Today the famous search engine Google pays tribute to the first female photojournalist of India. Let’s know more about her.
On what would have been her 104th birthday, Google pays tribute to yet another trailblazer – Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first female photojournalist – with a doodle. Other women who have made it to the Google Doodle list this year include Begum Akhtar, Cornelia Sorabji, and Anasuya Sarabhai.
Born in 1913 in a Parsi family in Navsari, Gujarat, Vyarawalla’s childhood was spent in various places as her father worked in a traveling theater company. Besides completing her education from Bombay University and Sir JJ School of Art, she started taking snaps of the daily life of Mumbaikars and in this way become a professional photographer.
Her career took off after her marriage to Manekshaw Vyarawalla, who worked as an accountant and a photographer for Times of India.
During the turbulent time of Second World War in 1942, Vyarawalla got a job at the British Information Services in New Delhi, and also started working with the Bombay-based ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’ magazine where many of her black and white images were published that became iconic because of the time and the turbulence that it depicted. She joined the British Information Services in 1942 after moving to Delhi and photographed many historical events and political leaders in the period leading up to Independence.
She photographed world leaders such as Ho Chi Minh, and American Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, and the first ladies, Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy.
She also photographed Queen Elizabeth II’s State visit and the Dalai Lama who had just escaped Tibet.
Some of her best work, however, came during Independence. Her key works include photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the latter being her favorite subject.
Some of the subjects for her photographs were Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family. She clicked some memorable photographs between 1938 and 1970. Her pictures like the first tricolor-hoisting after Independence, the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, releasing a pigeon, Nehru addressing jubilant crowds in Delhi, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy departing from India is some of the memorable pictures that have made their way to national archives.
The photographs that she clicked were published under the pseudonym ‘Dalda 13’. This number was symbolic as her birth year was 1913, when she was 13-years-old she met her husband and her first car’s registration number was DLD 13.
Soon after her husband’s death, in 1970, she gave up photography disappointed with the change the profession had undergone. In the year 1989, she lost her son and only child.
Later on, she handed her collection of photographs to the Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts. In 2011, she was awarded the second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan.
The iconic lady’s journey came to an end on January 15, 2012, in Vadodara, Gujarat at the age of 98 due to a lung disease.
In 1998, Sabeena Gadihoke from Jamia Milia Islamia University made a documentary on Homai and two other photographers titled ‘Three Women and a Camera’. Sabeen also wrote Homai’s biography – Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla – which was published in 20o6. The biography celebrates her work and her contribution to photojournalism especially as a lone woman in a field that continues to be male-dominated even today.
Homai’s Google Doodle today is a reminder of her contribution, her will to succeed despite the odds, and an inspiration who shows nothing is impossible.
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