| Homai Vyarawalla | |
|---|---|
| Born | 9 December 1913 Navsari, Gujarat, British India |
| Nationality | Indian |
| Education | Sir J. J. School of Art |
| Occupation | Photojournalist |
Homai Vyarawalla (born 9 December[1][2][3] 1913), commonly known by her pseudonym "Dalda 13," is India's first woman photojournalist. First active in the late 1930s, she retired in the early 1970s. In 2011, she was chosen for the second highest civilian award Padma Vibhushan by Govt. of India.[4]
Born in 1913 at Navsari, Gujarat, Vyarawalla, studied at the Bombay University and the Sir J. J. School of Art.[5]
She started her career in 1930s and thereafter received noticed at the national level when she moved to Mumbai in 1942 with her family, before moving to Delhi where in the next thirty years she shot many political and national leaders, including Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family working as a press photographer. At the onset of the World War II, she started working on assignments of the Bombay based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which over the years till 1970, published many of her black and white images, which later became iconic. [6] After the death of her husband she moved to Vadodara in 1973.
In 2010, the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (NGMA) in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts presented a retrospective of her work. [6]
Homai Vyarawalla took a number of memorable photographs during her career. Her favorite subject was Pt. Nehru. However, if you go through the archives of photojournalism, you would not find the name “Homai Vyarawalla” anywhere! Do you know why? It is because Homai Vyarawalla worked under a different professional name. And the identity she had chosen was “Dalda 13″! The reasons behind her choice of this rather amusing name were that her birth year was 1913, she got married at the age of 13 and her first car’s number plate read “DLD 13″.