Research

My current book project, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Politics in Late Colonial Bombay, foregrounds the role of women and gender relations in shaping political consumption in India. 

In 1930 an unprecedented number of women took to the streets of Bombay, now Mumbai, to participate in the Civil Disobedience Movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Their task was to promote swadeshi: a form of political consumerism centered around the boycott of foreign goods and preference for homespun cloth and indigenous products. Bombay's worldly women thus faced a critical moral demand to alter their consumption habits to demonstrate their commitment towards the nationalist cause. Urban women’s recalcitrance to give up their consumer lifestyle emboldened local businesses and merchants to offer indigenous alternatives to popular consumer goods. Ultimately, this enabled indigenous capital and industries to gain significant market share in the Bombay bazar, the principal commercial center of the British Empire outside of London. My project thus demonstrates the centrality of women’s nationalist work in the making of a consumer politics that defined both Indian nationalism and the wider anti-colonial movements of the interwar world. This project is an extension of my doctoral dissertation research.