Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Culture in Interwar Bombay

Abstract

My dissertation, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Culture in Interwar Bombay, proposes 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 middle-class Hindu women took to the streets of Bombay, now Mumbai, to participate in the Civil Disobedience movement under the leadership of M.K. 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. At the same time, urban women residing in this cosmopolitan city were deeply entrenched in the globally proliferating consumerism of the interwar years. In the face of a critical moral demand to alter their consumer habits to demonstrate their patriotism, women found themselves navigating the contested demands of a desire for a modern urban lifestyle and their commitment towards the nationalist cause, rooted in the homegrown and homespun.Urban and middle-class women’s recalcitrance in giving up their consumer lifestyle emboldened local businesses and merchants to offer indigenous alternatives to popular and global consumer goods. Ultimately, this enabled domestic capital and industries to gain significant market share in Bombay, the principal commercial center of the British Empire outside of London, and to transform it into a swadeshi bazaar. My dissertation thus demonstrates the centrality of women’s nationalist work in shaping market relations and the making of a consumer politics that defined both Indian nationalism and the wider anti-colonial movements of the interwar world. Recent studies point to (another) nationalist turn in contemporary India that inflects the forms of economic globalization embraced by the country’s middle classes today. The evidence from swadeshi Bombay reveals that contemporary consumer politics have much deeper historical roots, dating back to the interwar years, and sprouted in the city that was the commercial and financial hub of British India. Narrated across four thematically organized chapters, this dissertation follows a group of female volunteers known as desh sevikas, or “servants (sevikas) of the nation (desh).” While a substantial section of Indian historiography, including but not limited to the early Subaltern Studies collective, has centered the peasant in the vast Indian countryside as the protagonist of colonial history, this project “disobediently” turns to the “consuming” category of middle-class, upper-caste, urban (and Hindu) women as gendered citizens of British India’s urbs prima, “first city.” Sparsely mentioned in official record, the sevika more frequently appears in a range of image sources such as documentary photos, print advertisements, and political caricatures. The composite figure of the sevika thus lies at the intersection of the history of women and gender, consumerism, and anticolonial movements and invites methodological approaches from visual culture studies. My project deploys the sevika as a heuristic figure to tap into the multiple identities assumed by Bombay women—as city dwellers, as anticolonial workers, and as self-fashioned modern consumers. In doing so, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City locates urban women albeit those belonging to a specific class and caste as political-economic actors. It traces the many modes in which they practice their disobedience towards the British colonial state as well as traditional gendered norms, while remaining caught within the sobering limits of their caste and class.