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.

Pandit Nehru releasing a dove, sign of peace at a public function at the National Stadium in New Delhi, mid 1950s. // image source

Aerial View of the Republic Day Parade in Delhi taken from the top of India Gate in 1951. // image source

Mahatma Gandhi’s body at Birla House, 31st January 1948. // image source

Dances and fancy dress parties at the Gymkhana Club. Homai Vyarawalla Archive/ The Alkazi Collection of Photography

The Victoria Terminus, Bombay, 1940. Homai Vyarawalla Archive/The Alkazi Collection of Photograph

Homai Vyarawalla – India’s first woman photojournalist // image source

LOUIS JACQUES MANDE DAGUERRE THE WORLD FIRST PHOTOGRAPHER BORN 1787 NOVEMBER 18

LOUIS JACQUES MANDE DAGUERRE THE WORLD FIRST PHOTOGRAPHER BORN 

1787 NOVEMBER 18

On January 7, 1839, members of the French Académie des Sciences were shown products of an invention that would forever change the nature of visual representation: photography. The astonishingly precise pictures they saw were the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), a Romantic painter and printmaker most famous until then as the proprietor of the Diorama, a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects. Each daguerreotype (as Daguerre dubbed his invention) was a one-of-a-kind image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper.

 daguerreotype 

a photograph taken by an early photographic process employing an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapour.

Daguerre’s invention did not spring to life fully grown, although in 1839 it may have seemed that way. In fact, Daguerre had been searching since the mid-1820s for a means to capture the fleeting images he saw in his camera obscura, a draftsman’s aid consisting of a wood box with a lens at one end that threw an image onto a frosted sheet of glass at the other. In 1829, he had formed a partnership with Nicéphore Niépce, who had been working on the same problem—how to make a permanent image using light and chemistry—and who had achieved primitive but real results as early as 1826. By the time Niépce died in 1833, the partners had yet to come up with a practical, reliable process.

Not until 1838 had Daguerre’s continued experiments progressed to the point where he felt comfortable showing examples of the new medium to selected artists and scientists in the hope of lining up investors. François Arago, a noted astronomer and member of the French legislature, was among the new art’s most enthusiastic admirers. He became Daguerre’s champion in both the Académie des Sciences and the Chambre des Députés, securing the inventor a lifetime pension in exchange for the rights to his process. Only on August 19, 1839, was the revolutionary process explained, step by step, before a joint session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, with an eager crowd of spectators spilling over into the courtyard outside.

The process revealed on that day seemed magical. Each daguerreotype is a remarkably detailed, one-of-a-kind photographic image on a highly polished, silver-plated sheet of copper, sensitized with iodine vapors, exposed in a large box camera, developed in mercury fumes, and stabilized (or fixed) with salt water or “hypo” (sodium thiosulfate). Although Daguerre was required to reveal, demonstrate, and publish detailed instructions for the process, he wisely retained the patent on the equipment necessary to practice the new art.

From the moment of its birth, photography had a dual character—as a medium of artistic expression and as a powerful scientific tool—and Daguerre promoted his invention on both fronts. Several of his earliest plates were still-life compositions of plaster casts after antique sculpture—an ideal subject since the white casts reflected light well, were immobile during long exposures, and lent, by association, the aura of “art” to pictures made by mechanical means. But he also photographed an arrangement of shells and fossils with the same deliberation, and used the medium for other scientific purposes as well. The journalist Hippolyte Gaucheraud, in a scoop that appeared the day before daguerreotypes were first shown to the Académie des Sciences, wrote of having been shown the image of a dead spider photographed through a solar microscope: “You could study its anatomy with or without a magnifying glass, as in nature; [there is] not a filament, not a duct, as tenuous as might be, that you cannot follow and examine.” Even Arago, director of the Observatoire de Paris, was reportedly surprised by a daguerreian image of the moon.

Neither Daguerre’s microscopic nor his telescopic daguerreotypes survive, for on March 8, 1839, the Diorama—and with it Daguerre’s laboratory—burned to the ground, destroying the inventor’s written records and the bulk of his early experimental works. In fact, fewer than twenty-five securely attributed photographs by Daguerre survive—a mere handful of still lifes, Parisian views, and portraits from the dawn of photography.



