“Bombay, the Beautiful”

The Parsi presence in Bombay. At the Hormarjee Bomanjee Wadia Atash Behram (Fire Temple), set up in 1830 at Dhobi Talao, near Marine Drive.

“BOMBAY, THE BEAUTIFUL”

“While in school, I used to read about the movement for Independence and about Panditji [Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru] and the other leaders visiting Bombay for meetings at the Azad Maidan. It all sounded so exciting, but Parsi schools didn’t want their students to be involved with politics. I wished that I would be able to see all those great leaders one day.”

Homai Vyarawalla

One of Homai and Maneckshaw’s favourite weekend escapes in the mid-thirties was Navsari, where they photographed the cultivation and tapping of toddy. Those were the days of the undivided Bombay Presidency and the state of Gujarat was yet to be carved out. A getaway to Navsari was also pleasurable because of the joys of drinking toddy: “It would bring out all the perspiration and toxins from our body. We would feel so nice and light in the evening.” Toddy was either drunk raw from the khajoor trees, or boiled with garlic and jaggery, like tea in the evenings. “It was very healthy and full of vitamins,” according to Homai. This was soon to stop. The problem was that fermented toddy was, after all, an intoxicant. The Prohibition movement initiated by Gandhi was gathering momentum,and the same images of toddy cultivation taken by Homai and Maneckshaw were now published in the Orient Illustrated Weekly to illustrate this campaign. As Homai recalls, it was her community that was adversely affected by Prohibition. The rich Parsis of Navsari, Surat and Valsad had their breweries and toddy shops locked. “Worse, after Gandhi’s strictures against drinking, no worker would venture into their fields to harvest the crop and many families became impoverished overnight.”

This seemingly isolated development draws attention to the rather complicated relationship that the Parsi community had with pre-Independence India. Ironically, it was Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi President of the Indian National Congress, who had first demanded Swaraj or complete Independence for India.1 Bhikaiji Cama’s fiery speech in favour of Independence at the Second International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1907 was also well known. Other famous Parsis, like Sir Dinshaw Vatcha and Sir Pherozeshah Mehta, had been prominently

A spread on Prohibition in the Orient Illustrated Weekly dated August 7th, 1938. “Gandhiji’s insistence on the question of Prohibition was like holding to ransom the whole country for the misdeeds of a few addicted to drinking. It created a new breed of bootleggers and mafia gangs brewing illicit liquor in unhealthy surroundings. If at all, banning of manufacturing and drinking of liquor would have served the purpose, but why ban toddy that was a healthy natural beverage? When toddy was banned, people turned to drinking the harmful bootleggers’ concoction.”

This photograph of people enjoying toddy in Navsari was taken by Maneckshaw in 1937. We know that because Homai is in the picture drinking toddy!

associated with not just the freedom struggle, but also with the history of local selfgovernment and reform in Bombay. Landing in Diu as refugees in the tenth century, the community was determined to mingle easily with the Indians. As the popular story went, they had promised the Hindu ruler of Sanjan, Jadhav Rana, that they would be like sugar, which dissolved in milk and yet sweetened it permanently.2

There was also another history of the community and this was the story of Parsi entrepreneurship in Bombay.3 The city had become the commercial capital of India because of Parsis like Sir Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy, Sir Dinshaw Manekji Petit, Sir Cowasji Jehangir and Jamsetji Tata. These men and their families did not just represent big business and industry, but were deeply enmeshed in culture and philanthropy in Bombay. Hospitals, schools, colleges, roads, colonies and charities still bear their names. Many in the community identified with this part of their history, a history of sethias and traders who had strong links with the colonizersof India.4 In those days all persons born in Bombay became natural subjects of England. “They called the Parsis the royal community in Bombay.” 5 With this widely divergent sense of identification, some in the Parsi community approached Indian politics with ambivalence. Despite their admiration for Dadabhai Naoroji, average Parsis found themselves in a bind over how to react to the nationalist movement. There was a certain distaste for street politics. Growing up in a middle class Parsi home in Bombay, Homai had never worn a cotton sari because of its associations with the nationalist movement. “In those days it was specially mentioned in our Parsi schools that children should not take part in politics. They wouldn’t allow us to wear cotton.” The popular perception about the Parsis—“friendly to the Indians, loyal to the British”—was obviously inaccurate, but the rumour soon spread that the Parsis didn’t want the British to leave India.

