The Many Lives of Homai Vyarawalla

About the Speaker:

Sabeena Gadihoke is Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia where she teaches Digital Cinema. She is also a photo historian and has curated several shows on Indian photography the most recent of which is Lightworks: A Jitendra Arya Retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai. She has been a Fulbright Fellow and received grants from India Foundation for the Arts, the Charles Wallace Trust and the Majlis Foundation for her research on photography. Her book onIndia’s first woman photo-journalist, Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla (Mapin/ Parzor Foundation) was published in 2006. Gadihoke has several years of experience as a documentary filmmaker and cameraperson. Her current research interests focus on the intersection of the moving and still image.

Abstract

This illustrated talk will explore several ways of approaching the vast archive of India’s first press photographer who was primarily known for her now iconic images of the transfer of power in 1947 and the building of the nation in the decades that followed. Vyarawalla was re-discovered almost 20 years after she stopped photographing and select parts of her archive have appeared in public since. The digitization of her well preserved negatives now reveals that Vyarawalla may have been documenting other worlds keenly. Her employment as a press photographer with the British Information Services from 1942 may have suppressed other interesting ways in which her work may have evolved. In so doing, the talk re-visits my own book written on Homai Vyarawalla in 2006 and how a similar publication on Vyarawalla might be different today.

Report

In the talk, “The Many lives of Homai Vyarawalla’, Professor Sabeena Gadihoke discussed several aspects of Homai Vyarawalla and her works. Vyarawalla was born in 1913, in the Bombay, where she started her photography career. She was educated at the J.J. School of Art, and learnt photography from her boyfriend and later husband, Manekshaw Vyarawalla. In this paper, I am going to discuss two distinct aspects of her photographs, the political album and those on women’s fashion.

She started working for The Illustrated Weekly of India in the late 1930s, and then moved to Delhi in 1942, to join the British Information Services. Throughout the process of Independence, and it’s early years she remained prominent in the photography circles. She captured most important moments, like the day of independence and Gandhi’s death.She retired from photography in 1972 and lived an anonymous life in Pilani and then Baroda. She was rediscovered in 1997, on the 50th anniversary of India’s Independence, when many of her photographs became iconic.

Mrs Vyarawalla, though primarily a photojournalist took all kinds of pictures in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most prominent among her glossary are photographs that she took in embassy parties and all-woman fashion shows. Professor Gadihoke pointed out that these photographs have their own story about the history of early Independence. They have two prominent narratives.First, they showed expat woman in Indian clothes, an attempt to ‘Indianize’. Second, they show women dressed in different attires from all over India, which represents the ‘Unity in diversity’ aspects of the early Indian state.Both the sentiment was prevalent in the early decades of Independence.The striking feature is that many of these spaces and subjects were open to her only because she was a woman

Mrs Vyarawalla remains an important figure in the history of Indian photojournalism not only because she occupied a very male-dominated space in her work, but her photographs look both inwards and outwards in the 1950s and 1960s and give a rather holistic view of the early Indian nations.

By Pratiti, Undergraduate Class of 2020