On Walking Together: Anticolonial Practice

Vazira Zamindar, Brown University

When Mahatma Gandhi went in 1938 to the North West Frontier Province on the Indo-Afghan borderlands to support the work of his ally Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (affectionately called Bacha Khan and Frontier Gandhi) and the movement of Khudai Khidmatgars, he specifically invited photographers along. Kulwant Roy and Kanu Gandhi were amongst the photographers who traveled with him on the Frontier Mail to Peshawar, and their photographs appeared in newspapers of the time, in numerous books that were written on Gandhi's visit to the Frontier, and I encountered them in unexpected album collections and on the walls of Khidmatgar homes that I visited in the Peshawar Valley. I investigate the work of the photographs in the moment they were made (1938), anticolonial practice and the work I want them to do as I use them for a history of repair.

I have used some of these photographs in my book Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive (2026) and others in a comic book entitled When We Are Strangers (2026) that I made with the artist Sarnath Banerjee. In explaining my relationship to these images as a historian and an artist, I ruminate on the politics of the commons: on friendship, hospitality and the significance of reparations for South Asia and beyond.