The woman who called the shots: Remembering Homai Vyarawalla

Remembering Homai Vyarawalla, pioneering photojournalist, who died on Sunday, 15th January, 2012, aged 98

Sumana Mukherjee
Updated: Jan 16, 2012 07:48:10 PM UTC
Homai-Vyarawala_Sachin-Kadvekar_Fotocorp-196x300

 

Till three days before she died on Sunday, Homai Vyarawalla lived as she had for the past 40 years: Proudly independent in her little walk-up flat in Nizampura in Vadodara. She had turned 98 just a month earlier.

But then, age had never been a concern for the sprightly, spunky Vyarawalla. Nor was her gender, ironically for someone who will always be remembered as India’s first woman photojournalist. The subject of much press coverage in her last years, especially after she was awarded the Padma Vibhushan and the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) hosted a retrospective of her work in 2011, Vyarawalla had a similar contempt for celebrity, for the modern need to place people on pedestals. As far as she was concerned, she told me over farsan and chai in her tiny, sparsely furnished drawing room sometime in the late 1990s, she was just the right person around at the right time.

Born in December 1913 in the Parsi stronghold of Navsari, Vyarawalla studied at the JJ School of Arts in Mumbai before switching loyalties from the brush to the camera, still sensational then in its newness. Besides, as she says in this Rediff interview, there was the practical consideration of money: Painters faced an uncertain future but, as a photographer, she could sell a print for Re. 1.

Married to Manekshaw Vyarawalla, an accountant who taught her the basics of photography, Vyarawalla’s career took off in a big way once the young family of three — their son Farooq was born in 1942 — moved to Delhi. Employed by the Far Eastern Bureau of the British Information Services, she was one of a handful of photographers who witnessed history being created barely an arm’s length away: the show-of-hands decision on Partition on June 3, 1947; the hoisting of the Indian flag on August 15, 1947; the first Republic Day parade at Purana Qilla; visiting dignitaries like Marshall Tito, Ho Chi Minh and Jacqueline Kennedy.

Before Vyarawalla turned over her entire oeuvre of photographs to the Alkazi Foundation, they were stored in her home in cardboard boxes, which she willingly brought out for interested visitors. When I met her through a mutual friend in Vadodara — she had no phone, so the only way to contact her was through her neighbours or friends — Vyarawalla was in her early 80s. The only concession she showed to her age was her request to speak loudly and clearly; she also wanted you to be facing the light. With these conditions in place, she was happy to discuss her photographs and photography, her razor-sharp brain recalling anecdotes and impressions with a mischievous sense of humour and a no-nonsense earthiness.

Both were essential qualities for the sole woman photographer (not to mention the only one in a saree!) in the corridors of power in the Delhi of the mid-20th century. As she narrates in this 2006 documentary, Vyarawalla got away with a lot as not just because she was a Parsi — mohallawallahs knew they were a little less predictable than Hindus and Muslims anyway! — but because she never played the woman card. “Whether it was lugging around heavy camera equipment or standing on a chair to take a photo or processing my work or completing assignments even if they ran late into the night, I did everything the boys did,” she told me seriously.

In that attitude, Vyarawalla was one with a generation of remarkable Indian women who were doers first and gender pioneers second. For every Sucheta Kriplani, first woman chief minister of independent India, there’s a less known Santi Ghosh, militant nationalist who killed a British magistrate in 1931; for every Aruna Asaf Ali, there was a Vyarawalla. They simply went out and got things done because, in their emancipated upbringings, liberal educations and enlightened world-views, sex was less of a factor than inclination.

Going through her photographs, though, it’s easy to spot that her favourite model was Jawaharlal Nehru, a fact that Vyarawalla admits frankly. “I liked photographing him, he never made a bad picture,” she said. “We saw all the leaders from very close, but we never got personal. There was never any chit-chat or any overt friendliness. We were doing our job, they were doing theirs and there was mutual respect for the other side.”

With Nehru’s demise and his daughter’s ascendance, however, Vyarawalla witnessed another kind of change: A formal distance was imposed between the leaders and the photographers, and both parties supplanted the urbane chronicler culture with a new rough-and-readiness. By 1970, a year after her husband’s death, Vyarawalla decided she’d had enough: She gave up photography, moved first to Pilani with her son, and later to Vadodara.

Vyarawalla would take up a camera again only to explain how her favourite Rolleiflex worked or why people described her flashgun as her ashtray. Till the end, though, she took joy in reliving the past — one of the reasons she was an academic’s delight — and in her ordinary, everyday life. Her fingers were as green as her mind was fertile; in her hobby of gardening, she was as grounded as she had been in her profession. Wherever Homai Vyarawalla is today, I’m certain she is still calling the shots.

 

 

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

Check out our end of season subscription discounts with a Moneycontrol pro subscription absolutely free. Use code EOSO2021. Click here for details.

Post Your Comment
Required
Required, will not be published
All comments are moderated
  • ANUP KUMAR RAY

    Liked the article. Came to know many important aspects of the personality and career of India\'s first kady photo journalisy Homai Madam.

    on Oct 1, 2019