Few are privileged to witness the creation of history. In the 1940s, many emerged who could lay claim as its makers – Edward Mountbatten, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, to name a few. But it took one person to immortalize them all – Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first female photojournalist.
You couldn’t miss the sight of her at history’s many trysts with destiny. A petite Parsi lady in a Sari wielding a nine kg Rolleiflex camera, trying to be unobtrusive – often succeeding – and capturing the intimate, real moments of the biggest names of the time.
After her boyfriend, Manekshaw Vyarawalla (later husband), introduced her to photography, she took up a course at the J.J. School of Arts in Bombay. Her break came in 1942 when the British Information Service shifted office to Delhi during the war – and needed a photographer. Homai cycled the streets of Delhi carrying her bulky equipment. She soon became a familiar sight in influential circles.
As she wrote in an article for The Hindu:
Though I was on the payroll of the British Information Service, they allowed me to do private work outside office hours, taking pictures of prominent personalities for some magazines in Mumbai as well as for foreign agencies. From the initial ‘Who is she? What is she doing here?’ kind of reaction, the response changed to ‘Where is she? Why hasn’t she come?’.
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