Search engine giant Google paid homage to India’s first woman photojournalist, Homai Vyarawalla (pictured alongside), on December 9, 2017 with a doodle (pictured below) on her 104th birth anniversary. A Google Doodle is a special, temporary
alteration of the logo on Google’s home page that commemorates holidays, events, achievements and people. At the launch of a book on her work by biographer Sabina Gadhioke, Vyarawalla had told the audience that "it took me 30 years to realize they (her photographs) had value (and that too) because they told me” (see "A pictorial odyssey,” Parsiana, April 21, 2006). Her work was commemorated in a retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi in August 2010 and in Bombay in February 2011.
Navsari-born Vyarawalla, an alumna of Bombay University and the Sir J. J. School of Art started her career in the 1930s. With the onset of World War II, she started working on assignments for The Illustrated Weekly of India which published many of her black and white images that later became iconic. She was a photographer at a time when the idea of women working was yet to get traction in society, noted The Economic Times on December 9, in its article on Vyarawalla’s doodle.
Known for her photographs of many political and national leaders in the period leading up to independence, including Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and of the Nehru-Gandhi family, the Padma Vibhushan winner gave up photography in 1970 after the death of her husband Maneckshaw.
Other community members to have been honored with a Google Doodle in the past include the country’s first woman advocate Cornelia Sorabji on her 151st birthday in November 2017, and musician Freddy (Farrokh Bulsara) Mercury in September 2011 on what would have been his 65th birthday. Navroze was commemorated with a doodle in March 2017. Other Indians to be celebrated recently with a doodle include Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib, playback singer Mohammad Rafi, danseuse Sitara Devi and film maker V. Shantaram.
