When photos bring hidden pasts to life

Curators are dipping into photo archives to tell fresh stories on subjects as diverse as colonial history and industrialisation

- Avantika Bhuyan [e-mail]

How does a photograph capture the spirit of the city, its citizens and the revolutionary spirit prevalent at the time? It’s an idea that informs a forthcoming exhibition, Disobedient Subjects: Bombay (1930-31).

Here, Bombay of old essays the role of a protagonist—its architecture and landmarks serving as sites for protest. The show, which draws from an archival album, Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party—K.L. Nursey, presents a multilayered narrative. For one, it harks back to a significant chapter in India’s freedom struggle, the civil disobedience movement, which is often centred around the figure of M.K. Gandhi.

“We associate the Civil Disobedience Movement quintessentially with Gandhi, but the album appears to be making a different argument: that the people of Bombay made the movement that in turn made Gandhi globally famous,” curators Sumathi Ramaswamy and Avrati Bhatnagar, both faculty members at Duke University, US, write in an email to Lounge. About five years ago, when the two started working formally on the Nursey album—part of the private archive Alkazi Collection of Photography (ACP) in Delhi—they became interested in the place of the camera in the visual culture that emerged around Gandhi.

Presented by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) and Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, the show is set to open in Mumbai on 12 October. It is accompanied by a book, Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay, 1930-1931, published by the ACP in association with Mapin Publishing. Besides the widely known historical events, the exhibition foregrounds the role of ordinary people in expressing dissent against colonial rule, and “turning the streets of Bombay into sites of nationalist assertion, as captured on camera”. The curators also examine the role of women in this dissent.