Dalda 13, the first photojournalist in India

Homai Vyarawalla ©Sam Panthaky /AFP via Getty Images

Interesting stories are scattered around the world. There are people who enjoy great fame but are unknown to most. And sometimes their lives are compelling.

 

I want to tell you the story of “Dalda 13”. We remain in India and in the female world.

After having met those who fought for education and equal rights in the big Indian continent, let's go back to the thematic riverbed for which this Blog was born, namely Photography.

I was very impressed by reading about the life of Homai Vyarawalla, which is why I want to introduce you to her: a pioneer not only as she was India's first female photojournalist, but in her career, she documented the overthrow of British colonial rule.

And she was able to turn what appeared to be a weakness to her advantage: being a woman with a camera in her hand.

“I hadn’t the slightest clue I would be a photographer.

I wanted to be a doctor but that was the only time in my life that my mother refused to let me do something.

She had seen doctors on late-night shifts and didn’t want me in a profession like that. Little did she realize that press photography would be far worse!”

(Homai Vyarawalla)

Homai Vyarawalla was born on 9 December 1913 in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Her family belonged to the small but influential Parsi community of India.

She spent most of her childhood on the go because her father was an actor in a traveling theatre group, until her family soon moved to Mumbai (later Bombay), where she attended the JJ School of Art.

Homai came from a middle-class Parsi family, so education was a priority for her. There were only six or seven girls in her class, and she was the only one of the 36 students to finish the matriculation.

Dossabhai and Soonabhai Hathiram, Homai's parents, were not well educated but wished their daughter to study English further and enroll her at Grant Road High School in Tardeo. Homai's attempts at education encountered a variety of obstacles, both social and otherwise: Homai often moved house and walked long miles to school due to her family's poor financial situation; moreover, like all the other girls in her village, she had to endure the stigma during her menstrual periods, living in isolation for their entire duration, preventing her from attending school as if it were a temple not to be made impure.

After her matriculation, Homai continued her education at St. Xavier's College, earning a degree in Economics.

In college, she met Manekshaw Vyarawalla, a freelance photographer, who would later marry her, introducing Homai to photography.

 

©Homai Vyarawalla

Vyarawalla began her career in the 1930s. At the start of World War II, she had her first assignments for the Mumbai-based magazine “The Illustrated Weekly of India”, in which she published many of her most admired black and white images, albeit, in the early years of her career since Vyarawalla was unknown and was a woman, her photographs were published in her husband's name.

Vyarawalla claimed that precisely because women were not taken seriously as journalists, she was able to take high-quality photographs, without the subjects of her photos giving her special attention:

 

“People were pretty Orthodox. They didn't want women to move all over the place and when they saw me in a sari with the camera walking around, they thought it was an extraordinary sight. At first, they thought I was just messing with the camera, just to show off or something and they didn't take me seriously. But this came back to my advantage because I could also go to sensitive areas to take pictures and no one stopped me. So I was able to take the best photos and post them. It wasn't until the photos were posted that people realized how seriously I was working for that place.”

 

How to take advantage of what appeared to be an obstacle or a humiliation. A good lesson.

Finally, her work began to get noticed nationally, particularly after she moved to Delhi in 1942 to join British Information Services. As a press photographer, she has portrayed many political and national leaders in the period leading up to independence, including Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Indira Gandhi, and the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Her education at the Sir JJ School of the Arts in Mumbai, as well as the modernist images she saw in second-hand issues of LIFE magazine, influenced her graphic sense. These inspirations can be seen in her early portraits of common urban life and young modern women in Mumbai, but as Vyarawalla was unknown and a woman, these were first published in “Illustrated Weekly” and “Bombay Chronicle” under the name of her husband Maneckshaw, or under the pseudonym “Dalda 13”, which came from her year of birth, 1913, also at the age of 13 in which she met her husband and the license plate of her first car read “DLD 13”.

 

©Homai Vyarawalla

Despite her success at home and the long gallery of Indian leaders portrayed by Homai, she always remained in the background to Western photographers, as Sabeena Gadihoke, the curator of her photographic exhibitions, pointed out: “She was the only professional woman photojournalist in India during her time and her survival in a male-dominated field is all the more significant because the profession continues to exclude most women even today. Ironically, Western photojournalists who visited India such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Margaret Bourke-White have received more attention than their Indian contemporaries. In an already invisible history, Homai Vyarawalla’s presence as a woman was even more marginalized”. (Gadihoke, Sabeena, “INDIA IN FOCUS: CAMERA CHRONICLES OF HOMAI VYARAWALLA” The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts. Accessed January 26, 2020.)

 

In 1970, shortly after her husband's death, Homai Vyarawalla decided to abandon photography, at the very height of her fame, complaining about the “bad behavior” of the new generation of photographers. She did not take a single photograph in the last 40-plus years of her life: Homai Vyarawalla moved to Pilani, Rajasthan, with her only son, Farouq, returning to Vadodara (formerly Baroda) in 1982. After her son died of cancer in 1989, she lived alone in a small apartment in Baroda devoting all her time to gardening.

In 2011, the year before her death, Homai Vyarawalla received the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award in India.

In January 2012, Vyarawalla fell out of bed and fractured a hip bone. Her neighbors helped her get to a hospital where she developed respiratory complications; an interstitial lung disease led to her death on 15 January 2012.

When asked why she had given up her career as a photographer at the height of her success, Homai replied:

“It was not worth it anymore. We had rules for photographers; we even followed a dress code. We treated each other with respect, like colleagues. But then, things changed for the worst. They were only interested in making a few quick bucks; I didn't want to be part of the crowd anymore”.

Shortly before the death, she donated her collection of photographs to the Delhi-based “Alkazi Foundation for the Arts” and, in 2010, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (NGMA), the foundation presented a retrospective of her work.

 

Homai Vyarawalla. @indiahistorypics

I believe that telling the story of this woman in a sari with the Rolleiflex in her hand, little considered by the subjects she portrayed, forced for a long time to sign her photos with her husband's name and always in the shadow of the most famous Western photographers, is important.

Because she shows great tenacity and deep humility and dignity. There are not many who abandon what they loved most at the peak of their success just because money stands out over ethical values.

 

This a great lesson that once again comes from a woman in a profoundly male-dominated context.

This is also the India I love.

 

 Italian version