|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Vyarawalla’s remarkable body of work as a perceptive photojournalist captured the highs and lows of a nation in flux with such stunning felicity that her photographs still retain the power to bring the past alive before our eyes, as they did during the last week of February as part of a long overdue tribute to her legacy. A lavishly illustrated, thoroughly researched and meticulously written tome was dedicated to Vyarawalla’s life and work on February 25. The following day, an exhibition of exclusive photographs that she clicked until she called it a day in 1970 at the age of 57 got underway at Lalit Kala Akademi’s Rabindra Bhavan in Delhi. Many of the exhibited photographs have never been seen before.
Lt. Gen. (retd) A.M. Sethna, president of the Parzor Foundation for Preservation of Vulnerable Human Heritage, the organisation behind both the related events, says: "Homai Vyarawalla is a truly amazing woman… At 92, she lives alone, does her own household chores, has no servants and even drives her own car." Parzor Foundation mounted the show in collaboration with the Union Ministry of Culture. The book and the exhibition are a part of the Foundation’s UNESCO-assisted charter to preserve and promote Parsi-Zoroastrian culture and heritage. As Jamia Millia Islamia teacher and independent documentary filmmaker Sabeena Gadihoke, the writer of India in Focus: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla says: "The great value of Homai’s work lies in her vast collection of photographs that archive the nation in its infancy documenting both the euphoria of Independence as well as disappointment with its undelivered promises." "This book," Gadihoke writes, "acknowledges her role as a pioneer among women and her contribution to early photojournalism in India." The writer ‘rediscovered’ Homai Vyarawalla when, in the late 1990s, she made the award-winning Three Women and a Camera, which featured the work of the celebrated but nearly forgotten photographer of yore. According to Lt. Gen. Sethna, Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla is the first of Parzor Foundation’s proposed series of publications on various aspects of the Parsi contribution to India’s history. Vyarawalla’s eventful life itself is pretty much like a live chronicle of nearly 100 years of the history of a vast nation. The sari-clad photographer, who would make her way around the city on a bicycle clicking people and events, was a well-known personality on the national scene in the post-Independence years. Yet, she chose to keep a low profile, letting her images do the talking. Besides recording the first moments of the birth of India, she photographed Jawaharlal Nehru as he addressed the newly liberated nation from the Red Fort on August 16, 1947. She trained her camera on the most influential leaders of post-Independence India as they went about the task of nation-building. Her camera also captured the visit of many well-known foreign dignitaries and heads of state like Ho Chi Minh, Queen Elizabeth and Jackie Kennedy. But it wasn’t just the rich and the powerful that Vyarawalla was interested in. She was the first Indian photographer to turn her attention to the common man and capture the trials and tribulations of the masses. As the subcontinent’s first woman photojournalist, Vyarawalla witnessed the ebbs and tides of history from close quarters and captured some of the most unforgettable moments in her roving camera. Whether it was the show of hands that sealed India’s Partition, the death of Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri declaring war on Pakistan or Indira Gandhi at the inauguration of the first Asian Games in Delhi, with Rajiv and Sanjay in tow, or a young Dalai Lama’s arrival in India in 1959, she and her camera missed nothing at all. She recorded the last days of the British Empire as well as the early years after Independence with equal eloquence. Her photographs of personalities like Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, C.Rajagopalachari, Shastri and Indira Gandhi are integral parts as much of India’s photojournalism heritage as of the nation’s collective psyche. Not only was Homai the only woman in the profession in her time, her general contribution to photojournalism in this country was no less pioneering. Many of her early photographs were printed under the name of her boyfriend, Maneckshaw, who she married after 13 years of courtship. Homai was born in Navsari, Gujarat, the birthplace of such illustrious Indians as Dadabhai Naoroji and Jamsetji Tata, in 1913. Her father was an actor in an itinerant Urdu-Parsi theatre troupe. Homai grew up in Bombay, where she was the only girl in her class to complete her matriculation examination. Beginning her career with the Bombay Chronicle during World War II, she moved to Delhi as the Indian representative of the British Information Services. Thus began the most productive phase of her career, which continued unhindered till she voluntarily decided to call it a day. A year after she gave up photography, her husband, Maneckshaw Vyarawalla, also a photographer, passed away. Fifteen years ago, Homai lost her only son, Farooq, to cancer. But the indomitable spirit of a lady who was in the thick of the action all through her career hasn’t suffered one bit. Not that her photographs need the support of words, but more than a generation after she quit the professional scene, it seems like a perfectly good idea for us to jog our memories a bit and see the history of India through the eyes of a nonagenarian. — S.C. |
||
|
|
||
IF
a well-composed image is indeed worth a thousand words, the
fascinating tapestry of Homai Vyarawalla’s eventful life and times,
which yielded an amazing array of memorable freeze frames over a
period of three decades, articulates much more than what mere words
can express.
