Women

Leading the charge on the disobedient streets of Bombay and on the seashore was the figure of the desh sevika, “handmaid of the nation.” Conceived in April 1930 by Sarojini Naidu as the voluntary wing of the Rashtriya Stree Sangh, the Desh Sevika Sangh (DSS) was founded in response to “the Mahatma’s Call” to the women of India to participate in the nationalist struggle during the Civil Disobedience Movement. Under the leadership of Lilavati Munshi, Hansa Mehta, and Jaishree Raijee, the members of the DSS frequently made headlines in leading newspaper dailies of the city and were an unparalleled force with whom the Bombay police had to contend. Under an oath to promote and produce khadi and boycott all foreign goods, the sevikas were trained in “first aid” and “Indian economics” as they launched a sustained movement to picket foreign cloth merchants and liquor shops in the Bombay marketplace and ran a door-to-door campaign spreading the new gospel of khadi. Such was the “menace” of the DSS that the colonial state specially formulated “the Prevention of Intimidation Ordinance 1930” and “the Unlawful Instigation Ordinance 1930,” making picketing and boycott in the country illegal. In response, these unrepentant women retorted with renewed ardency in their anticolonial activities, inviting, even celebrating, arrests, and police action. While Gandhi idealized Indian women as emblems of self-sacrifice and passive resistance, the actions of the disobedient women captured in the photographs of the album go beyond the roles prescribed to them as “handmaidens of the nation.”