NAKARAJAN: HOMAI VYARAWALLA , FIRST INDIAN FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER BORN 1913 DECEMBER 9- 2012 JANUARY 15

HOMAI VYARAWALLA ,

FIRST INDIAN FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER

BORN 1913 DECEMBER 9- 2012 JANUARY 15

Homai Vyarawalla (9 December 1913 – 15 January 2012), commonly known by her pseudonym Dalda 13, was India's first woman photojournalist.[2][3] First active in the late 1930s, she retired in the early 1970s. In 2011, she was awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award of the Republic of India.[4]

Homai Vyarawalla was born on 9 December 1913 at Pranjal Shah's house.[5]

Personal life[edit source]

Vyarawalla was married to Manekshaw Jamshetji Vyarawalla, an accountant and photographer for the Times of India.[6] In 1970, a year after her husband’s death, she gave up photography as she did not wish to work with the new generation paparazzi culture.[7] [8]

Homai Vyarawalla then moved to Pilani, Rajasthan, with her only son, Farouq who taught at BITS Pilani. She returned to Vadodara (formerly Baroda) with her son in 1982.[9] After her son's death from cancer in 1989, she lived alone in a small apartment in Baroda and spent her time gardening.[10]

Career[edit source]

Vyarawalla started her career in the 1930s. At the onset of the World War II, she started working on assignments for the Mumbai-based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which published many of her black and white images that later became iconic.[11] In the early years of her career, since Vyarawalla was unknown and a woman, her photographs were published under her husband's name.[12]

Eventually her photography received notice at the national level, particularly after moving to Delhi in 1942 to join the British Information Services, where she photographed many political and national leaders in the period leading up to independence, including Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family while working as a press photographer.[12]

Her favourite subject was Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India.

Most of her photographs were published under the pseudonym "Dalda 13″. The reasons behind her choice of this name were that her birth year was 1913, she met her husband at the age of 13 and her first car's number plate read "DLD 13″[13].

In 1970, shortly after her husband's death, Homai Vyarawalla decided to give up photography lamenting over the "bad behaviour" of the new generation of photographers.[14] She did not take a single photograph in the last 40-plus years of her life. When asked why she quit photography while at the peak of her profession, she said

"It was not worth it anymore. We had rules for photographers; we even followed a dress code. We treated each other with respect, like colleagues. But then, things changed for the worst. They [the new generation of photographers] were only interested in making a few quick bucks; I didn't want to be part of the crowd anymore."[11]

Later in life, Vyarawalla gave her collection of photographs to the Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.

In 2010, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (NGMA) in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts presented a retrospective of her work.[11]

Google honoured her legacy on her 104th Birth Anniversary with a doodle.[15] On her 104th birthday Google tribute to Homai Vyarwala India's first woman photojournalist with a Doodle as " First Lady of the Lens". Doodle drawn by the guest Doodler and Mumbai artist Sameer Kulavoor. In the Doodle, Homai Vyarwala is found at the centre.

Death[edit source]
In January 2012, Vyarawalla fell from her bed and fractured a hip bone. Her neighbours had helped her reach a hospital where she developed breathing complications. She had been suffering from interstitial lung disease which resulted in her death at 10.30 am on 15 January 2012.[16]

An exhibition provides an insight into India’s first woman photo journalist Homai Vyarawalla’s archives, beyond her famed political work

The set of monochromes belong to Homai Vyarawalla — not just India’s first woman photojournalist who captured compelling political moments, but also a woman in her 20s, who roamed the city streets with her Rolleiflex, documenting India at the cusp of Independence. “This exhibition points to a different journey. Before being swept up in the maelstrom of nationalist politics. Homai had been keenly observing other worlds,” says curator Sabeena Gadihoke of the exhibition “Inner and Outer Lives: The Many Worlds of Homai Vyarawalla” at Shridharani Gallery.

The collection is an outcome of investigations into negatives neatly labelled and packed in worn-out negative jackets stored in an old chest of drawers at her Baroda home. “These she hardly ever opened. Some may have been printed, others circulated privately, while yet others may have been discarded,” adds Gadihoke, a close associate and author of India in Focus: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla. She helped Vyarawalla transfer her work to the Alkazi collection, before the latter breathed her last in 2012. The ongoing exhibition is a glimpse into these negatives — there is no Jawaharlal Nehru, her favourite subject. We do see Homai though, before and behind the camera.

War Files
“Homai Vyarawalla may have been commissioned to capture the citizen drills but she always came back with more. She was patient. She continued to take photographs even when it could be assumed that her job was over,” says Gadihoke, referring to a set of photographs that showcase India preparing for WW II. The prints show nurses on the piano, being trained for emergency medical services, including feeding the newborn, and a lab for essential communications; some were published in magazines like Indian Information and The Illustrated Weekly, others were meant to be archived.

Dress Circle
There is masquerade too — both, a female impersonator in Mumbai transforming into the fairer sex, and expatriates participating in fashion pageants, saree for women and the Nehru attire for infant boys. “Irony and ambivalence sit playfully in the heterogeneity of actors who perform the Indian. This gives us pause to ask: Who could be an Indian?” she notes.

City Lights
There is Vyarawalla, among three women standing against a maze of lines at Jantar Mantar. There is also the Delhi and Mumbai she explored, from Hollywood posters outside New Davar Bar to the Victoria Terminus in the 1930s and sparsely populated Minto Bridge. As Gadihoke says, “Each vignette could be the setting for an urban tale.”

Students Union
Her alma mater, JJ School of Art, also became her subject. In the ’40s Vyarawalla photographed inside institutions that sought to create modern Indian women, from trained artists to The Ratan Tata Institute that provided vocational training to Parsi women in Mumbai and the Lady Irwin College in Delhi that groomed them. “There is a familiar cast of characters — possibly friends of Homai Vyarawalla — who seem happy to perform their roles as students, women, citizens and desiring subjects. As they playfully strike poses and take joy in each other’s company, they can be seen to be stepping out of the theater of domesticity, to stage their own dreams,” says Gadihoke.

The exhibition at Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam, 205 Tansen Marg, is on till February 24. Contact: 23718833

Homai Vyarawalla, a name not new to the photojournalist community of India is nonetheless one of the most iconic women of India’s history pre and post Independence. In 2011, she was awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award of India.

With time, the first woman journalist of India received national level acclamation, even more after moving to Delhi.

She photographed many political leaders national and international, her favourite being Jawaharlal Nehru.

She photographed many leaders in the period leading up to independence, including Mohandas Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family while working as a press photographer. She also captured the various state visits of prominent figures such Dalai Lama, just after he had escaped from Tibet and John F. Kennedy and the first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

Her most famous pictures include the pictures of first tricolour-hoisting after Independence, the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru releasing a pigeon, now a part of national archives.

Vyarawalla learned photography from a friend and began taking pictures of Bombay life at the age of 13. Originally from Navsari in Gujarat, Homai earned a diploma from Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, Mumbai.

Today marks the 104th birthday of the influential woman of pre as well as post-independent India. A time when women were strictly confined to household chores until and unless one was a prominent figure in those times, Homai chose her passion and made a career out of it. An impressive step in that era, with today’s Indian woman to be much more independent and educated in the current year of 2017, a lot can be achieved if one believes in their passion and inner strength regardless of gender. Homai Vyarawalla is a true inspiration.