Homai recalls that the community was also affected very adversely by the, “Khede ooski zamin”—Land To The Tiller Movement—that originated during the nationalist struggle. Most Parsis in Gujarat were agriculturists with large landholdings that they had carved from wastelands. These had been turned into fertile fields that were now taken away and distributed among the labourers who worked for them. “There was no compensation for the owners of the land who lost their means of livelihood and were turned into paupers overnight. My husband’s maternal grandmother, who owned large fields in the villages surrounding Vyara, with teak and sandalwood trees, was reduced to abject poverty. After the death of her husband she supported her daughter’s family and, with her fields gone, she died with no money, leaving the family financially stranded.”

The campaign for Prohibition led by Gandhi added to the toll on the community as women were already picketing against liquor licenses in Bombay. 6 The Parsis were to survive these misfortunes and in the early thirties, Bombay still very much belonged to them.

“I was bold about what I wanted to do. Those were days when women were not supposed to carry handbags. They were not supposed to have any pockets either because of the sari and carried their cash in their blouses. Instead I used to go about with a camera. I still remember, someone asked me, ‘Kya hajamat karne ja rahi hai?’—‘Are you going to work as a barber?’ I replied, ‘Haan...kya aapki karwani hai?’—‘Yes...would you like me to cut your hair?’“

A Parsi photographer, Shahpur N. Bhedwar, had made a name for himself, winning awards in Bombay and London as a photographer in the late nineteenth century. Bhedwar’s work represented an older theatrical tradition of salon photography that Homai disparagingly called “armchair photography”. There were others like him in Bombay at the turn of the twentieth century. She recalls famous studio owners like Taraporewalla and Ambalal Patel, who would shoot portraits of couples in the studio with huge cameras and complicated paraphernalia. This kind of photography did not appeal to her. But Homai needn’t have worried because new technological developments in the early twentieth century were fast freeing the camera from the confines of the studio. The turn of the century also marked a more democratic engagement of Indians with photography.7 Bombay was a good place to start a career for these aspiring photographers, as magazines like The Illustrated Weekly of India and The Bombay Chronicle were offering them possibilities of work. According to Homai, Maneckshaw was one of the first to provide these publications with photo-features on Bombay.8 She began her career in photography by assisting him. Given the difficulty of a woman being accepted as a professional photographer in those days, Homai’s own images and accompanying text were first printed under Maneckshaw’s name and credited with his initials, “M.J.V.”

In the thirties, Bombay was the most dynamic and modern of Indian cities.9 Homai’s early images in the thirties and forties are a visual record of urban life in Bombay and its suburbs. She recalls the city as having tramcars that were first horse driven and then operated by electricity. “Later replaced with buses, the tracks were removed completely. The streets were swept and washed every

The Parsi presence in Bombay. At the fire temple and at Chowpatti Beach on the occasion of Avan Yazad Parab, Festival of the Waters.

“Bombay was a village before the Parsis took over.” By the time Homai was growing up in Bombay, the Parsis were everywhere. They set up most institutions and charities in the city. Headed initially by the British, the J.J. School of Arts where Homai studied was set up by Sir Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy. Her college education was subsidized by a scholarship from one of the numerous Parsi charities in Bombay. Her brothers worked in the Petit cotton mills. She would often visit the Gateway of India flanked by the Taj Hotel. Popular folklore recalled the story about how Jamsetji Tata wasn’t allowed to stay in an elite hotel because of the colour of his skin. The Taj, opposite the Gateway of India, would be his answer to this humiliation. Strong votaries of economic nationalism, the Parsis had set up banks and the newspaper industry in Bombay. Homai’s early pictures were published in The Bombay Chronicle, the Jam-e-Jamshed and TheCurrent—all founded by Parsis.

