Prologue

“It was after fifty years of having taken these pictures that I started to see the value of my work. I was just earning a living at that time with no thought of preserving it for posterity. Once you had said I would be remembered for it. Remembered by whom? In a country where a great man like Gandhiji has been forgotten, why would I be remembered? I couldn’t care less. All I want today is for people, especially the young, to see what it was like to live in those days. It was a different kind of world altogether. I want people to get a glimpse of that.”

Homai Vyarawalla, March 2005

She was fifty-seven when she decided to quit. Nobody seemed interested in her photographs any longer. For twenty-three years, this treasure remained locked away in cupboards and boxes.

In the early eighties, during a move between cities, she packed all her best negatives into a box. The box was lost in transit and has never been found again. Thinking that there was no use for them, she burnt some of her other prints and negatives and threw away some of her movie footage. Meanwhile, she ran a home and grew a beautiful garden in far away Pilani.

One day, many years later, a Delhi-based photographer noticed the name of a woman among a long list of men in the Press Information Bureau records. He kept inquiring about her and by coincidence met her at a camera repair shop in Delhi. That was how Homai Vyarawalla was found again.