New Delhi: When Independent India’s first tricolour was hoisted back in 1947, when Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead to cause the new nation to lapse into grief, it was a young Homai Vyarawalla’s photographs that gave vision to those classic sights for the present generation to cherish.
Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman photojournalist was born on this day, December 9, and Google has dedicated its doodle for the day to this maverick personality, who had pioneered a profession that was perhaps unthinkable for women in back in the day.
It is her 104th birth anniversary today.
She was born in a Parsi family in Gujarat and in 1913 started photography during the 1930s after getting a degree from the prestigious JJ School of Art in Mumbai.
Vyarawalla started out as a young photographer with ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’ in Mumbai during the Second World War era and some of her black and white photographs went on to become absolute classics.
Later, she went on to capture the Indian Independence movement and the prominent personalities of the time, including Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Jawarhalal Nehru and others.
She used the unique pseudonym of ‘Dalda 13’ to publish her work and she would often attribute it to her birth year, 1913, among other reasons.
In 2011, a year before her death, she was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan award, the second highest civilian award.
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