Louis Daguerre, in full Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (born November 18, 1787, Cormeilles, near Paris, France—died July 10, 1851, Bry-sur-Marne), French painter and physicist who invented the first practical process of photography, known as the daguerreotype. Though the first permanent photograph from nature was made in 1826/27 by Nicéphore Niépce of France, it was of poor quality and required about eight hours’ exposure time. The process that Daguerre developed required only 20 to 30 minutes.

Daguerre was at first an inland revenue officer and then a scene painter for the opera. In 1822 at Paris he opened the Diorama, an exhibition of pictorial views, with various effects induced by changes in the lighting. A similar establishment that he opened in Regent’s Park, London, was destroyed by fire in 1839. Niépce, who since 1814 had been attempting to obtain permanent pictures by the action of sunlight, learned in 1826 of Daguerre’s efforts in the same field. The two became partners in the development of Niépce’s heliographic process from 1829 until the death of Niépce in 1833. Daguerre continued his experiments, and it was he who discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image if the latent image on the plate was developed by exposure to fumes of mercury and then fixed (made permanent) by a solution of common salt. On January 9, 1839, a full description of his daguerreotype process was announced at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences by the eminent astronomer and physicist François Arago. Daguerre was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honour. In 1839 Daguerre and the heir of Niépce were assigned annuities of 6,000 francs and 4,000 francs, respectively, in return for their photographic process.

MARGARET BOURKE WHITE , FIRST FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER COVERED INDIAN INDEPENDENCE ,WAR PHOTOS ETC

MARGARET BOURKE WHITE ,

FIRST FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER COVERED 

INDIAN INDEPENDENCE ,WAR PHOTOS ETC
BORN JUNE 14,1904

Margaret Bourke-White

WW II, INDIAN INDEPENDECE 

Margaret Bourke-White (/ˌbɜːrkˈhwaɪt/; June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry, the firsthand American female war photojournalist, and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her photograph appeared on the first cover.[1] She died of Parkinson's disease about eighteen years after she developed her first symptoms.

Early life[edit]

Margaret Bourke-White[2] (born Margaret White),[3] in the Bronx, New York[4] to Joseph Whites, a non-practicing Jew from Poland, and Minnie Bourke, who was of Irish Catholic descent.[5]

 She grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey (in a neighborhood now part of Middlesex), and graduated from Plainfield High School in Union County.[4][6] From her naturalist father, an engineer and inventor, she claims to have learned perfectionism; from her "resourceful homemaker" mother, she claims to have developed an unapologetic desire for self-improvement."[7] 

Bourke-White's brother Roger describes their parents as "Free thinkers who were intensely interested in advancing themselves and humanity through personal achievement," relating this quality in part to the success of Bourke-White, as a prominent Cleveland businessman and high-tech industry founder, and their older sister, Ruth White, who became well known for her work at the American Bar Association in Chicago, Ill.[5]

 Roger Bourke White is not surprised at her success: "My sister Margaret was not unfriendly or aloof. Her interest in photography began as a young woman's hobby, supported by her father's enthusiasm for cameras.[4] Despite her interest, in 1922, she began studying herpetology at Columbia University, only to have her interest in photography strengthened after studying under Clarence White (no relation).[4] She left after one semester, following the death of her father.[3] 

She transferred colleges several times, including: University of Michigan, where she became a member of Alpha Omicron Pi sorority;[8] Purdue University in Indiana; and Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.[3] Bourke-White ultimately graduated from Cornell University with her B.A. in 1927, leaving behind a photographic study of the rural campus for the school's newspaper, including photographs of her famed dormitory Risley Hall.[3][4][9] A year later, she moved from Ithaca, New York, to Cleveland, Ohio, where she started a commercial photography studio and began concentrating on architectural and industrial photography.

In 1924, during her studies, she married Everett Chapman, but the couple divorced two years later.[7] Margaret White added her mother's surname, "Bourke" to her name in 1927 and hyphenated it.[3]

Architectural and commercial photography[edit]

One of Bourke-White's clients was Otis Steel Company. Her success was due to her skills with both people and her technique. Her experience at Otis is a good example. As she explains in Portrait of Myself, the Otis security people were reluctant to let her shoot for many reasons.

Firstly, steel making was a defense industry, so they wanted to be sure national security was not endangered. Second, she was a woman, and in those days, people wondered if a woman and her delicate cameras could stand up to the intense heat, hazard, and generally dirty and gritty conditions inside a steel mill. When she finally got permission, technical problems began.

