Her picture. His initials. India’s first woman press photographer waited ninety-seven years for her name.
The Person
She wore a khadi sari to every assignment. She stood in a crowd of men with a camera around her neck and she waited. The other photographers pushed to the front and she did not. She had learned that if you held back, the men in front believed they had won, and then they forgot you, and the moment you wanted came to you clean and unguarded. She got the picture. They got the front row. She thought that was a fair trade.
Her name was Homai Vyarawalla. She was born in Navsari in 1913, into a Parsi family that moved to Bombay when she was young. Her father acted in a travelling theatre company, so she grew up around the making of scenes. She went to the Sir J.J. School of Art. She met a self-taught photographer named Maneckshaw Vyarawalla, and he taught her the camera, and in 1941 she married him. That is the tidy version. The truth is that she taught herself most of it, on a secondhand Rolleiflex, photographing her classmates and the streets of Bombay for one rupee a picture.
She became India’s first woman press photographer. That is how she is remembered now, and it is a fair thing to say, provided you say it the honest way: she is widely regarded as the first. Nobody kept a register of firsts in the vernacular papers of late-colonial India. But no serious voice has ever put another woman ahead of her, and she did the work, and the work is the argument.
The Context
In the late 1930s a woman who made photographs for a living was an odd thing, and an odd thing did not sell. Maneckshaw already had a name. Editors knew him. He contributed to the pictorial magazines and his pictures moved. So her earliest Bombay work went out under his name, because an unknown woman could not get in the door, and a known man could.
There is a cover that survives. September 1941, the Bombay Chronicle. The photograph is hers — a young woman named Rehana Mogul, one of the modern girls of the city that Homai loved to shoot. The credit line reads Maneckshaw Vyarawalla (M.J.V.). Her picture. His initials. That is not an anecdote she told years later over tea. It is a printed object, reproduced in the scholarship, and you can look at it and see exactly what happened.
Be careful what the object proves and what it does not. It proves the misattribution. It does not prove that some editor sat down and reasoned that a man’s name was worth more than a woman’s, though that is surely close to the truth of it. And it does not prove theft. Maneckshaw was her teacher and her husband; they shared a darkroom and a household and a business, and he sold the early pictures because his name sold. Who decided each credit, and whether she minded at the time, the record does not say. So we will not say it either. The mechanism is the press culture of the day, working through a byline.
That is enough. That is worse, in a way, because it needed no villain.
Do not confuse this with the other name. Later, when she was her own photographer, she published under a pseudonym: Dalda 13. That one was hers. The stories about where it came from do not fully agree — her birth year, the age she met Maneckshaw, the registration plate on her car, DLD 13, a filmmaker who mistook the plate for her name. She may have gathered all of it into a private joke and worn it like a signature. What matters is the direction of the thing. M.J.V. was a name laid over her work by the trade. Dalda 13 was a name she laid over it herself. One is erasure. The other is a woman signing her own frame.
The Decision
In 1942 the Vyarawallas moved to Delhi to photograph for the British Information Services. Delhi was where the century was being decided, and she decided to photograph it. That was the choice. Not a dramatic one, no line drawn in a doorway. She simply picked up the Speed Graphic and went to where history was standing and pointed the camera at it, day after day, for the better part of three decades.
And in Delhi the name changed. Her own name went on the work now, and then Dalda 13, and the pictures were unmistakably hers. She photographed the crowds at the first flag-hoisting at the Red Fort in August of 1947. She photographed Lord Mountbatten among the jubilant crowds on the fifteenth of August, and again, separately, at his farewell from office the following June, in 1948, when the last viceroy actually left. She photographed Gandhi’s funeral and his cremation, and the later procession that carried his ashes. She photographed Nehru more than she photographed anyone — the flag, the dove let loose from his hands, the private moments no one else was close enough to catch. When India pictures Nehru in its mind, it is often her frame it is remembering.
She was one of the key chroniclers of that birth, not the only one. Cartier-Bresson was there. Bourke-White was there, and got more of the world’s attention for it. Homai was in the room too, in her sari, holding back until the front row forgot her.
The Aftermath
Maneckshaw died in 1969. A year later she put the camera down for good. She said the new men were badly behaved, uncouth, in it for the money, with no respect for the people they photographed. She did not care for what the trade was becoming. She had photographed for thirty-three years and then she stopped, and she did not pick it up again for the last forty years of her life. She gardened. She lived alone. Her only son died in 1989. She kept her negatives.
For a long time the histories of photography did not have her in them. A younger photographer went looking and could find nothing, and did not understand how a woman who had made those pictures could be left out of the record entirely. In the mid-1990s a filmmaker and scholar named Sabeena Gadihoke tracked her down in Baroda and began the long work of recovery — years of taped interviews, and finally the book that put the whole career back together.
The recognition came late and it came in a rush. The Chameli Devi Jain Award in 1998. Gadihoke’s book, India in Focus: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla, in 2006. A National Photo Award and a retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in 2010, the same year the Alkazi Foundation took in her archive — the thousands of negatives and prints and the cameras. And in 2011 the Padma Vibhushan, the nation’s second-highest civilian honor, placed in her hands when she was ninety-seven years old. She died the next January, at ninety-eight.
It would be neat to say the M.J.V. credit is why she waited so long for her due. It would be neat and it would be more than the record can carry. The early misattribution, the decades of obscurity, the late canonization — they line up in a way that tempts you to draw a straight line through them. But a chronology is not a cause. What is true is plain enough without the embellishment: she made the record of a nation being born, and the nation took most of a century to learn her name.
The Meaning
There is a particular kind of disappearance that needs no thief. No one stole Homai Vyarawalla’s pictures. They were simply printed under a name that sold better, in a trade that could not yet imagine a woman behind the lens, and the habit of it was so ordinary that it left almost no fingerprints. Just a credit line. Just three initials over a young woman’s photograph of another young woman, in a Bombay paper, in 1941.
That is the quiet danger in it. We know how to remember the woman whose work was seized from her, because the seizing makes a story. It is harder to remember the woman whose work was merely mislabeled by everyone’s ordinary assumptions, because there is no moment of theft to point to, only a slow fog of custom. She had to make herself un-forgettable one held-back frame at a time, and even then the histories closed over her for forty years, and it took another woman going to look for her to open them again.
She got her name back before the end. That is the mercy in the story, and it is a real one. But she got it back at ninety-seven, from a country that had been looking at her photographs its whole life without knowing whose eye had held the camera. The pictures were never anonymous. Only the photographer was. She spent her career making the visible record of a nation and stayed, herself, just outside the frame.
Homai Vyarawalla needs to be remembered.
About the Author
Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach ‘Critical Skills’ and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
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