Discover the hidden heroine in a long-lost photo

In India, a recently discovered set of photos has drawn attention to the role women played in one of the country’s largest anti-colonial movements, the civil disobedience movement led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1930-31.

These images demonstrate more than just female participation. They are visual evidence of how women direct and dominate political activity, often relegating men to the margins.

In April 1930, Gandhi ended his crucial salt foray, breaking the British monopoly on salt production – a symbol of colonial tyranny. He grabbed a handful of mud salt from the sea and declared that he was “shaking the foundations of the British Empire.”

Since then, Gandhi has presided over waves of civil disobedience protests, encouraging Indian National Congress supporters to smuggle salt, boycott foreign goods and confront phalanxes of wooden baton-wielding police. Just a few months ago, the Congress Party declared purna swaraj (complete independence) as a political goal for India.

Historians have long recognized the civil disobedience movement as an important turning point in Indian politics.

First, more women participated in anti-colonial activities. 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, congressional leaders used modern media technologies such as radio, film, and photography to help their political battles reach international audiences.

About 20 years ago, a photo album of the movement appeared at an auction in London. The Alkazi Foundation, a Delhi-based art collecting institution, acquired the album following a tip-off from an antiquities dealer in Mumbai (formerly Bombay).

The album’s small size and anthracite cover give away few clues to its provenance.

Scrawled on the spine are the words “Old Congress Party – Photo Collection of Nurses in Kuala Lumpur”.

No one knows the identity of KL Nursey. Typed photo captions are short and full of spelling and factual errors. The album sat undisturbed in the Alqazi Foundation’s collection until its curator and two historians from Duke University began revisiting it in 2019.

They were shocked by what they found.

Although of unknown origin, the photos in the nurse’s album tell a dramatic and detailed story.

The streets of Mumbai are filled with tension as thousands of Congress-aligned volunteers crowd the streets. Unlike earlier photographs of political events in India, these were not staged: they captured violent confrontations with police, injured volunteers being loaded into ambulances, raucous marches in monsoon downpours, and a steady stream of protesting men and women in Mumbai’s Indian Gothic streetscapes. Electric energy flows through the black and white images.

Most importantly, perhaps better than any other source, this album reveals how women used the civil disobedience movement to gain power.

“We were immediately struck by the emphasis on women in action,” said Sumathi Ramaswamy of Duke University, who led the detailed review of the album with her colleague Avrati Bhatnagar.

In one photo, Lilavati Munshi, a courageous Congress leader from Gujarat, directs a group of people to attack government-owned salt pans. In another photo, Munshi stood defiantly outside a boycotted British department store, undeterred by a group of condescending British police officers, wearing a stylish sleeveless sari blouse.

This visual record of female leadership is unique. Despite its leftist leanings and Gandhi’s impetus, Indian nationalist activity remains a male-dominated one, with its own distinctive patriarchal overtones.

As recently as the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22, the role played by women was much more restricted. Now, however, there has been a huge leap forward in female participation.

In addition to well-known figures like Munshi, the album Nurses also documents thousands of completely unknown female volunteers.

Women gather on the shores of Mumbai’s Chowpati Beach to prepare banned salt. Members of Desh Sevika, an all-female volunteer force, clashed with police who tried to snatch away the makeshift flag. Perhaps most striking was how many female volunteers brought their young daughters with them to guide a new generation of women into anti-colonial politics.

The Nurse Album also points to a significant reversal of gender dynamics.

Long marches of women, many carrying takli or spindles to commemorate Gandhi’s commitment to homespun, took over the streets of Mumbai and, quite literally, pushed men to the edge. Elsewhere, middle-class men, many of whom rarely set foot in a kitchen, hold impromptu classes instructing volunteers on how to boil and cook 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,” Ms. Ramaswamy said. “But when we started researching the album, we quickly became convinced that it made a different argument: that the people of Bombay launched the movement that made Gandhi famous around the world.”

Here, the camera plays a vital role. In ways that written sources cannot capture, the photographs show women taking nationalist activities into their own hands: challenging the police, drumming up support for the boycott, addressing crowds, directing salt production, and seeking arrest.

“Participation in the nationalist movement was not only a catalyst for the political awakening of women in India,” Ms. Bhatnagar said. “It also creates new possibilities for them to enter public roles and occupy civic space in unprecedented ways.”

Many of the women who were photographed looked directly into the camera, aware that their political activities were being recorded for posterity. In this way, Ms. Bhatnagar continued, “they claimed freedom from colonial rule but also from the pervasive division of gendered spaces between home and public”.

The Nurse Album is also a stunning testament to the transformation of Mumbai’s city.

The shift in power was palpable beneath the domes and spiers of the colonial metropolis, where homespun-clad congressional volunteers outnumbered pith-helmeted police and army soldiers. They occupied the city’s most famous landmarks, gathering outside the Victoria Terminus (today’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) and climbing the neoclassical Fitzgerald Fountain in Dobitarao. At the same time, the colonial authorities transformed Wally Cottage, a tenement house for cotton mill workers, into a makeshift prison for nationalists.

Mumbai historian Murali Ranganathan said: “While photography has been around for centuries in Mumbai, it was in the ‘Nurse’ album that political activity was captured on camera for the first time.”

The photos from the nurse’s album are now back on public release.

Ramaswamy and Bhatnagar recently published a book titled Photographing Civil Disobedience, which includes many images as well as articles by many scholars. In October, they opened two museum exhibitions, both titled The Disobedient Subject, at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Women volunteers of the civil disobedience movement belatedly recognized their decisive role in one of India’s largest mass movements.

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

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