Public spaces and democratic citizenship

What common thread links the mill workers’ general strikes of 1919-20, the 1930 Gandhian civil disobedience movement, and Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s farmers’ rally against the khoti system in 1938 in Bombay (now Mumbai)? Beyond transgressing colonial laws, these popular mobilisations, representing different strands of anti-colonial movements, used and turned the alien and commanding spaces of colonial cities into a veritable theatre of contestation and claim-making. Following World War I, colonial India embraced new rituals of collective resistance such as processions, flag hoisting, public meetings, marches, boycotts and hartals. These new modes of protest transformed urban civic arenas, parks, seashores, maidans, streets, iconic colonial buildings and public squares, that symbolically represented colonial power, into sites of protest and anti-colonial performance.

Volunteers and activists took to the streets and alleys, organising marches, pickets, and processions that often culminated in large public gatherings, creating dramatic moments of confrontation with the colonial state. This topography of dissent and disobedience not only defied the politics of spatial segregation and public behaviour but further re-territorialised these spaces as nationalist spaces.