Homai Vyarawalla: The Woman Who Photographed a Nation Being Born

Every photo credited to Maneckshaw Vyarawalla in Bombay's Illustrated Weekly of India in the mid-1930s was actually the work of his college classmate — a young Parsi woman whose own name, editors believed, would make readers take the pictures less seriously. So she let his name run instead, and later signed her own work with a pseudonym, Dalda 13, borrowed from her scooter's number plate. It would be years before Homai Vyarawalla's own name appeared on the images she took.

By the time she retired in 1970, she had spent three decades as India's first woman photojournalist, cycling across Delhi with a nine-kilogram Speed Graphic camera slung over her shoulder to photograph the birth of a nation — from the last days of British rule to Nehru's funeral.

Timeline

• 1913 — Born December 9 in Navsari, Gujarat, into a Parsi family.

• 1930s — Family settles in Bombay; studies at Sir J.J. School of Art, where she meets photographer Maneckshaw Vyarawalla.

• 1938 — Begins her career, publishing early photos of Bombay street life — initially credited to Maneckshaw's name.

• 1942 — Moves to Delhi with Maneckshaw after both are hired by the British Information Services.

• 1947 — Photographs the transfer of power and the birth of independent India.

• 1969 — Maneckshaw dies.

• 1970 — Retires from photography and largely destroys her own negatives, saying she no longer recognised the profession's new, more invasive culture.

• 2011 — Receives the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour.

• 2012 — Dies on January 15, at age 98, in Vadodara, Gujarat.

Early Life

Homai was born in 1913 into a Parsi family in Navsari, Gujarat. Her father worked with a travelling theatre troupe, so her early childhood moved often before the family settled in Bombay. She studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art, where she met Maneckshaw Vyarawalla, a photographer for The Illustrated Weekly of India and The Bombay Chronicle, whom she would later marry. He taught her the fundamentals of the camera and encouraged her toward a field that, at the time, had no women in it at all.

Her first published photographs — a series from a picnic at Bombay's Women's Club — ran under Maneckshaw's name, since editors doubted readers would take a woman photographer's work seriously. She later published under the pseudonym Dalda 13, taken from her scooter's number plate, before eventually working openly under her own name.

Achievements

In 1942, Homai and Maneckshaw were hired by the British Information Services and relocated to Delhi, where she spent nearly three decades documenting the final years of colonial rule and the first decades of Indian independence — the transfer of power, the Partition-era conferences, the country's first Republic Day parade, and the daily life of its new leaders.

She became known for candid, unobtrusive images of major political figures, most notably Jawaharlal Nehru, whom she photographed in relaxed, playful moments rarely seen in the formal press photography of the era. She covered visits from foreign dignitaries, the arrival of the Dalai Lama in India in 1956, and the funerals of Gandhi and later Nehru — though by her own account, missing the prayer meeting where Gandhi was assassinated was one of her lasting professional regrets.

In 1998, she received the Chameli Devi Jain Award recognising outstanding women in journalism. In 2011, at 97, she was awarded the Padma Vibhushan — living to receive India's second-highest civilian honour in person, a recognition that came decades after the work itself.

Challenges

Vyarawalla entered a profession that, in the 1930s, had no women practitioners in India at all and little institutional respect even for the men in it, competing for recognition against the international attention given to Western photojournalists working in India at the time. She worked in a saree and deliberately understated dress specifically to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field, and published under her husband's name and a pseudonym before her own name carried enough credibility to run alone. In 1970, disillusioned by what she saw as a shift toward a more invasive, less respectful paparazzi culture, she retired from photography entirely and destroyed the majority of her own negatives, choosing to control her legacy on her own terms rather than let it be shaped by a profession she felt had changed for the worse.

Legacy

Vyarawalla's surviving archive — later donated to the Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts — remains one of the primary visual records of India's transition from colony to republic. A 2010 retrospective with the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, and a later exhibition at New York's Rubin Museum of Art brought renewed international attention to work that had, for decades, received less recognition than that of her Western contemporaries.

In 2017, Google marked what would have been her 104th birthday with a doodle honouring her as India's “First Lady of the Lens.” More than the individual photographs, her legacy is the fact of her presence at all — the first woman in a field that had assumed, without much thought, that there wouldn't be one.

Sources

Wikipedia: Homai Vyarawalla. BBC News, “The trailblazer who became India's first woman photojournalist.” TIME, “Homai Vyarawalla: India's First Female Photojournalist.” The Tribune, “Homai Vyarawalla: Breaking barriers, one frame at a time.” Global Indian, “Meet India's first female photojournalist.” Live History India, “Homai Vyarawalla's Tryst With Destiny.”

Related Women

Sarla Thakral — India's first woman pilot, breaking into another field with no women in it, in the very same decade Vyarawalla began her career.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay — a contemporary who worked to preserve and document India's cultural heritage through a different medium, at the same moment Vyarawalla was documenting its political transformation.