Black-and-white film in that era was sensitive to blue light, not the reds and oranges of hot steel, so she could see the beauty, but the photographs were coming out all black. She solved this problem by bringing along a new style of magnesium flare, which produces white light, and having assistants hold them to light her scenes. Her abilities resulted in some of the best steel factory photographs of that era, which earned her national attention.

Photojournalism[edit]

"Kentucky Flood", February 1937
In 1929, Bourke-White accepted a job as associate editor and staff photographer of Fortune magazine, a position she held until 1935.[3] In 1930, she became the first Western photographer allowed to take photographs of Soviet industry.[3]

She was hired by Henry Luce as the first female photojournalist for Life magazine in 1936.[3] Her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam construction appeared on its first cover on November 23, 1936.[1] She held the title of staff photographer until 1940, but returned from 1941 to 1942,[3] and again in 1945, where she stayed through her semi-retirement in 1957 (which ended her photography for the magazine)[1] and her full retirement in 1969.[3]

Her photographs of the construction of the Fort Peck Dam were featured in Life's first issue, dated November 23, 1936, including the cover.[10] This cover photograph became such a favorite (see [11]) that it was the 1930s' representative in the United States Postal Service's Celebrate the Century series of commemorative postage stamps. "Although Bourke-White titled the photo, New Deal, Montana: Fort Peck Dam, it is actually a photo of the spillway located three miles east of the dam," according to a United States Army Corps of Engineers web page.[12]

During the mid-1930s, Bourke-White, like Dorothea Lange, photographed drought victims of the Dust Bowl. In the February 15, 1937 issue of Life magazine, her famous photograph of black flood victims standing in-front of a sign which declared, "World's Highest Standard of Living", showing a white family, was published. The photograph later would become the basis for the artwork of Curtis Mayfield's 1975 album, There's No Place Like America Today.

Bourke-White and novelist Erskine Caldwell were married from 1939 to their divorce in 1942,[3] and they collaborated on You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a book about conditions in the South during the Great Depression.

She also traveled to Europe to record how Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were faring under Nazism and how Russia was faring under Communism. While in Russia, she photographed a rare occurrence, Joseph Stalin with a smile, as well as portraits of Stalin's mother and great-aunt when visiting Georgia.

World War II[edit]

Bourke-White was the first female war correspondent[3] and the first woman to be allowed to work in combat zones during World War II. In 1941, she traveled to the Soviet Union just as Germany broke its pact of non-aggression. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. Taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy, she then captured the ensuing firestorms on camera.

As the war progressed, she was attached to the U.S. Army Air Force in North Africa, then to the U.S. Army in Italy and later in Germany. She repeatedly came under fire in Italy in areas of fierce fighting.


"The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Arctic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as 'Maggie the Indestructible.'"[1] This incident in the Mediterranean refers to the sinking of the England-Africa bound British troopship SS Strathallan that she recorded in an article, "Women in Lifeboats", in Life, February 22, 1943. She was disliked by General Dwight D Eisenhower, but was friendly with his chauffeur/secretary, Irishwoman Kay Summersby, with whom she shared the lifeboat.

In the spring of 1945, she traveled throughout a collapsing Germany with Gen. George S. Patton. She arrived at Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp, and later said, "Using a camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me." After the war, she produced a book entitled, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, a project that helped her come to grips with the brutality she had witnessed during and after the war.

"Too many who got in the way of a Bourke-White photograph — and that included not just bureaucrats and functionaries but professional colleagues like assistants, reporters, and other photographers — she was regarded as imperious, calculating, and insensitive."[1]

Recording the India–Pakistan partition violence[edit]

An iconic photograph that Margaret Bourke-White took of Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1946

Bourke-White is known equally well in both India and Pakistan for her photographs of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar at his home Rajgriha, Dadar in Mumbai on the occasion of a third impression of his book which was published in December 1940 as Thoughts on Pakistan

 (the book was republished in 1946 under the title India's Political What's What: Pakistan or Partition of India). These photographs were published on LIFE magazine cover. She also photographed M. K. Gandhi at his spinning wheel and Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, upright in a chair.[13][14]

She also was "one of the most effective chroniclers" of the violence that erupted at the independence and partition of India and Pakistan, according to Somini Sengupta, who calls her photographs of the episode "gut-wrenching, and staring at them, you glimpse the photographer's undaunted desire to stare down horror." She recorded streets littered with corpses, dead victims with open eyes, and refugees with vacant eyes. "Bourke-White's photographs seem to scream on the page," Sengupta wrote. The photographs were taken just two years after those Bourke-White took of the newly captured Buchenwald.[13]

Sixty-six of Bourke-White's photographs of the partition violence were included in a 2006 reissue of Khushwant Singh's 1956 novel about the disruption, Train to Pakistan. In connection with the reissue, many of the photographs in the book were displayed at "the posh shopping center Khan Market" in Delhi, India.

