The hidden heroines found in long-lost photographs

In India, a group of newly discovered photographs draws attention to the role of women in one of the country’s largest anti-colonial movements, known as the Civil Disobedience Movement, which Mahatma Gandhi led from 1930 to 1931.

The photos don’t just capture female participation. It is clear evidence of how women control and dominate political activity, often putting men on the sidelines.

In April 1930, Gandhi concluded his pivotal salt march, breaking the British monopoly on salt production – a charged symbol of colonial misrule. After lifting a handful of muddy salt from the sea, he declared that he was “shaking the foundations of the British Empire.”

Gandhi subsequently presided over waves of civil disobedience protests, encouraging Indian National Congress supporters to manufacture banned salt, boycott foreign goods, and confront battalions of metal-wielding police. Just a few months ago, the Congress Party declared Purna Swaraj (complete independence) as its political goal for India.

Historians have long recognized the Civil Disobedience Movement as an important turning point in Indian politics.

First, women joined anti-colonial activities in greater numbers. When Gandhi started the Salt March, he banned women from joining, but several women leaders eventually convinced him to give them a greater role.

Second, Congress leaders harnessed new media technologies such as radio, film, and photography, which helped their political struggle reach an international audience.

About 20 years ago, a single album of action photos turned up at a London auction. Acting on a tip-off from an antiquities dealer in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), the Al Qadi Foundation, a Delhi-based arts collective, acquired the album.

The album is small in size with a charcoal gray cover, and offers few clues as to its provenance.

Written on the back were the words ‘Collections of Old Congress Party Photographs – Kuala Lumpur Nursi’.

No one knew KL Nursi’s identity. The photo captions were brief and full of spelling and factual errors. The album remained undisturbed in the collections of the Judge Foundation until its curator and two historians from Duke University began re-examining it in 2019.

They were shocked by what they found.

Despite their unknown origins, Norse album photographs tell a dramatic and detailed story.

In this photo, the streets of Bombay are tense and crowded with thousands of volunteers allied with the Congress Party. Unlike previous photographs of political activism in India, these images are not staged images: they depict violent confrontations with police, wounded volunteers being loaded onto ambulances, noisy marches in the monsoon rains, and endless streams of protesting men and women through the streets of Indo-Gothic Bombay. There is electrical energy running through black and white images.

Above all, the album highlights, perhaps better than any other source, how women used the civil disobedience movement to empower themselves.

“We were immediately struck by the focus on women at work,” says Sumathi Ramaswamy of Duke University, who with colleague Avrathi Bhatnagar led the detailed examination of the album.

In one photo, Lilavati Munshi, the outspoken Congress leader from Gujarat, guides a group of men into raiding a government-owned salt dock. In another photo, Munshi stands defiantly in front of the entrance of a British store that has been boycotted, unafraid of a group of British police officers standing over her – and elegantly dressed in a sleeveless sari blouse.

This visual record of female leadership is unique. Despite his leftist leanings and Gandhi’s urging, Indian nationalist activism remained an overwhelmingly male endeavor, with a distinctly patriarchal flavour.

Until recently, in the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-1922, women played a much more restricted role. But now, women’s participation has achieved a qualitative leap.

In addition to well-known figures like Munshi, Nursi’s album documents thousands of completely unknown female volunteers.

Women gather on the shores of Chowpatty Beach in Bombay, preparing to make smuggled salt. Members of Desh Civica, an all-female volunteer force, grapple with police trying to seize the temporary national flag. Perhaps most surprising was the number of female volunteers who brought their young daughters, bringing new generations of women into anti-colonial politics.

Nursi’s album also points to notable reversals in gender dynamics.

Long processions of women, many carrying the takli or spindle to honor Gandhi’s commitment to homespun khadi, invade the streets of Bombay, literally pushing the men to the sidelines. Elsewhere, middle-class men, many of whom rarely set foot inside a kitchen, hold impromptu classes where they instruct volunteers on boiling and cooking salt.

It is these unknown men and women who help us better understand this chapter of Indian history. “We associate the civil disobedience movement with Gandhi,” says Ms. Ramaswamy. “But as we began studying the album, we were soon convinced that it made a different argument: that it was the people of Bombay who created the movement that in turn made Gandhi world famous.”

Here the camera played a crucial role. In ways that cannot be captured in written sources, photographs show women taking nationalist activities into their own hands: challenging police, rallying support for boycotts, addressing crowds, directing salt production, and courting arrest.

“Participation in the nationalist movement was not just a catalyst for the political awakening of Indian women,” says Ms. Bhatnagar. “It has also created new possibilities for them to enter public roles and occupy civic spaces in ways rarely seen before.”

Many of the women photographed look directly into the camera, aware that their political activism is being documented for posterity. Ms. Bhatnagar continues in this way, “They demanded freedom from colonial rule but also from the prevailing gender division of spaces, between the home and the public.”

Nursi’s album is also a stunning testimony to Bombay’s urban transformation.

Under the domes and towers of a colonial city, there is a clear transfer of power, with khadi-clad Congress volunteers outnumbering policemen and army soldiers in heavy helmets. They took in the city’s most prominent landmarks, crowding outside Victoria Station (today’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) and climbing into the neoclassical Fitzgerald Fountain at Dhobi Talao. At the same time, the colonial authorities converted the Worli area – housing for cotton mill workers – into temporary prisons for interned nationalists.

“Although photography has a century-long history in Bombay, political activity was captured with the lens for the first time in a Norse album,” says Murali Ranganathan, a Bombay historian.

These photos in Nursi’s album are now back in public circulation.

Ramaswamy and Bhatnagar recently released a book titled Photographing Civil Disobedience, which includes many photographs along with essays by a number of scholars. In October, they opened two museum exhibitions, titled Disobedient Subjects, at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies.

Women volunteers in the civil disobedience movement have gained belated recognition for their distinctive role in one of India’s largest mass movements.

Nearly a century later, their determination and determination are still as evident as when they were first captured on camera.

Disobedient Subjects is on view at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai until March 31, 2026 and at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University until January 19, 2026.