The life, times and photos of India’s first woman press photographer Homai Vyarawalla. Malavika Karlekar reviews the book.
Few children of the Nehruvian era who grew up in Lutyens’s New Delhi can have forgotten the slim Homai Vyarawalla at work with her heavy camera equipment at Republic Day parades, parties at the Gymkhana Club or, if one was lucky, at one’s wedding. Filmmaker and academic Sabeena Gadihoke’s delightful photo-biography of India’s first woman photojournalist brings us a comprehensive sampling of her oeuvre.
This book was published to accompany the October 2010 collaborative exhibition between the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and the National Gallery of Modern Art, titled “Homai Vyarawalla: A Retrospective” and curated by Gadihoke. Gadihoke spent two years interviewing Homai Vyarawalla in spells; she tells us about rummaging through trunks, piles of memorabilia, her subject’s mind. As a cameraperson, she provides important details on the equipment used and on Vyarawalla’s responses to changing technologies. Biographies of the living are not easy to write and Gadihoke was extraordinarily lucky to work with a person whose mind was so intact, her recollections so fluent and perfect.
Today, the 97-year-old Vyarawalla lives in Vadodara, surrounded by her photographs and a terrace garden that she assiduously nurtures. It was her ability to multi-task, to adjust quickly in a man’s world and to make the best of a situation that made Vyarawalla an iconic figure and highly successful professional. How many would have rushed from the darkroom to learn how to fry bacon from Erle Stanley Gardner’s dashing defence attorney of the 1930s, Perry Mason? Or decide that ikebana was not just worth photographing but also learning?
As the daughter of a peripatetic actor with the Urdu Parsi theatre, Homai Hathiram was good at adjusting to unusual circumstances. When her mother Soonamai decided to live in a Parsi mohalla in Tardeo, Bombay, with the children — two sons and Homai — Vyarawalla’s life became more settled. She studied at the co-educational St Xavier’s College, combining a degree in economics with a Diploma in the Arts Teachers Course at the well-known J J School of Arts.
By this time she had a steady boyfriend named Maneckshaw Vyarawalla, a self-taught photographer. Soon enough, she was learning from him. Despite opposition from Maneckshaw’s mother, who did not take kindly to the idea of a college-educated daughter-in-law, the two married in 1941. The following year they shifted to New Delhi, as employees of the British Information Service (BIS).
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As a press photographer, Vyarawalla had to be out shooting every day, difficult for a woman who had just become a mother. Days of challenging, never-to-be-forgotten events were, however, to follow: as the adrenaline flowed, Vyarawalla recorded her favourite subject Jawaharlal Nehru in his many moods (hugging his sister Vijayalakshmi, addressing the nation for the first time as Prime Minister from the ramparts of the Red Fort on August 6, 1947, and more), and also Mohammad Ali Jinnah the day before he left for Pakistan, and Mahatma Gandhi as he arrived at the historic meeting of the All India Congress Committee in June 1947.
Vyarawalla’s comments on the meeting are most salutary: ducking behind benches and crouching out of sight to take her photographs, she could not help but register that “a handful of people” voted for the partition of India. Younger socialists like Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narain and the old guard consisting of Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad and, of course, Gandhi, were visibly upset. More than three pages of this book carry the evocative images. One shows some delegates raising their hands while others appear totally disinterested; another portrays a dejected Maulana seated beside a quizzical C Rajagopalachari; a third shows the crowds awaiting the decision that changed the lives of millions...
Vyarawalla was not at Birla House on that fateful January 30 in 1948. Instead, the next day, quickly absorbing her disappointment, she clambered up the drainpipes of an electrical room to get top-angle crowd scenes as a mourning crowd surged for a final look at the Mahatma.
Her camera recorded President Rajendra Prasad and S Radhakrishnan (the latter apparently referred to her as the “Royal Photographer”) and the Mountbattens and, later, Queen Elizabeth. When security concerns did not dominate public events, she was able to take a telling image of Louis Mountbatten inspecting the Guard of Honour for the last time at Rashtrapati Bhawan. Mountbatten’s stern, upright demeanour and Edwina’s half smile are offset by two casual Indian bystanders, watching the proceedings with some bemusement. Today no such stragglers would be allowed within miles of such an occasion; and yet their presence is almost symbolic of the passing of the old order and the advent of the new, chaotic India. It is interesting that Vyarawalla did not ask them to move out of the frame.
There are lighter moments, such as several shots of dignitaries struggling to take their shoes off at Rajghat, skirts swirling at a dance, and Indira Gandhi serving a child at her son’s birthday party. A ubiquitous presence and the only woman press photographer of those days, Vyarawalla was referred to by her colleagues as “Mummy”, which was a nickname given to her by younger friends.
She continued photographing till 1970 (Maneckshaw had died the year before), when she left Delhi to join her son Farouq in Pilani and later Vadodara. Until a few years ago she was her own driver, plumber, electrician and cook.
If there are quotes that cry out for a reference, confusion in presentation and chronology in parts of the book and the glaring absence of images of Delhi’s refugee camps in 1947, one is tempted to write off these shortcomings. It must have been no easy task to write the life of such a formidable personality, one who is determined to leave for the other side with her boots still on!
Malavika Karlekar edits the Indian Journal of Gender Studies. She is the author of Re-visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875-1915
INDIA IN FOCUS
CAMERA CHRONICLES OF HOMAI VYARAWALLA
Author: Sabeena Gadihoke
Publisher: Mapin
Pages: 232
Price: $35