On 26 October 1930, when the Civil Disobedience Motion was at its crescendo, the Bombay Battle Council, the group of senior Congress leaders growing and implementing methods for satyagraha, tried to carry a flag salutation ceremony on the Azad (“Free”) Maidan, previously part of the Esplanade of Bombay, renamed so by the nationalists. After a bunch of male demonstrators have been arrested, a bunch of ladies activists from the Desh Sevika Sangh entered the fray. They resisted all makes an attempt by the police to grab their flags and stood their floor despite a lathi cost. Just a few ladies have been arrested, however the remaining have been bundled right into a police van, and dropped off at Ghatkopar, about 15 miles (almost 24 km) away, within the Bombay Suburban District.
Implicit on this motion was the idea that the suburbs of Bombay have been unlikely websites of protest; the suburbs neither had the monumental setting which the town of Bombay may present in loads, nor may they command the audiences essential to render protests significant. And by briefly exiling ladies into the suburban wilderness, the colonial regime assumed that it may thus discourage their additional participation within the protests. However have been these assumptions borne out by the precise scenario on the bottom?
Of the 245 pictures within the Nursey album, simply two are captioned with areas within the suburbs of Bombay. And each of them depict ladies picketing the public sale of toddy store licences at Bandra within the Bombay Suburban District in July 1930. In a single {photograph}, ladies with their backs to the digicam are, because the caption suggests, “urging bidders to not bid for the public sale,” at the same time as a posse of lathi-bearing policemen look on. Girls have been on the forefront of the agitation – main processions, picketing international material retailers, hoisting Congress flags, breaking the salt legal guidelines, protesting towards the evils of alcohol – all by means of 1930-’31. And the Nursey album options lots of of ladies, many from the Bombay suburbs.
Alternatively, although these areas have been vital websites of nationalist protest, they don’t appear to have caught the eye of photographers. The suburban Congresswomen and their suburban protest websites have each suffered various levels of erasure, not simply within the Nursey album but additionally within the bigger historic narrative. And, most often, they haven’t merited a point out within the footnotes of historical past. Is it doable to think about a nationalist historiography the place a few of these suburban ladies and their websites of protest are foregrounded? Can we, 100 years later, map these websites of resistance which have been as necessary to the motion as some other? And is it doable to evaluate the importance of those ladies’s contributions to a motion which was nationwide in scale?
The suburbs of Bombay
Even earlier than the Mahim Causeway connecting the islands of Bombay and Salsette was constructed within the 1840s, Bandra was a suburb from the place a number of folks, crossing the Mahim creek on boats, commuted each day to work in Bombay. The southern elements of Salsette steadily started to imagine a suburban character within the second half of the nineteenth century. The plague epidemic which lasted almost 20 years from 1896 and the influenza pandemic of 1918-’19 contributed to elevated migration from Bombay to Salsette, particularly by middle-class households. By the Twenties, fairly a number of city agglomerations, deliberate and unplanned, had emerged in Salsette. This led to the South Salsette taluka of Thana district being designated because the Bombay Suburban District; its boundaries have been largely coterminous with that of latest Better Bombay.
Whereas the municipalities of Bandra and Kurla had been in existence from the nineteenth century, those for Vile Parle-Andheri and Ghatkopar-Kirol have been more moderen. Mulund and Chembur, modelled after the backyard cities of Letchworth and Welwyn within the neighborhood of London, have been nonetheless at a nascent stage and housed a number of thousand folks every. All these cities have been linked to the town by the suburban railway community, and one may attain Victoria Terminus in lower than an hour. Notably related to the Civil Disobedience Motion have been the salt pans which dotted the panorama of the Bombay Suburban District.
Throughout 1930-’31, these suburban cities not solely served as logistical bases for the Bombay campaigns of the Congress but additionally have been the websites for breaking the salt legal guidelines, picketing toddy distributors and enterprise flag salutation marches and different types of protest. Every of those suburban cities already had native Congress committees; additionally they shaped prabhat pheri (lit., “daybreak rounds”) and vanar sena (lit., “monkey brigade”) contingents. In step with the overtly army vocabulary used inside the Congress to designate many points of the Civil Disobedience Motion, chhavanis (lit., “cantonments” or “camps”) have been established in these cities.
These camps housed Congress volunteers from different elements of the Bombay Presidency who might be dispatched to Bombay at quick discover for picketing and processions. The Maharashtra Battle Council selected Vile Parle in suburban Bombay as the location for the principle chhavani; subsidiary chhavanis have been arrange at Ghatkopar, Bhandup, Mulund and Chembur. Every chhavani was headed by a senapati who each day conferred with the Congress Home in Bombay to resolve the protest technique for the subsequent day or week.
The primary senapati of the Vile Parle chhavani was Jamnalal Bajaj, who initiated the Civil Disobedience Motion in suburban Bombay on the morning of 6 April 1930, simply when Gandhi was breaking the salt legal guidelines at Dandi. The venue was the seashore at Juhu, a small island municipality linked by a causeway to Vile Parle. Volunteers from Bombay, its suburbs and adjoining districts gathered in giant numbers to organize salt by boiling seawater. Because the protesters have been always being arrested, the variety of volunteers on the chhavani stored fluctuating.
By the tip of June 1930, the Vile Parle chhavani had registered 144 males and 164 ladies, of whom 57 stayed on the premises, together with Jamnalal’s spouse Janakiben and Gandhi’s spouse Kasturba. The chhavani ran a hospital to deal with volunteers who sustained accidents throughout protests, and likewise ran a swadeshi store. The residents stored busy with lessons on takli (spindle) and charkha spinning. By August 1930, the Vile Parle chhavani had been outlawed together with quite a few different Congress establishments, and needed to be dissolved. The residents arrange one other chhavani within the neighbourhood in a constructing owned by Bajaj.
On 19 October 1930, this chhavani, often known as Satyagraha Chhavani, was raided together with these at Chembur and Ghatkopar. Lots of the residents have been arrested. Although fixed efforts have been made by the native police to disrupt these suburban establishments, native households, notably by means of their ladies, continued to make sure that a Congress presence was maintained within the suburbs of Bombay. Many of those households – Chemburkar, Vileparlewala, Vandrekar – had surnames which have been demonyms of Bombay suburban cities.
That is an excerpt from chapter 6 of Photographing Civil Disobedience, Bombay 1930-31, edited by Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy. Printed by Mapin Publishing together with Alkazi Assortment of Images along side the exhibition “Disobedient Topics: Bombay, 1930-1931”, which runs on the at CSMVS in Mumbai (in partnership with Alkazi Basis) till March 31.
