Independence Day Special: Neville Tuli’s SWARAJ Is A Visual Walk Through India’s Freedom Struggle

In 1921, a matchbox factory somewhere in India printed tin covers bearing the faces of the country’s independence leaders, and got half their names wrong. It didn’t matter. The matchboxes still sold, still travelled through kitchens and shops and hands that couldn’t read a newspaper, and still did what they were designed to do: put a freedom fighter’s face in front of a nation that had never seen him. Radio hadn’t reached most villages yet. Television didn’t exist. If you wanted to know what a freedom fighter looked like, you were far more likely to see him on a calendar, a cigarette pack, or the wall of a paan shop than in any newspaper.

That matchbox tin is now on display in New Delhi, at an exhibition that opened just days before India’s 79th Independence Day and runs through the anniversary itself. “SWARAJ: Revisualising India’s Political History,” on view at the India Habitat Centre’s Visual Arts Gallery until August 19, 2026, makes the case that the freedom struggle was won as much through images as through speeches and marches—and that the country has largely stopped looking at the pictures that got it there.

The exhibition is the work of Neville Tuli, who has spent three decades arguing that India doesn’t yet know how to look at itself. London-born, trained in economics at the London School of Economics and Oxford, Tuli moved to India in 1993 and went on to found Osian's Connoisseurs of Art in 2000—the country’s first dedicated arts auction house, and the engine behind one of the largest privately assembled archives of Indian fine art, film memorabilia, photography, and print in the world.

Walk in, and the exhibition doesn’t begin with 1947, or even 1857. It opens with something closer to a prologue: European coastal views of Surat, Goa, and Cochin dating back to the early 1600s, the earliest visual record of India as seen by outsiders arriving by sea. From there it moves briskly into the reformist ferment of nineteenth-century Bengal—Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s campaign against sati, a cause the exhibition pointedly carries forward to the 1987 Roop Kanwar case in Rajasthan, as if to say the fight was never fully won; Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar’s push for the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856; and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel “Anandamath,” whose hymn “Vande Mataram” would later become one of the most contested anthems of the freedom movement.

Matchboxes, Lithographs, And The Making Of A Political Public

The exhibition’s real subject is not any single event but the slow construction of a shared political imagination across a vastly unequal, multilingual population. Indian historical popular and fine visual culture “created the silent visual background within which the country walked and acted through,” Tuli told Outlook Traveller, adding that this imagery “cut through so many of the barriers of economic strata, language, religion, gender” in ways formal political speech rarely could. 

The way we today visualise Dayanand Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Tilak, Annie Besant, Tagore, Bhagat Singh, Sarojini Naidu, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Subhash Chandra Bose—and many more—is all “dependent on that visual energy rooted in the 1910-1950s period,” said Tuli.

That argument is easiest to see in the exhibition’s smallest, strangest objects. A set of Swadeshi-era matchbox tin covers from around 1916–1920, their printed portraits of independence leaders riddled with misspelt names, sit not far from the grand oil paintings—proof that political imagery reached ordinary Indians through everyday commerce, not only through newspapers meant for the literate few. This was the era when the Indian printing press itself became a nationalist industry: Bengal’s Chore Bagan and Kansaripara art studios, Raja Ravi Varma’s chromolithograph presses in Maharashtra, and later the Allahabad Press and S.S. Brijbasi, all mass-producing gods, goddesses, and freedom leaders side by side until the line between devotional and political imagery all but disappeared. Bharat Mata’s transformation into “Mother India” over the first half of the twentieth century, and the Tiranga’s own evolution—from Bhikaiji Cama’s flag unfurled in Berlin in 1907 to its final constitutional form in 1947—are traced through this same visual economy.

Tuli was careful to stress that none of these symbols can be read alone. Their meaning, he said, “gains relevance” only “in their inter-relationships, differences, and re-integration” with everything else circulating at the time, pointing out that revolutionary icons such as Bhagat Singh and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose gained their visual authority partly because they were placed beside older warrior-figures like Maharana Pratap and Shivaji, a juxtaposition that made new heroes legible through old legends.

1857 And The First War Fought In Pictures

The exhibition’s treatment of 1857 refuses to settle on a single name for it—Mutiny, Revolt, First War of Independence all appear together, a small but pointed acknowledgement that how an uprising is named has always been contested ground. Alongside the rebellion sits Felice Beato’s 1858 photography from Lucknow, among the earliest photojournalism to come out of the subcontinent—a lineage the show carries forward across nearly a century, to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of Gandhi’s final days in 1948, and further still to the photojournalists who covered India’s most violent public moments of the 1980s and 90s.