 "More astonishing than the images blown up large as life was the number of shoppers who seemed not to register them," Sengupta wrote. No memorial to the partition victims exists in India, according to Pramod Kapoor, head of Roli, the Indian publishing house coming out with the new book.[13]

She had a knack for being at the right place at the right time: she interviewed and photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just a few hours before his assassination in 1948.[15] Alfred Eisenstaedt, her friend and colleague, said one of her strengths was that there was no assignment and no picture that was unimportant to her. She also started the first photography laboratory at Life magazine.[7]

Later years and death[edit]

In 1953, Bourke-White developed her first symptoms of Parkinson's disease.[3] She was forced to slow her career to fight encroaching paralysis.[1] In 1959 and 1961, she underwent several operations to treat her condition,[3] which effectively ended her tremors, but affected her speech.[1] In 1971 she died at Stamford Hospital in Stamford, Connecticut, aged 67, from Parkinson's disease.[2][3][16]

Bourke-White wrote an autobiography, Portrait of Myself, which was published in 1963 and became a bestseller, but she grew increasingly infirm and isolated in her home in Darien, Connecticut. In her living room there "was wallpapered in one huge, floor-to-ceiling, perfectly-stitched-together black-and-white photograph of an evergreen forest that she had shot in Czechoslovakia in 1938". A pension plan set up in the 1950s "though generous for that time" no longer covered her health-care costs. She also suffered financially from her personal generosity and "less-than-responsible attendant care."[1]

”லைஃப்” பத்திரிகை. மார்கரெட் புருக் ஒயிட் (Margaret Bourke-White) என்ற பெண் புகைப்படப் பத்திரிகை யாளரை இந்தியாவுக்கு.......

நூறு ரூபாய் காமிராவும்.. காந்தி புகைப்படமும்...! -
காந்தியின் வாழ்க்கையைச் சித்திரமாக ஆவணம் செய்தது, எப்போதுமே அவரது அருகாமையில் இருந்த அவரது பேரன் கனு காந்தியின் கேமரா. Kanu's camera had the ability to artificate the life of gandhi, a life that's mentioned nowhere in his experiment with truthGandhi's Photographs by his grand nephew kanu gandhi |

சாந்தமே உருவான முகத்துடன் கையில் நாளிதழோடு ராட்டையின் முன்பு காந்திஜி அமர்ந்திருக்கும் இந்தப் புகைப்படம் மிகவும் பிரபலமானது. அவரது அஹிம்சை, ஒத்துழையாமை, கிராம சுயராஜ்ஜியம், ஆங்கிலேயருக்கு எதிராக அவர் எடுத்த ஆயுதமான இராட்டை என அனைத்தையும் ஒருசேர கொண்டிருக்கும் இந்தப் புகைப்படம் உலகளவில் அஹிம்சையின் முகமாக இன்றளவும் அவரை நிலை நிறுத்திக் கொண்டிருக்கிறது.

1946-ம் ஆண்டு பிற்பகுதியில் இந்தியா சுதந்திரம் அடைவதற்கான சூழல் நிலவியதால் அதற்கு காரணமான காந்திஜியைப் பற்றி எழுத நினைத்தது அமெரிக்காவின் புகழ்பெற்ற ”லைஃப்” பத்திரிகை. அதற்காக மார்கரெட் புருக் ஒயிட் (Margaret Bourke-White) என்ற பெண் புகைப்படப் பத்திரிகையாளரை இந்தியாவுக்கு அனுப்பியது.

