Google honours first Indian woman photojournalist with a doodle

09th December 2017
Google honours first Indian woman photojournalist with a doodle

December 9 2017: Google  today honours  Homai Vyarwala India's first woman photojournalist on her 104th birth anniversary with a Doodle as " First Lady of the Lens".  The doodle  has been drawn by Mumbai artist Sameer Kulavoor .
Homai Vyarawalla (9 December 1913 – 15 January 2012), commonly known by her pseudonym "Dalda 13", was India's first woman photojournalist. First active in the late 1930s, she retired in the early 1970s. In 2011, she was awarded Padma Vibhushan. Vyarawalla started her career in the 1930s. At the onset of the World War II, she started working on assignments for the Bombay-based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which published many of her black and white images that later became iconic.
Eventually her photography received notice at the national level, particularly after moving to Delhi in 1942 to join the British Information Services, where she photographed many political and national leaders in the period leading up to independence, including  Gandhiji, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family while working as a press photographer.Her favourite subject was Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India.
Most of her photographs were published under the pseudonym "Dalda 13″. The reasons behind her choice of this name were that her birth year was 1913, she met her husband at the age of 13 and her first car's number plate read "DLD 13″
In 1970, shortly after her husband's death, Homai Vyarawalla decided to give up photography lamenting over the "bad behaviour" of the new generation of photographers.  She did not take a single photograph in the last 40-plus years of her life.
Later in life, Vyarawalla gave her collection of photographs to the Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.
In 2010, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (NGMA) in collaboration with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts presented a retrospective of her work.  ( source: Wikipedia)