Past Imperfect episode 25: Female power on the streets of Bombay

Past Imperfect Episode 25 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Avrati Bhatnagar, Instructor in the Department of History and International Comparative Studies Program at Duke University, and Sumathi Ramaswamy, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of History at Duke University. Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy are the editors of Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931. Photographing Civil Disobedience captures Bombay in a moment of upheaval, convulsed by the Civil Disobedience Movement. Based on an album of photographs recently discovered at the Alkazi Collection in Delhi, the volume provides a new perspective on Bombay and Indian nationalism, demonstrating the power of female political participation. Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy show us how, in the months after Mahatma Gandhi’s famous Salt March, the women of Bombay led, directed, and dominated key acts of anticolonial protest. Photographs, they remark, can tell us a very different version of history from what we derive from written records.