Resistance and its Discontents:
Vignettes from Bombay's Civil Disobedience Movement

Prashant Kidambi, University of Leicester

The Civil Disobedience movement in colonial Bombay marked the high water mark of Gandhian mobilization as political performance and spectacle. As the arresting images in this exhibition attest, the insurgent crowds that massed on the streets during the movement were simultaneously collective actor and audience, calling into being the very political community in whose name they claimed to act. My paper will use this rich visual archive to explore three themes. First, I consider the ways in which the Gandhian mobilisation drew on but also departed from the traditions of the crowd that had evolved in colonial Bombay since the mid-nineteenth century. Second, I set a seemingly incongruous image in this collection of a Muslim procession in Dongri against the wider backdrop of deepening communal antagonism in the city. Third, I dwell on a photograph of the hartal organized by the  Congress in memory of ‘Babu Ganu’ to unpack the contentious making of a nationalist martyr.