Subject: India's first woman photo journalist - msg#00098

http://newstodaynet.com/2007sud/feb07/190207.htm

India's first woman photo journalist
V SUNDARAM

Photography came to India in the 1840's, and many photographers
suitably adopted the mores and conventions worked out by generations
of British artistes, who had visited the Indian subcontinent from the
start of the late eighteenth century. In 1815, MacKenzie was made
Surveyor-General of India. His extensive work served to set the tone
of the East India Company's involvement in a whole range of
government-sponsored projects and eventually led to the hiring of
professional photographers on a similar basis. In response to an
appeal from the Royal Asiatic Society regarding the dilapidated state
of the Ajanta caves, the Madras Military Establishment released
Captain Robert Gill from active military service to make oil paintings
exactly to the scale of the Buddhist Frescos in the early 1850s.
What is interesting to note is that a few years later, the
Madras Government supplied Captain Gill with a camera and within one
or two years he became an active correspondent with the Journal of the
Photographic Society of Bombay.' After the publication of a book of
Captain Robert Gill's photographic views, the Bombay Government in the
late 1860's equipped him with a specially made rectilinear lens made
by Dallmeyer of London and an 8 x10 camera. The wide-angle lens with
short focus enabled Captain Gill to take photographs in the confined
quarters and narrow entrances of the unique Hindu -caves at Ellora.

Jawaharlal Nehru lighting the cigarette of
MS Simon on Board A Boac Test Flight.
By 1869 all the Presidencies of the States of Bombay
and Madras had sponsored photographers for snapping Indian views in
the field. Catalogues of the prints made by great commercial
photographic firms of the 1870's and 1880's like Bourne & Shepherd,
Johnston & Hoffman, Bourke, Sache and T A Rust appeared in the market
throughout the British empire. By the end of the 19th century, many
aristocratic Indian men had started taking to photography as a hobby
more than as a profession.

Indian women from upper class families also started taking
interest in photography after 1910. Among some early women pioneers,
we have to take note of the photographs of Mira Chaudhuri (1905-1994),
Indira Dey (1912-1992), Manobina Roy (1919-2001), Debalina Mazumadar
(1919) and Rajendra Kunverba (1920-2000). Homai Vyarawalla who was
India's first woman Press photographer and who later in her career
developed into a great photo-journalist belongs to this tradition.


Great moment in world history captured ? Victory parade of
allied forces in Connaught Place in New Delhi in November
1945 Marking the end of Second World War.

Photography has become so commonplace today that it may appear
a bit naïve to ask, 'What is photography?' Is photography an art or a
mere mechanical process? Photography is more than tools and
techniques. Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, whose experiments helped lay the
basis for photography, conceived its function as merely 'to copy
nature with the greatest fidelity.' Photography has also been called a
language. This would mean that photography is a medium of
communication, a method of recording events and conveying messages, a
system of making known viewpoints, and opinions about reality. Every
photograph is really giving a report on something. It may be a report
designed to serve a utilitarian purpose. It may be a report designed
to serve an inspirational purpose. Or it may be a combination of the
two.

As a great pioneer in the world of Indian photo-journalism,
Homai Vyarawalla came out with great photographs starting from 1938
for over a period of 35 years till 1973. The lasting beauty of her
photographs - 'whether utilitarian or inspirational' - can be summed
up in one brilliant phrase of the great American poet Robert Frost:
'Art should strip life to form.' Viewed in this light Homai Vyarawalla
was a great creator of photographic art in our country. Though the
creative world of her works of art sprang from life, yet at the same
time it represented a unique world of its own, serenely detached from
the surrounding cauldron of clutter, clatter and confusion.
Consequently her works of photographic art have preserved for
posterity a beautiful slice of life that might otherwise have been
dissolved in the constant flux and flow of reality in the never ending
river of time.

