Pioneering chronicler and photographer (1913-2012)
It was common for the Films Division Newsreel to screen the arrival of Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru from his travels. As he was shown disembarking from the plane, a battery of photographers waited on the tarmac to receive him; amongst them a solitary female figure stood out – sari clad or some times in a dress – camera cocked to grab that one signature shot of her favourite subject – Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
India’s first woman press photographer Homai Vyarawalla, captured the last days of the British Empire in India right down to the departure of the last Viceroy. She was a key visual chronicler of the post-Independence era. India’s first woman photojournalist ironically received less attention than the Indian work of her international contemporaries – Henri Cartier-Bresson and Margaret Bourke. She was the only professional woman photojournalist in India during her time, and her survival in a male-dominated field has to be lauded.
Born into a middle-class Parsi home in Navsari, Gujarat, Homai grew up in Bombay and was the only girl in her class to complete her matriculation! She learnt photography from Maneckshaw (she called him Maneckji) Vyarawalla, later her husband. Her training at the Sir J. J School of the Arts, Mumbai influenced her visual sense as did the modernist photographs she studied in second hand issues of LIFE magazine. Her early portraits of everyday urban life and modern young women in Mumbai show these influences; but since Vyarawalla was unknown and a woman, these were initially published in the Illustrated Weekly and Bombay Chronicle under Maneckshaw’s name!
In Delhi, she joined the British Information Services. There she photographed a significant meeting when Congress members voted for the Partition of India. Vyarawalla also documented events leading upto Independence, the building of dams and steel plants and the state visits of the most famous names in 20th-century history, including Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ho Chi Minh, Marshall Tito and Russian leaders Brezhnev and Khruschev. Vyarawalla captured the first entry of a young Dalai Lama into India for TIME-LIFE.
High-society magazines like Onlooker and Current requested her for “pictures of good looking women.” Not surprisingly, they published large spreads on the visits of Queen Elizabeth I and the US First Lady Jackie Kennedy. Her most significant contribution as a photo-journalist was the first Flag hoisting at the Red Fort on 15 August 1947; and funerals of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri. She had also covered the visits of Queen Elizabeth and the former US President Dwight Eisenhower. Homai often recapitulated that during the day she photographed politicans and leaders; in the evening she covered social events that were held in Delhi.
At a time when candid photography was favoured, she got the best shots. Her favourite subject was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, who she caught in playful and vulnerable moments. Ironically, her most famous photographs of Gandhi were taken during his funeral in 1948. Vyarawalla loved black and white, and she processed her own images and believed that the choice of monochrome preserved them for posterity. And more than 50 years later, it’s easy to see why.
The bonhomie she shared with her colleagues, allowed them to request each other for a frame – “Ek frame mere liye.” In case of multiple assignments, they kept one frame to share with someone. The newer crop of press photographers who scuffled for a shot, and the marked presence of policemen and barricades at political meetings distancing the photographers from the leaders in the 1970s augured retirement, albeit premature, for Homai Vyarawalla.
After a career spanning 33 years which traced the birth and growth of a new nation, Homai was disillusioned, as the Nehruvian dream began to falter. The day a policeman asked her to move away from the barricade at a public meeting of the then PM Indira Gandhi, the First Lady of Indian Photography immediately shut her camera and put it away, with an air of finality.