Between the 1857 uprising and the early twentieth century, the exhibition also lingers on the theatre of empire itself: the Anglo-Afghan-Russian rivalry that shaped colonial military strategy, and the elaborate pageantry of the Delhi Durbars, whose grandeur repeatedly put the British Crown at odds with its own viceroys, Lord Hardinge among them.

Gandhi’s Shadow, And The Roads Not Taken

No figure dominates SWARAJ the way Gandhi does. From the Non-Cooperation Movement of the early 1920s through Civil Disobedience, the spinning wheel, and his fraught public engagement with untouchability and caste alongside B.R. Ambedkar, Gandhi’s visual presence in the show is, in Tuli’s words, unrivalled: “nothing ever comes close to the forms, scale, and diversity which the life of Gandhiji inspired.” Paintings such as Ramendranath Chakravorty’s 1932 oil of Gandhi at Dandi sit beside photographs and film stills tracking how his image was built, repeated and reinterpreted across five decades.

But the exhibition doesn’t let Gandhi’s dominance flatten the freedom movement’s other, more contested strands. A parallel thread follows the revolutionary tradition—from the 1907 split within the Congress, through Rash Behari Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad, and Bhagat Singh, into the Tebhaga and Telangana peasant uprisings and, eventually, the Naxalite movement—alongside a dedicated section on Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army between 1938 and 1945. Tuli acknowledged this tension directly, noting that the “revolutionary iconicity around Bhagat Singh and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose grew to some extent” even as Gandhi’s image continued to dominate public consciousness. Elsewhere in the same galleries, the socially committed art of the 1930s to 50s—Chittaprosad’s stark linocuts of the Bengal famine and the Quit India movement, alongside Somnath Hore, Zainul Abedin, and Gobardhan Ash, many of them associated with the Indian People’s Theatre Association—makes the case that ordinary suffering and organised protest were as central to the freedom story as any Congress session.

Cinema gets its own extended run through the show, treated less as entertainment than as political instrument—from Dadasaheb Phalke’s founding films, through the Bombay studio system, into an unbroken chain of political cinema stretching from “Awara” (1951) and “Mother India” (1957) to “Shaheed” (1965), “Upkar” (1967), “Aandhi” (1975), and the Emergency-era satires “Kissa Kursi Ka” (1977) and “Nasbandi” (1978)—with a particular focus on actor-turned-politician Manoj Kumar, and glancing references to MGR, Jayalalithaa, Sunil Dutt, and Raj Babbar, screen stars who carried their public image straight into electoral politics.

After 1947: A History That Refuses To Close

The final stretch of SWARAJ is where its argument turns most contemporary. Partition is framed unusually wide, beginning not in 1947 but in 1905, the year Bengal was first partitioned by the British, and running through to the 1971 Bangladesh war and its refugee crisis, as though independence and division were never a single, finished act but a wound reopened repeatedly. This flows into the integration of the princely states—Jammu and Kashmir, Junagadh, Hyderabad—and the Telangana peasant uprising that accompanied it, before arriving at the Emergency of 1975-77.

The exhibition’s closing galleries gather the decades since into a single sprawling arc—subaltern and peasant protest, the Bhopal gas tragedy, Tibetan resistance, reservation politics, and communal violence, including India’s photojournalism of the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition and the riots that followed in Bombay. Tuli traced this impulse back to the rise of Subaltern Studies scholarship after the 1980s, which he called “a rare Indian academic success globally” for pushing marginalised voices into serious historical study, even as he was candid that “the bias and manipulation of political ideologies in writing history is obvious to all.”

The show ends, appropriately, back where its title points: “Gandhiji in Contemporary India,” a section beginning in the early 1990s and built around contemporary artists Debanjan Roy and Gigi Scaria, both known for pulling Gandhi’s image into a modern, sometimes irreverent idiom. It’s here that Tuli’s larger claim about images versus archives lands hardest. Asked whether visual and material history could reveal what written records tend to miss, he told Outlook Traveller: “Absolutely, without any doubt, and I rarely say that.” Written histories, he added, remain “partial, incomplete, in tunnelled worlds,” prone to producing “half-truths”—which he considers more dangerous than outright falsehood, precisely because they pass as complete.

The Information

“SWARAJ: Revisualising India’s Political History” is on view at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi, daily from 11 AM to 7 AM until Sunday, August 19, 2026.

Entry is free.

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