About 20 ago, someone at Mumbai’s Philips Antiques learned that a unique album of photographs was going up for auction in London. He quickly contacted the theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi, who purchased the album for the Delhi-based Alkazi Collection of Photography. Although small and unassuming, the album, known as the Nursey album, has now helped a group of scholars tell some remarkable new stories about one of modern India’s most decisive turning points: the Civil Disobedience Movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1930-’31.
Along the spine of the album runs a rather vague title, “Collection of Photographs of Old Congress Party – KL Nursey”. While the identity of KL Nursey remains a mystery, the 245 black-and-white photographs inside the album show the city of Bombay convulsed by nationalist protest and the mass manufacture of contraband salt.
Working with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and its curator, Rahaab Allana, two historians at Duke University, Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy, have published a book and organised two museum exhibitions on the photographs. They now join Past Imperfect to discuss their work and how photography can reveal very different histories of a well-documented event.
Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931 (published by Mapin) features 150 photographs…
Source: Podcast: Women lead the charge in a mysterious photo album of the Civil Disobedience movement