day: “‘Bombay the beautiful’, it came to be called.” While the Parsis may have dominated its affairs in the decade before Independence, the city was a cosmopolitan mix of different communities that even played cricket against each other.10 “In fact, the Parsis were the first to play cricket as well.” Homai recalls watching Pentagular matches that were fought on lines of communities between the Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, the Europeans and the “rest”, which included Jains, Buddhists and Christians. This sectarianism in sport was encouraged by the British who had, in the past, followed elaborate systems of ethnographic classification based on caste and religious identity to understand this “strange” country.11 On assignment for magazines like TheIllustrated Weekly of India, which were

Two sequential issues of TheBombay Chronicle in September 1941. Both portraits were taken by Homai of her friends, Rehana Mogul and Gul Eskie, at the J.J. School of Arts. They are credited to Maneckshaw Vyarawalla (M.J.V.).

These are some of the very first pictures taken by Homai and published under Maneckshaw’s name in TheBombay Chronicle in 1939–40. In 1937 Homai borrowed Maneckshaw’s Rolleiflex to take pictures of the J.J. School of Arts’ women’s picnic to the Ambernath Temple near Bombay. She also photographed other activities of the school. When Homai requested its British Director, Mr. Gerrard, for captions, she was asked why his wife had not found place in the photographs. She finally had to do the captions on her own, looking through books at the Petit Library. The woman sketching is Homai’s friend Mani Turner. Homai’s camera was soon in great demand with all her other friends. Homai herself earned a princely sum of eight rupees for her first spread of eight pictures. Opposite page:

Above left and right: Homai at Chowpatti Beach, photographed while taking pictures of the Ganpati immersion there. She holds her Contax camera. The building seen in the background is Wilson College, the centre for Homai’s Matriculation examination.

Below: Left: Taziya procession on the occasion of Muharrum in Bombay.

Centre: The Ganpati procession in Bombay. Homai climbed onto the second floor of the building opposite that was under construction to take this picture. Accompanied by her brother Homi, they found the door to the staircase locked after she finished taking pictures. They had to finally climb down the scaffolding with Homi vowing never to come photographing with her again!

Right: Parsi women coming out of the fire temple in Dhobi Talao, Bombay.

Marwaris in Bhuleshwar, with new account books to be ceremoniously started onDhanteras, the day before Diwali; when Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity is honoured. “They were so superstitious. The Marwaris would come dressed in sherwanis holding red silken cloth decorated with zari and tilak to take back the books. And then they would come out and wait on the streets for an auspicious omen before proceeding. It was so funny to see five people suddenly breaking into a run when they saw a jharoowali or a flowerseller go by!” The “economy of begging”: According to Homai, each of the steps at the Mahalaxmi Temple in Bombay, that the beggars occupied had a price. Beggars would be given pice that they would collect and exchange with the local thekewala for annas and rupees. “Of course the agent would charge his own commission for exchanging the money.” Picture taken in 1940.

British owned, Homai’s early photographs of Bombay seemed to echo this tradition. Armed with their cameras, Maneckshaw and Homai photographed streets, festivals and the work and activities of its diverse inhabitants.

In 1939 the Second World War broke out, placing Britain and its most significant colony in a dilemma. In favour of supporting the war against fascism, the Congress wanted a commitment from Britain about Independence. In turn, the colonial state needed the support of Indian troops and civilian population, despite their gathering hostility to imperialism.12 In this tense atmosphere, documentary footage and photography became a useful tool for the British to mobilize popular opinion. The newly constituted F.A.B., Film Advisory Board, commissioned a series of “information” films that highlighted war efforts as well as the activities of the British state as a progressive and developmentalist institution.13 These themes of scientific and social transformation also found expression in Homai’s photofeatures of the time. Some of her early spreads featured the Haffkine Institute, where vaccines were prepared, and the Victoria Memorial Blind School in Tardeo, Bombay. As part of a series titled “India’s Rural Industries”, she shot fisherwomen, agricultural labour, cotton ginning, toddy tapping and brick making.

