Disobedient Women in a Consumer City

My dissertation, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Politics in Interwar Bombay, argues that the history of economic nationalism in India and the spread of middle-class patriotic consumer culture is a gendered history. 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 consumer 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. 



Research Project


I am working on a collaborative project titled "Words of Light on the Streets of Disobedience in Bombay" with Sumathi Ramaswamy. Developed with New Delhi based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, this project draws on a collection of documentary photographs compiled in a historical album named Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party— K.L. Nursey. A video preview is available on YouTube, linked below. 


As part of this endeavor, I have co-authored a peer reviewed journal article ‘Light Writing on the Lathi Raj, Bombay 1930-31’ in the History of Photography. 


Currently, Ramaswamy and I are editing a scholarly catalog with contributions from prominent scholars of cultural, visual, and material history of colonial Bombay and British India, for publication in Fall 2024. A selection of these essays was presented at a panel titled "Nationalist Streets/Colonial Cities" at the 51st Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI in October 2023.