This paper examines the spatial politics of the Civil Disobedience movement in Bombay, arguing that anticolonial activists weaponized the city’s infrastructure to enact a powerful form of “ordered disorder.” While foundational theories of urban rights, such as Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city,” frame urban struggle within an established polity, this analysis demonstrates how Indian nationalists articulated a more radical claim: a “right to the anticolonial city.” This was realized not through claims to housing or services, but through the strategic sabotage of the city’s circulatory systems—the deliberate halting of trams, the closure of markets and shops dealing in foreign goods, and the orchestrated disruption of traffic.

Building on the work of scholars like Jim Masselos who have offered a robust historical framework to assess colonial Bombay’s spatial order, this paper contends that these acts of “infrastructural disobedience” were meticulously calibrated routines. I argue that these routines leveraged the central paradox of civil disobedience: the fusion of legal transgression with strict social discipline. As colonial systems of commerce and mobility were paralyzed across the city, the movement aspired to impose its own alternative civic order through its emphasis on non-violent mass coordination. The tram tracks obstructed with metal chains and market streets lined with picketers became a public tableau not of chaos, but of a functioning, popular sovereignty, directly challenging the colonial state’s claim to be the sole guarantor of urban order.

Drawing on the photographs of the Nursey Album, this paper builds on the tension between obedience to the nation and disobedience to the colonial state, captured by the documentary eye of the camera. It highlights how the movement’s spatial tactics staged a tangible preview of swaraj or self-rule—a novel proclamation, adopted by the Indian National Congress in December 1929, four months before the launch of the Civil Disobedience Movement—transforming the city from an emblem of imperial control into a laboratory for an emerging nation-state. This case compels a critical rethinking of the “right to the city” framework, centering the role of disciplined disruption and infrastructural conflict in anticolonial urban world-making.