One of the activities of the Haffkine Institute in Bombay. “Once, animal lovers were agitating against the cruelties practiced by the Haffkine Institute on animals. Mahatma Gandhi visited the Institute and was greatly impressed by the way the institution looked after the well being of the animals, rodents, snakes, etc., kept in well-swept cages for experimental purposes. But he never asked to see how the experiments were carried on in various departments. He never saw how a lamb’s skull was drilled and the brain injected with a deadly disease to learn the progress of the disease on the lamb; and after it died, how its brain was brought out to use it as an anti-rabies vaccine. Nor did he see a mouse imprisoned in a glass jar with a handful of fleas to induce the symptoms of plague in the little creature that would endure the torture for days before it died of sheer exhaustion trying to escape. Nor a horse’s throat being slit open to collect its blood and the wound stitched up again; the whole process repeated several times till the horse died after the last drop of its blood was collected. I was a witness to all these and many more of these heart breaking cruelties the general public never got to see.” The Blind School at Tardeo. This assignment got Homai and Maneckshaw their jobs with the British Information Services at Delhi in 1942.

The text in the Indian Firemen spread (below) asks, “If ever enemy planes succeed in flying over this country, are India’s fire brigades ready for this emergency?” A Parsi, Rustomji Palamkote, was the dynamic Fire Chief of the Fort area Fire Brigade Station in Bombay (above). He was among the seventytwo firemen who lost their lives in the harbour blasts aboard two ships in 1942. Most of them died trying to save lives of crewmembers and drowned during the rescue operations. His brother Edul P. Palamkote, also in the same picture, became the first Fire Chief of Independent India. “Most of the people I photographed in these pictures died in the accident. The blasts were so intense that gold bricks stacked on the ship were blown into the homes of some Parsis, but they were so honest that they returned the gold. The entire fire brigade from Bombay reached the ship and the second blast occurred while they were saving people. Rustomji was thrown into the sea. An excellent swimmer, his legs caught in the debris and he drowned.”

“The Government of India had assigned Mr. Bhavnani from the Films Division to take movie footage of war efforts in Bombay. He didn’t take me seriously as I followed him around for a spread on the fire service. I captured this explosion with my small Rolleiflex camera before he could catch it on film. It so happened that my pictures were published in The Illustrated Weekly a week before his movie was shown. The man was furious. ‘She has killed my film,’ he shouted!”

Most of Homai’s photo-stories on the War effort were first printed in The Illustrated Weekly of India. In contrast to The Bombay Chronicle that had been founded by Pherozeshah Mehta in 1915, with the idea of supporting early Indian nationalism, The Weekly was edited by an Englishman, Stanley Jepson, and often reflected British interests in India.14 During the days of the War it featured fervent appeals to the civilian population of Bombay to participate in war-related utility services like first aid, hospitals, and other rescue activities. Article after article asked Bombay’s citizens if they were prepared for the war against the “forces of evil threatening the world”.15 This was a bit ironic, as the Second World War and the gathering nationalist movement had complicated notions of belonging and loyalty among several urban groups who were being asked to join the War effort. The key question was— whom did the Indians identify with in this battle between democracy and fascism? If they did identify with the Allies, then how could they position themselves against British colonialism? Juxtapositions of civil life in Bombay and the impending war, in Homai’s photographs point to some of these conflicts. For instance, a spread on the war effort (see page 36) titled, “There is a job for every patriot: You can do something,” notes, “Do you see any class, colour, racial caste or religious distinction here? These are women of your native land helping all the injured in the National emergency. You are a woman of India too. They need your help in the mercy work. Must they ask in vain?” Calling Indian citizens “patriots” and asking them to support a “national emergency” is somewhat ironic as this spread is dated 1942, which was also the year that Gandhi called for the “Quit India”

A hand-coloured cover of The Illustrated Weekly, taken at a cotton-ginning factory in Navsari.

movement. Mass demonstrations were immobilizing law and order everywhere. The emphasis on the need for “free movement of people and traffic” or referring to emergency activities as “mercy work” that had “nothing to do with politics” seem to acquire a different perspective when seen against this backdrop.

