The “Disobedient Subjects: Bombay 1930-31” exhibit — on display in the U.S. for the first time at the Center for Documentary Studies — presents a photographic archive of the rarely seen lives and labors of citizens who pushed back against colonial authority in early twentieth-century Bombay. (Lan Wei/Center for Documentary Studies)
Seeing Empire: Undergraduate Historians Visit the “Disobedient Subjects: Bombay” Exhibit
The study of modern empires can take many forms. On a crisp autumn afternoon when students in the gateway seminar Empires in Historical Perspective entered the exhibit Disobedient Subjects: Bombay 1930-31, they were not there for a typical class lecture. Instead, they encountered a gallery lined with sepia-toned photographs that became text and teacher in a live inquiry about how visual images inform the study of colonialism.
The students were led by their seminar instructor Avrati Bhatnagar, who co-curated the exhibit with Sumathi Ramaswamy, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of History. Together, they invited students to observe and question the photographs as artifacts. As historians.
In the seminar, undergraduate students spend the semester examining how empires are built, experienced, represented and resisted. Bhatnagar designed the museum visit to extend those analytic skills from the page to the image.
Bhatnagar — who finds that students “read images intuitively” — prompted students to examine what is visible and what remains unseen, modeling image literacy alongside archival responsibility.
“In a media-saturated age, critical seeing is as vital as critical reading,” she said. “Photographs are historical documents that simultaneously record and construct the past. Each frame is an argument that must be supported with evidence. It tells us not only what the photographer saw, but also what the viewer is invited to remember or to forget.”
The exhibit visualizes Bombay’s 1930–31 Civil Disobedience movement through the lens of resistance itself. Meticulously preserved and publicly displayed in the U.S. for the first time, the images illuminate how ordinary citizens forged a movement of anticolonial resistance.
For Bhatnagar, the exhibition also marks a personal journey from graduate researcher to faculty colleague and curator. Ramaswamy, an expert on visual cultures of Indian nationalism, delights in this generational continuity. “Avrati was my student, now my collaborator,” she said. The project bridges three levels of mentorship: seasoned faculty, junior faculty and undergraduate students. “That dialogue across generations is part of the exhibition’s spirit.”
Standing before an image of a 1930s street protest, several students noted how political dissent appears both collective and intimate. Others questioned the camera’s vantage point: Who decided to capture this moment? Who is absent from the frame? The discussion opened into a deeper conversation about visual ethics and how images of suffering, heroism or anonymity circulate within imperial histories and how they can either humanize or flatten their subjects.
First-year student Nicholas Karafotias reflected on how the exhibit made him rethink the impact of women in the struggle for independence. “Often the role of women is overlooked in this period of history,” he said. “After learning of their dissidence in the Bombay protests, I realized the importance women played in the decolonization process.”
By the afternoon’s end, the students left the exhibit with more than notes about names and dates, but with questions about perspective and modern-day parallels.
The visit affirmed that for these emerging historians, images are not merely illustrations of empire’s past, they are active forces shaping how the story of empire continues to be written, contested, and, perhaps, remembered anew.
The exhibition — free, open to the public and on view through January 19, 2026 at the Duke Center for Documentary Studies — is the first public showing in the United States of material from the Collections of Photographs of the Old Congress Party — K.L. Nursey, held by the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts in New Delhi.
A concurrent exhibit, on display now in the heart of the very city of the 1930 protests at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), showcases the original photographs. The Mumbai exhibit’s guest book, thick with multilingual visitor responses, will itself become an archival artifact testifying to contemporary public engagement with the imagery.
