India’s first woman photojournalist, Homai Vyarwalla had witnessed and captured the pre and post independent India. Clad in a sari and equipped with a Rolliflex camera, she shot several historical events and personalities in an age when most women hardly stepped out of the house. Her pictures present a visual transformation of India from when it was ruled by the East India Company to a free sovereign nation.

Born in 1913 to a poor family in Navsari, a Mafussil town in Gujarat, Homai Vyarwalla was sent to Bombay by her parents for further studies. She completed her Honours from Bombay University and a Diploma in Art from J J School of Art. This was when Vyarwalla took to photography and stared learning the craft of taking pictures with the help of magazines like Popular Photography. In the following years, her love for photography was further supported and influenced by her photographer husband, Maneckshaw whom she married after a courtship of 15 years.

In her early days, Vyarwalla sharpened her skills by taking countless pictures of her husband and spent a lot of time in the dark room to get the perfect colours. Soon her pictures started getting recognized and sold under her husband’s name and by the late 1930s her work started getting published officially under her own name.

She began as a freelance photographer and her work was soon published across both national and international publications. Her first pictures were published in Bombay Chronicle for which she got paid Re. 1 in cash for each of her photographs. Her poignant images of fire brigades, ambulances and rescue workers during the outbreak of war earned her and Maneckshaw an invite from the headquarters of the Far Eastern Bureau of the British Information Services in Delhi. The appointment proved to be a turning point in her life as she it gave her the opportunity to photograph influential foreign dignitaries and several political events of historical importance.

She became an integral part of India’s freedom struggle capturing the exploits, the struggle of our freedom fighters. She did all that she could to photograph political leaders. Out of the several political leaders that she shot, her favourite was India’s first Prime Minister- Jawaharlal Nehru, who was always happy to be photographed.

After her husband died in 1969, Homai gave up photography in 1970 and has never clicked a single picture since then. She felt it wasn’t worthwhile as all the leaders she truly respected had died or retired. The barricade of bodyguards surrounding eminent personalities was making it too difficult for photojournalists like her to capture them. But more than anything else, it was lack of respect with which photographers were starting to get treated that led Vyarawalla to quit photography for good.

An independent woman for life, Vyarawalla spent the rest of her days in Baroda, where she breathed her last on 15th January, 2012. The grand old lady, as she was called, had several accolades to her credit and will be lovingly remembered by all.