Another spread on wartime rations (see page 36) juxtaposes the title “Chappattis for the Indian Troops & Bread for the British Army,” with the following text: “Wherever they are, Indian troops are given their own food and this is made by their own caste men. Brahmins for example get food cooked by Brahmin cooks and Dogra cooks make food for Dogra troops. Though this causes a great number of problems, the idea is always put in operation in the field.” These notions of a hierarchical Indian army and a non-stratified and fair colonial administration were obviously simplistic. Among the many popular but relatively unrecognized revolts in the events leading to the Independence was a mutiny by the Royal Indian Navy in February 1946 in Bombay. The revolt seemed to have been sparked off by reports of contaminated food and racial insults by Commander King, the Officer In Charge of a shore base. His racist address to the ratings had triggered a hunger strike in the Signals Training establishment, Talwar, which spread to naval bases all over the country.16 Despite some of these contradictions, Homai still remains appreciativeof the efforts made by the colonial administration to warn civilians of the dangers of bombing, even when they were not assured of political cooperation, as she feels that they were being provided with life saving essential skills.

“Serious” issues of war juxtaposed against the pre-occupations of civilian life.

The War effort in Bombay.

Prominent amongst her early spreads are images of Parsi women being trained for rescue activities during the war. Women appear as homemakers as well as participants in public life in Homai’s early images, presenting more complicated insights into gender relations and acceptable roles for them at the time. In opposition to working class women, who worked alongside men, career options for most middle and upper class women still seemed largely circumscribed by normative gender roles. An article titled “Careers for Indian Women” in The Illustrated Weekly of India dated May 11th, 1941, describes the focus of women’s education to be “the companion and inspiring helpmate of her husband” and most professions were placed as pastimes that would aid their role as homemakers. The discipline of Home Science (some of these images were taken later at the Lady Irwin College in Delhi in 1946), was also grooming women to be more efficient homemakers. It presented them with possibilities that would not take them too far away from the home, such as dairy farming, poultry rearing, bee keeping, horticulture and dressmaking. Some of Homai’s images of women in Bombay seem also to suggest that there were new options opening up for them like architecture, window dressing and advertising. Predictably these were published in the “Home Section” of the magazines.

In the early forties, Bachoo Bulsara, a young woman in her teens, working as a Secretary with Associated Cement joined the A.R.P. (Air Raid Precaution) training in Cusrow Baug in Bombay. This event changed her life as she met her husband Tehemton Parakh here. Bachoo recalls an almost equally young woman photographing her at the training. The photographs were published in several publications including this one, a War propaganda publication of the British Information Services. In January 2004, Bachoo, now settled in Kolkata, suddenly recognized herself while standing before this photograph at the UNESCO-Parzor Exhibition.

Picture spreads from The Illustrated Weekly dated 1941. Most of the women in these pictures were Homai’s classmates at the J.J. School of Arts.

Fisherwomen—it was common for Maneckshaw and Homai to photograph an entire process and make stories out of these pictures. “We would write up the entire story and provide it to the magazine for them to edit.”

Picture pages featuring Lady Irwin College, Delhi from an article in The Illustrated Weekly (1946) titled “The Passing of a Drudge.”

“My pictures of Lady Irwin College were first published in the Weekly (1945). This Ceylonese woman saw the pictures and was motivated to come to India to study at the college. She later modelled for me for this picture.”

In a black and white era, the covers of magazines like The Illustrated Weekly, which often featured women, were hand-tinted by their own artists. Most of the models in these colour pictures were students at the Lady Irwin College in Delhi. This cover is dated August 18th, 1946.

