The hidden heroines present in long-lost pictures

In India, a set of just lately found pictures is drawing consideration to the position of girls in one of many nation’s greatest anti-colonial actions, generally known as the civil disobedience motion, led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1930-31.

The photographs don’t merely seize feminine participation. They are visible proof of how ladies commanded and dominated political exercise, typically relegating males to the sidelines.

In April 1930, Gandhi concluded his pivotal salt march, breaking the British monopoly on salt manufacturing – a charged image of colonial misrule. Raising a handful of muddy salt from the ocean, he declared himself to be “shaking the foundations of the British Empire”.

Afterwards, Gandhi presided over waves of civil disobedience protests, encouraging supporters of the Indian National Congress to fabricate contraband salt, boycott international items, and face down phalanxes of lathi-wielding policemen. Just just a few months earlier than, the Congress had declared purna swaraj (full independence) as its political goal for India.

Historians have lengthy recognised the civil disobedience motion as an vital turning level in Indian politics.

First, ladies joined anti-colonial actions in larger numbers. When Gandhi started his salt march he forbade ladies from becoming a member of, however a number of feminine leaders ultimately satisfied him to accord them a larger position.

Second, Congress leaders harnessed fashionable media applied sciences like radio, movie, and images, which helped their political battle attain a world viewers.

About 20 years in the past, one album of pictures from the motion appeared at a London public sale. Tipped off by an antiquarian vendor in Mumbai (previously Bombay), the Alkazi Foundation, a Delhi-based artwork assortment, acquired the album.

Small in dimension with a coal-gray cowl, the album gave few clues about its provenance.

Scrawled on its backbone have been the phrases “Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party- K. L. Nursey.”

No one knew the id of KL Nursey. Typewritten photograph captions have been temporary and rife with spelling and factual errors. The album remained undisturbed within the Alkazi Foundation’s collections till its curator and two historians from Duke University started to reexamine it in 2019.

They have been shocked by what they discovered.

Despite their unknown origins, the images of the Nursey album informed a dramatic and detailed story.

Pictured right here have been the streets of Bombay, tense and bristling with 1000’s of volunteers aligned with the Congress. Unlike earlier pictures of political exercise in India, these are usually not posed-for photographs: they seize violent confrontations with police, wounded volunteers loaded onto ambulances, boisterous marches amidst monsoonal downpours, and countless streams of protesting women and men by means of Bombay’s Indo-Gothic streetscape. There is an electrical vitality operating by means of the black-and-white photographs.

Above all, the album brings to gentle, maybe higher than some other supply, how ladies used the civil disobedience motion for his or her empowerment.

“We were immediately struck by the emphasis on women in action,” says Sumathi Ramaswamy of Duke University, who, alongside together with her colleague Avrati Bhatnagar led the detailed examination of the album.

In one image, Lilavati Munshi, an intrepid Congress chief from Gujarat, instructs a gaggle of males raiding a government-owned salt pan. In one other, Munshi stands defiantly earlier than the doorway of a boycotted British division retailer, uncowed by a gaggle of British cops towering over her – and stylishly wearing a sleeveless sari shirt.

This visible file of feminine management is exclusive. Despite its leftward leanings and Gandhi’s prodding, Indian nationalist exercise had remained an overwhelmingly male endeavour, with its personal distinct patriarchal taste.

As just lately because the noncooperation motion in 1920-22, ladies performed a much more circumscribed position. Now, nonetheless, ladies’s involvement took a quantum leap.

Beyond recognisable figures like Munshi, the Nursey album paperwork 1000’s of utterly unknown feminine volunteers.

Women collect on the shores of Bombay’s Chowpatty Beach, able to make contraband salt. Members of the Desh Sevika, an all-female volunteer drive, wrestle with police trying to grab away their provisional nationwide flag. Perhaps most hanging of all was what number of feminine volunteers introduced alongside their younger daughters, inducting new generations of girls into anticolonial politics.

The Nursey album additionally factors to outstanding inversions of gender dynamics.

Long processions of girls, lots of them bearing a takli or spindle to honour Gandhi’s dedication to homespun khadi fabric, take over Bombay’s streets, fairly actually pushing males to the very margins. Elsewhere, middle-class males, lots of whom had hardly ever set foot inside a kitchen, maintain impromptu lessons the place they instruct volunteers on boiling and cooking salt.

It is these anonymous women and men who assist us higher perceive this chapter of India’s historical past. “We associate the civil disobedience movement with Gandhi,” Ms Ramaswamy says. “But when we began studying the album, we were soon convinced that it made a different argument: that the people of Bombay made the movement that in turn made Gandhi globally famous.”

Here, the digicam performed a important position. In ways in which couldn’t be captured in written sources, pictures display ladies taking nationalist actions into their very own arms: difficult policemen, drumming up assist for boycotts, addressing crowds, directing salt manufacturing, and courting arrest.

“Participation in the nationalist movement was not only a catalyst for the political awakening of Indian women,” Ms Bhatnagar says. “It also created new possibilities for them to step into public roles and occupy civic spaces in ways that had rarely been seen before.”

Many of the photographed ladies look instantly on the digicam, acutely aware of their political exercise being documented for posterity. In this manner, Ms Bhatnagar continues, “they claimed freedom from colonial rule but also from prevailing gendered division of spaces, between the domestic and the public”.

The Nursey album can also be a shocking testomony to the city transformation of Bombay.

Below the domes and spires of a colonial metropolis, a discernible switch of energy is obvious, as khadi-clad Congress volunteers outnumber pith-helmeted policemen and armed forces troopers. They commandeer town’s most outstanding landmarks, rallying outdoors Victoria Terminus (immediately’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) and climbing onto the neoclassical Fitzgerald Fountain at Dhobi Talao. Colonial authorities, in the meantime, remodel the Worli chawls – tenement housing for cotton mill staff – into makeshift prisons for detained nationalists.

“Though photography already had a century-long history in Bombay, political activism was captured by the lens for the first time in the Nursey album,” says Murali Ranganathan, a historian of Bombay.

These pictures within the Nursey album are actually again in public circulation.

Ramaswamy and Bhatnagar just lately launched a e-book titled, Photographing Civil Disobedience, which incorporates most of the photographs alongside articles by numerous students. In October, they opened two museum reveals, each titled Disobedient Subjects, on the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai and Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies.

The ladies volunteers of the civil disobedience motion are getting a belated acknowledgement of their defining position in certainly one of India’s greatest mass actions.

Nearly a century later, their resolve and willpower are as palpable as they have been when first captured on digicam.

Disobedient Subjects runs on the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai by means of 31 March 2026 and on the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University by means of 19 January 2026.