Mounted and foot police, lathi in hand, became a routine fixture of the city’s streets in the months during which the Civil Disobedience Movement animated Bombay. Correspondingly, facing the lathi charge, courageously and nonviolently, became a badge of honor for the practitioner of civil disobedience, or satyagrahi. Contemporary police reports may well deny the officiated use of extreme violence on nonviolent resistors, but the photographs carefully archived in the Nursey Album call out the lie. Powerful though these photographs are, they do not record the sound of the lathi meeting the body or capture the redness of the blood flowing from wounds. Also, difficult to read from these evocative images is the hesitation and frustration of the lower rank local policeman bound by his official duty to strike, even while hearing the incessant appeals of trampled Congress volunteers to consider his obligation to the larger cause of the nation.