Sabeena Gadihoke has recently produced an outstanding
biography of Homai Vyarawalla under the title 'India in Focus: Camera
Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla' which tells us the exciting story of
India's first woman photo-journalist. Gadihoke rightly observes 'Early
Indian photo-journalism and press photographs developed around the
visibility of public events and important figures during the freedom
struggle. Like many of her contemporaries, Homai Vyarawalla was a
chronicler of this era, without realising how significant her images
were to become.' Homai was born in Navsari, a Mafussil town in
Gujarat. Her father was an actor from the Urdu-Parsi theatre. The
family was poor and her parents packed her off to Bombay for further
school and college studies. Homai took an Honours degree from Bombay
University and a Diploma in Art from J J School of Art. As a very
young woman, she fell in love with another photographer called
Maneckshaw and married him. She lived happily ever thereafter.
Maneckshaw had a tremendous influence on Homai as a photographer. In
an interview which Homai gave to Preeti Verma Lal, she recalled, 'I
remember my first shot as a photographer, in 1938. A group of women
from the Women's Club in Bombay had gone for a picnic party and I
photographed them. My first published pictures were in the Bombay
Chronicle ? a whole range of pictures, for which I was paid one rupee
in cash for each.' In the early days Homai would take photographs and
her husband Maneckshaw would spend hours in the dark room at home to
get the right colours. In the field of photography and
photo-journalism Homai and Maneckshaw complemented and supplemented
each other.
Later, Homai started freelancing for the Illustrated Weekly of
India. And its editor Stanley Jepson used to give her weekly
assignments. In the early days for a fragile woman like Homai taking
photographs in field situations was not easy. Her large-format Speed
Graphic camera had a composite wood, steel and aluminium chassis,
which used to weigh more than six pounds. Taking each photograph with
this heavy weight equipment was indeed a heroic act of weight lifting.
In 1942, Homai and Maneckshaw moved to Delhi to work for the British
High Commission, then known as Far Eastern Bureau of British
Information Services. From that moment Homai Vyarawalla became a
permanent fixture at all major ceremonies ? either government or
private sector ? and during the next 25 years she turned out her best
work as a press photographer and photo-journalist.

Homi Vyarawala india's
first woman photo journalist.
When Homai Vyarawalla dressed in an elegant Indian sari and
armed with a Rolliflex camera, was hopping from place to place in the
centres and corridors of power from 1945 to the late 1960's, she had
the unique opportunity, normally given to very few press
photographers, of catching on the camera great historical events and
personalities ranging from Lord Mountbatten to Marshall Tito, from
Queen Elizabeth to Jacqueline Kennedy, from Khrushchev to Kosygin,
from Eisenhower to Nixon, apart from Atlee, Nasser, Chou En Lai and a
host of others who have shaped the direction and contours of 20th
century history. She took many delightful photographs of Nehru, Indira
Gandhi and the other members of her family. Thus she herself became a
part of history in the making, capturing World War II, India's Freedom
Struggle leading up to independence and subsequently the hectic days
of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

Homai Vyarawalla lost her husband in 1969 and soon thereafter
she moved to Vadodhara where she has been living alone ever since in
total anonymity. She is over 93 years old today. It is exciting to
read about her childhood in Bombay, her brilliant career as India's
first woman photo-journalist and her subsequent retirement to
Vadodhara.

In a recent article on Homai Vyarawalla, R C Rajamani has
observed, 'My chat with her brought out her character as a thorough
professional who kept a distance from her subjects and refused to be
over-awed into hero-worshipping. This perhaps distinguishes her from
the average photo-journalist, who, given her fame and experience,
would have been too willing to drop names and claim proximity with the
great and mighty.'

Homai has been living alone and in total anonymity in Baroda
during the last three decades. She was persuaded by the Parzor
Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of Parsi-Zoroastrian culture
and heritage, to share her memories and photographs with the world in
the form of a book. Parzor chose Sabeena Gadhioke of Jamia Millia
University as the researcher and writer. Sabeena Gadhioke has done
full justice to the creative life and times of Homai Vyarawalla.

Many do not know that Nehru was a chain-smoker. We get a very
interesting glimpse of Nehru in a relaxed and informal mood with a
burning cigarette on his lips, in Homai's photograph. This photograph
shows Nehru lighting a cigarette on the lips of Ms.Simon, wife of the
then British High Commissioner to India. The photograph was taken
inside the BOAC Boeing on its inaugural flight to London from New
Delhi.

It is difficult to find words with which to pay tribute to the
indescribable genius of Homai Vyarawalla. Always moving in joy and
child-like simplicity, she produced her great photographs in an
effortless and exquisite manner, which always reflected and radiated
the ecstatic quality of her soul. Her work will continue to speak and
proclaim for centuries.

(The writer is a retired IAS officer)

e-mail the writer at vsundaram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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