Civil Disobedience and the City

This essay examines the interaction between different sections of Bombay’s working population and the Indian National Congress during the first two years of the Civil Disobedience movement. It looks at this engagement primarily through the vernacular archives, and explores the divergent, sometimes conflicting, trends in the articulations of nationalism in the Civil Disobedience movement and the Congress. This essay draws upon Masselos’ work and focuses on the spatial templates of the Civil Disobedience movement. It maps the relationship between the functioning of the local units of the Congress and the political infrastructure of the city’s mill districts. It argues that there was a co-relation between their mobilization practices in the city’s working-class neighborhoods and their attempt to appropriate social spaces.