டெல்லியில் காந்திஜியை சந்திக்க சென்ற அவரை உடனே அனுமதிக்கவில்லை. மாறாக காந்திஜி சார்பில் நிபந்தனைகள் அவருக்கு விதிக்கப்பட்டது. ஒன்று புகைப்படம் எடுப்பதற்கு முன்பு இராட்டை சுற்றக் கற்றுக் கொள்ள வேண்டும். அப்போதுதான் நீங்கள் இராட்டையோடு காந்திஜியை புகைப்படம் எடுக்க அனுமதிக்க முடியும்.

 மற்றொன்று பிளாஷ் பயன்படுத்தக் கூடாது என்பது. காந்திஜியைப் புகைப்படம் எடுப்பது என்பது வரலாற்றில் அதிமுக்கியமான நிகழ்வு என்பதால் மார்கரெட் புருக் ஒயிட்டும் இராட்டை சுற்றக் கற்றுக் கொள்கிறார். ஆனால் பிளாஷ் பயன்படுத்த மட்டும் காந்திஜியின் உதவியாளர்கள் மூலம் அவரிடம் அனுமதி வாங்கிக் கொண்டார்.

அதன்பிறகு காந்திஜி மௌன விரதம் இருந்த ஒரு நாளில் புகைப்படம் எடுக்க அனுமதிக்கப்பட்டார் ஒயிட். அன்றைய தினம் மூன்றே படங்கள்தான் எடுத்தார் ஒயிட். முதல் இரண்டும் சரியாக வராதநிலையில் மூன்றாவதாக எடுத்தப் படம்தான் ஒழுங்காக பதிவானது.

ஆனால் அந்தப் புகைப்படம் வரலாற்று முக்கியத்துவம் வாய்ந்ததாக மாறும் என்று மார்கரெட் ஒயிட் எதிர்பார்க்கவில்லை. ஏனென்றால் எந்தக் கட்டுரைக்காக அவர் அமெரிக்காவில் இருந்து வந்தாரோ அந்தக் கட்டுரையில் அந்தப் புகைப்படம் வெளியாகவில்லை. ஆனால் 1948-ல் காந்திஜி இறந்த பிறகு உலக அளவில் மிகவும் சக்தி வாய்ந்த புகைப்படமாக மாறியது. காந்திஜி இறப்பிற்குப் பிறகு இந்தப் புகைப்படத்தைத்தான் உலகின் அனைத்து முன்னணிப் பத்திரிகையிலும் வெளியிட்டது.

அமெரிக்காவின் முதல் பெண் போர் போட்டோகிராபரான மார்கரெட் புருக் ஒயிட், ஜவஹர்லால் நேரு, முகமது அலி ஜின்னா, அம்பேத்கர், வல்லபாய் பட்டேல் உள்ளிட்ட முன்னணித் தலைவர்களை தனது காமிராவில் பதிவு செய்தவர். சோவியத் யூனியனில் அனுமதிக்கப்பட்ட முதல் பெண் புகைப்படக்காரரும் மார்கரெட் ஒயிட்தான். 1948 ஜனவரி 30-ம் தேதியன்று காந்திஜி சுட்டுக் கொல்லப்படுவதற்கு 2 மணி நேரத்திற்கு முன்பு அவரை இறுதியாக பேட்டி எடுத்தது இந்த மார்கரெட் புருக் ஒயிட்தான்.

6.மகாத்மா காந்திஜி மீது பேரன்பு கொண்ட பாகவதர், உலகின் மாஞானிகளோடு மகாத்மாவை ஒப்பிட்டுப் பாபநாசம் சிவனைப் பாடல் எழுதச் சொல்லி, தன் குரலில் பாடி மகிழ்ந்தார்.

(
“காந்தியைப் போல் ஒரு சாந்த சொரூபனைக் காண்பதும் எளிதாமோ – மகாத்மா
மாந்தரிலே ஞானயோகம் மேவும்
வேந்தரிலே சுயநலம் சிறிதும் இல்லா
அஹிம்சை தனிலே புத்தர் அவர் – ஆத்மா
சோதனையிலே ஏசுநாதர் அவர் அது
பகையும் வென்ற கர்மதீரர் அவர். நம்
பாக்கியத்தால் இந்த இந்திய நாட்டில் அவதரித்த
குழந்தையுள்ளமும் அன்புகனிந்த மொழியுங் கொண்டு
கொடுமைகளை எதிர்த்து வெல்லும் சித்தன்
முழங்கால் துணியும் மோகனப் புன்னகையும்
தவழப் பகைவரும் கண்டஞ்சும் சுத்தன் இனிமேல்