When Independent India’s first tricolour was hoisted back in 1947, when Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead to cause the new nation to lapse into grief, it was a young Homai Vyarawalla’s photographs that gave vision to those classic sights for the present generation to cherish.
Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman photojournalist was born on this day, December 9, and Google has dedicated its doodle for the day to this maverick personality, who had pioneered a profession that was perhaps unthinkable for women in back in the day.
It is her 104th birth anniversary today.
She was born in a Parsi family in Gujarat and in 1913 started photography during the 1930s after getting a degree from the prestigious JJ School of Art in Mumbai.
Vyarawalla started out as a young photographer with ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’ in Mumbai during the Second World War era and some of her black and white photographs went on to become absolute classics.
Later, she went on to capture the Indian Independence movement and the prominent personalities of the time, including Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Jawarhalal Nehru and others.
She used the unique pseudonym of ‘Dalda 13’ to publish her work and she would often attribute it to her birth year, 1913, among other reasons.
In 2011, a year before her death, she was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan award, the second highest civilian award.
About Homai Vyarawalla, India's First Woman Photojournalist
Hailing from Navsari in Gujarat, Vyarawalla moved to Bombay to pursue a diploma at St Xavier's College before moving on for further studies at the JJ School of Arts.
She was introduced to photography by her husband Manekcshaw Vyarawala, a photographer at the Times of India.
Vyarawala went on to work with the British Information Services and was a familiar sight in Delhi, sari-clad, travelling from one end of the city to the other on a cycle.
She believed that the key to a good photograph is timing, composition and angle.
"There are 15 people taking a photograph at the same time; each has his own style. But there's only one who gets the right moment and the right angle," she said
Her contribution as a photo journalist include immortalising the moment when the first Flag was hoisted at the Red Fort on August 15, 1947, the departure of the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten from the country, and the funerals of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri. Vyarawala also photographed Queen Elizabeth's and former United States president, Dwight Eisenhower's visits to India.
She was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award in India in 2011.
She passed away at the age of 98 in 2012 in Vadodara, Gujarat.
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