Different faces of women in Bombay— a spread from The Bombay Chronicle dated 1941. “The woman with her feet in water was going through a divorce. When the picture was published, she exclaimed to me, ‘Oh my God! Everybody is going to think that I am keeping cool despite my divorce!’“

Homai’s classmate at the J.J. School of Arts and her favourite model, Rehana Mogul, posing for the camera.

Rehana Mogul and Mani Turner at work in their sculpture class at the J.J. School of Arts. They were good friends. A live male model can be seen in the background.

Some of these pictures are from A.R.P. and fire-fighting sessions organized at Cusrow Baug, Colaba and Dadar. Parsi women also trained with the St. John’s Ambulance Services, as well as at local hospitals, learning how to deal with casualties during the War.

Also see opposite page.

Simultaneously, the demands of the Second World War were urging some women out of the home, as they participated in mock demonstrations of utility activities that were far from conventional. This move into the public domain was probably in keeping with the peculiar conditions of a war that had created new spaces in which women were needed. It is not surprising that most of Homai’s images featured British and Parsi women. As in many post-War situations, perhaps these unusual activities would have been suspended when the condition of the emergency was over. The end of the War also marked the beginnings of Indian Independence. Encouraged and inspired by Gandhi, Indian women had started to play a major role in mass demonstrations. Some historians have seen this phase of nationalism as a setback for the women’s movement. They view the struggle for Independence as absorbing the women’s question and putting it on hold for the next two decades.17 However, the fact that women had entered the public sphere was significant. Also, generalizations about movements often ignore the smaller stories and the “exceptions”. One of these exceptions was Homai herself. In a post-War era, Homai was to move out of Bombay forever and be catapulted into the most public and political of arenas, that of Delhi in the years leading unto 1947.

Homai may not have photographed any of the mass movements inspired by Gandhi in Bombay, but destiny had other things in store for her. Not only was this Westernized Parsi woman, who worked for the British, to switch to khadi saris, but she was to become one of the most significant chroniclers of Independence through her images.

Opposite page: The Victory Parade by the Allied Forces in India passes through Connaught Place in Delhi marking the end of the Second World War in 1945. Homai photographed the parade from the balcony of her apartment.

1 1906. 2 A different version of this story is recounted by Sooni

Taraporewalla in the Introduction to her book, The

Zoroastrians of India: The Parsis: A Photographic

Journey: 1980–2000 (Bombay: Good Books, 2000), p. 15. Parsi folklore also holds that a gold ring was put into the milk to prevent it from boiling over. This meant that they would never merge but would live peacefully with the Indians. 3 Starting out as village farmers and artisans in Gujarat, the community laid both the foundations of the industrial revolution and urbanization in western India.

They were pioneers in the opium trade and the cotton industry in India. The lifeline of Bombay; its dockyards and ships, were built in the eighteenth century by a

Parsi, Lowji Nusserwanji Wadia. Numbering just a little over forty-six thousand in 1901 in Bombay, Parsi traders, moneylenders and bankers laid the foundations of urban life in the city while also initiating political and social reform movements in the community. From Rusheed R. Wadia, “Colonial Trade and Parsi Entrepreneurs,” in Godrej and Mistree, eds., p. 454. 4 The Parsis had moved to Bombay in the seventeenth century and began their careers as brokers between the Portuguese and the Indians. The East India

Company was also benevolent towards the community who in turn became their political and commercial mediators in India. 5 Interview with Homai Vyarawalla. 6 See Radha Kumar, A History of Doing: An Illustrated

Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and

Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for

Women), 1993, p. 77. It must be clarified here that there were also a large number of Parsi women from well-known families who played an active role in the

Nationalist movement and who came out in the streets of Bombay in support of Gandhi’s Salt

Satyagraha and the Swadeshi movement. These included names like Perin D.S. Captain, the granddaughter of Dadabhai Naoroji who founded the

Rashtriya Stree Sabha, Khurshed Naoroji who was asked by Gandhi to work with Khan Abdul Ghafar

Khan, Mithoo Petit, Serene P. Jeejeebhoy, Dinbai F.S. Patuck and Mary Clubwalla Jadhav among others.

