Disobedient Subjects: Bombay, 1930-1931

Disobedient Subjects takes you on a visual journey through Bombay — today’s Mumbai — so that you too can bear witness, nearly a century later, to the unfolding of the Civil Disobedience Movement against colonial rule in British India’s most important commercial city and financial capital. Soon after Mohandas K. Gandhi broke the infamous colonial salt laws on the Dandi seashore in Gujarat at the crack of dawn on April 6, 1930, he called upon his fellow citizens across India to join him to protest the longstanding British monopoly on the production, distribution, and sale of this most essential life-sustaining commodity. Among the first to heed the call of the Mahatma, “Great Soul,” were the disobedient men and women (and some children) of Bombay who took to the streets in large numbers — in parades, protests, and processions — and to the seashore to engage in illicit salt-making. This exhibition centers on selections from a rare album held by the Alkazi Collection of Photography in New Delhi. Titled Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party — K.L. Nursey, the album documents the ebbs and flows of this revolutionary mass action. Its 245 carefully preserved photographs allow us to feel the energy and enthusiasm of disobedience, from April 1930 with the commencement of the Salt Satyagraha in the city, to August 29, 1931, when Gandhi set sail to attend the Second Round Table Conference in London as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress, the party leading the charge against British colonial rule. Powered by the force of the historical photograph, the album’s folios bring alive the power of the dissenting multitude: the anonymous patriotic residents of the city joined in solidarity with Congress Party volunteers and well-known nationalist leaders to ensure Bombay’s remarkable transformation into a city of disobedience. “We often ask too much or too little of the image,” wrote photography scholar Georges Didi-Huberman. Inspired by this challenge, Disobedient Subjects invites you, the viewer, to the streets of colonial Bombay. As the camera brings into focus new perspectives on an historic moment and movement from India’s past, we also invite you to ask if we ask too much of these photographs, or too little.

Duke Scholars