A Reading Path Down a Rabbit Hole: Homai Vyarawalla
Selected profiles and analyses about the first Indian female photojournalist, Homai Vyarawalla
Profiles and interviews
- Whatever Happened to Rehana?: (Sabeena Gadihoke, Volume 2, Issue 2: Women’s Camera Work: Asia Spring 2012)
- The Many Lives of Homai Vyarawalla with Sabeena Gadihoke and Dr. Shernaz Cama
- Remembering Homai Vyarawalla: An Interview in Boston (Dinyar Patel, Patel’s personal blog, January 2012)
- An iconic observer - The curious life and times of Homai Vyarawalla (Malavika Karlekar, January 2023, The Telegraph Online)
Quotes & images
“Growing up in Bombay, Homai learnt photography from her boyfriend, Maneckshaw, who was a self-taught photographer. Her first pictures were published in the Illustrated Weekly of India under his name.”
“A striking young woman dominates many of Homai Vyarawalla’s photographs of women in Bombay. Rehana Mogul was Homai’s classmate at the Sir J.J. School of Art in the late 1930s.”
“…but the most visible representation of the modern girl in India was the urban collegiate young woman. This was particularly true for the Anglo-Indian and Parsi communities, which were considered to be more liberal as far as women were concerned.”
“It may be no coincidence that we do not see “modern girls” in Homai Vyarawalla’s work after 1942. Some feminist historians have viewed the nationalist movement at this time as a setback for the “women’s question””