Hirabai A. Tata was a pioneer in the battle for the vote for Indian women and was the Honorary Secretary of the Indian Women’s Association, which later became the All IndiaWomen’s Conference. Mithan Jamshed

Lam helped draft the Hindu Code Bill. See Piloo

Nanavutty, The Parsis (New Delhi: National Book Trust of India, 1977). I am grateful to Tanika Sarkar and to

Shernaz Cama for drawing my attention to these sources. 7 See G. Thomas, History of Photography India 1840–1980 (Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh State

Akademi of Photography, 1981). Shambhu Shaha (1905–1988), was among these early Indian photographers who documented the streets of

Calcutta from the early thirties. 8 Homai recalls another photographer who did the same: M. Desai who also taught photography at the

J.J. School of Arts after Homia left the school in 1942. 9 Gyan Prakash, “Blitz’s Bombay,” in Seminar, No. 528 (August 2003). 10 See Ramachandra Guha’s work on cricket in pre-

Independence India. Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (London: Picador, 2002), p. 16, 305. Till 1947, most

Indian cricket was played on the lines of communities.

According to Guha the existence of community based cricket was a bizarre paradox: “a nakedly communal tournament that grew in and was nurtured by the most progressive and cosmopolitan city in modern

India.” There is no doubt that the British encouraged this sectarianism; “Communal cricket was molded as much by Hindu caste prejudice as by Parsi snobbery, by Muslim cultural insularity and by British racial superiority.” I am grateful to Shikha Jhingan for drawing my attention to Guha’s work. 11 Christopher Pinney points out how the census and early colonial photography were used to categorize and classify the new colony. Ordinary people were represented as photographic “types” in ethnographic projects such as the eight volumes of The People of

India, edited by Watson and Kaye, 1868–1875, commissioned by Lord Canning; and The Oriental

Races and Tribes, Residents and Visitors of Bombay,

2 vols. (London: 1863–66). See Christopher Pinney,

Camera Indica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 12 It was only after the Nazi attack on Russia and the success of the Japanese in South East Asia in 1941 that the British felt obliged to make some gestures to win over Indian public opinion. The Cripps mission was a result of this. See Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (New Delhi: Macmillan India Ltd., 1983), p. 385. 13 See Srirupa Roy, “Moving Pictures: The Postcolonial

State and Visual Representations of India,” in Beyond

Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in

Modern India, edited by Sumathi Ramaswamy (New

Delhi: Sage, 2003), p. 240. 14 See B.K. Karanjia, “Parsi Pioneers of the Press (1822–1915),” in Godrej and Mistree. 15 A phrase used to describe the Axis powers led by

Germany in one of the magazine spreads. 16 From Tariq Ali, The Nehrus and the Gandhis: An

Indian Dynasty (Great Britain: Picador, 1985), p. 71.

According to Ali he referred to them as, “You sons of bitches, sons of coolies, sons of bloody junglees (savages).” What was interesting about the mutiny was that like the I.N.A., there was total solidarity and absence of sectarian differences among the men.

They had elected a Naval Central Strike Committee headed by M.S. Khan and had political slogans demanding the release of I.N.A. detainees, equal pay for white and Indian sailors and the withdrawal of

Indian troops from Indonesia. The strike had tremendous public support with crowds bringing food for the ratings to the Gateway of India. Extremely worried about the consequences of the Mutiny, the

British pleaded with the Muslim League and the

Congress to quell the uprising. Jinnah made a communal speech urging the Muslim sailors to withdraw. However, it was Gandhi and Patel amongst others who finally persuaded them to surrender, much to the disappointment of C.P.I. leaders like Aruna Asaf

Ali. See Sarkar, pp. 423–425 and Ali, p. 71. 17 See Kumar, pp. 93, 94.