Deceased--Homai Vyarawalla

Homai Vyarawalla
December 9th, 1913 to January 15th, 2012

Homai Vyarawalla
Rehana Mogul Posing For The Camera
Photographic print on archival paper
22" x 20"

"Farewell Homai Vyarawalla"

by

Sabeena Gadihoke

January 21st, 2012

The Hindu

Sabeena Gadihoke, close friend and biographer, remembers her 14-year journey with Mrs Vyarawalla.

Homai Vyarawalla turned 98 on December 9, 2011. For the first time in 14 years, I had taken the liberty to visit her without giving her prior notice. I wanted to give her a surprise on her birthday. I texted her as soon as I landed the previous night and promptly got a reply: “Just got your message. Most welcome. See you tomorrow. Love.” Two years ago, Homai had considered the possibility of learning email but decided that texting on the phone was a better option. It was a struggle as her fingers often missed the tiny buttons on her phone but she was determined. Soon she was texting people with occasional ‘misfires'. A friend was once puzzled to receive a cryptic message stating: “Please send pedas!” The message was for someone else.

When Homai Vyarawalla was given a pen, the same fingers magically transformed into those of a calligraphist. Her handwriting till the end was beautiful and our correspondence through letters stand testimony to her disappointment with mine. In 1997, she wrote: “The postman must be able to read the address without stress — he has many letters to deliver. Do try and make his work easier.” In 2005, she asked for 6 fine point ball pen refills — “I am always in trouble here as the stock they sell is unpredictable and my handwriting looks shabby.” In 2006, she actually returned a letter saying she couldn't understand what I had written! By now I began sending her typewritten letters but I preserved each one of her letters beautifully written on recycled paper, sent in re-used envelopes.

While much will hopefully be written in the coming years about Vyarawalla's professional contribution as a pioneering professional — she was India's first woman press photographer who captured the first three decades of a nation in transition — what stays with me are memories of an elderly Homai Vyarawalla who I met when she was 87. Her memory was razor sharp even though it needed a little jogging to set her recounting stories and anecdotes that spanned almost a century of Indian history. She was an untrained but skilled archivist. She meticulously preserved her beautiful monochrome prints and negatives in boxes and hand-made negative jackets stored in Tupperware cases. For years, she struggled to protect them from the humid climate of Vadodara and was palpably relieved when they were finally handed over to the Alkazi Foundation in Delhi on permanent loan.

Everything put to use

Nothing that came Homai's way was discarded easily. Everything was put to good use. Her simple and sparse home had pieces of driftwood that looked like sculpture. Her walking stick, polished with age, was carved out of a piece of wood while her nameplate was made from broken glass bangles. Many who knew her intimately wanted to photocopy her hand-written book of recipes and medical home remedies. She could also cut her own hair and tailor her own clothes. She once sawed an oversized baking tray, repaired my slippers and fixed the plumbing in her water tank. All this and more when she was well into her nineties!

She often said she was like Robinson Crusoe. Her island was her home in Vadodara where she lived independently till the end with her plants and a few personal photographs.

Time spent with Homai in Vadodara had a different quality. We always talked about photography but as the years went by and we became closer, our conversations about the grand events of history melted into smaller more intimate discussions about the everyday. Belonging as she did to a middle class Parsi family, Homai had to struggle for most of her life. She always said that had she not become a photographer, she would have joined any other profession that was available to her. Not working was never an option for her. Her father, an actor in a travelling Urdu-Parsi Theatre troupe had to borrow money to return to India when his company declared bankruptcy in Rangoon. He died soon after and Homai's mother augmented the family income by weaving the parsi kusti (sacred thread). Homai was the only girl in her class in the Gujarati school where she studied.

Thereafter, she received a diploma at St Xavier's College. She studied further at the JJ School of Arts in Bombay where she was introduced to many of the subjects of her early photographs, including the beautiful Rehana Mogul.

Captured official histories

Homai learnt photography from her boyfriend Maneckshaw who she later married. The two would walk the streets of Bombay in the 1930s and early 40s taking photographs. In 1942, they moved to Delhi and as employees of the British Information Services were plunged into the thick of nationalist politics. Homai photographed official histories as they unfolded but she also captured images of leisure as elite Indians and expatriates met at social functions at the gymkhana club in Delhi. She photographed marriage ceremonies, school functions, fancy dress parties and more.

Adventurous

Homai was an adventurous woman. Stranded in Sikkim, she hitched a ride back on an army truck after taking images of a young Dalai Lama crossing the border in 1959. Once she came tumbling down while trying to shoot Mohammad Ali Jinnah, bringing to a halt the proceedings of his last press conference the day before he left for Pakistan in 1947. Homai's fall brought a smile on Jinnah's face.

She had also photographed the meeting of the Congress Working Committee that ratified the decision to Partition the country. Acharya Kripalani, who was chairing the meeting, was not happy to have photographers around so Homai had to keep ducking behind the benches. Her desire to discover new frontiers made her travel to the U.S. and the U.K. at the age of 95 in 2008. When she saw the statue of Gandhi at Tavistock Park, her only comment was that he was not wearing spectacles!

Homai's last birthday brought a stream of visitors to her house. The Parsi Dharamshala sent us a delicious parsi meal and we went shopping for a new television set. In the evening, we cut a cake and, as it got dark, Homai held a lamp in her hand and pretended to cast a spell over us. The next day, I recorded an interview with her. She said this was the first time she had ever celebrated her birthday. Talking about the future she said: “My body may be wrecked and wasting away but my spirit is as young as when I was 40. It resides within this body like a tortoise. When the time comes to go, it will only be leaving this temporary home.” Her only regret was that she had started to fall sick and she hated that. In another interview, she said she would not mind coming back to the same kind of life once again, “because I like this life very much.” She was looking forward to going to New York for an exhibition of her work in a few months. What else would you wish for? I asked. Her reply was simple: “Good friends, peace and quiet and to be able to sit in the sun.”

As the evening ended, I realised to my shock and disappointment that I had accidentally erased the interview. I tried returning to the subject but that moment had passed. By now the sun had set and Homai looked tired. I returned home depressed that I had lost that interview till a friend suggested that perhaps certain moments are not meant to be recorded but treasured in our memories.

As a friend bids farewell to you for now Mrs. Vyarawalla, I wish you a happy birthday once again. I have been privileged to have known you and I hope that wherever you are, you have found peace and that quiet place to sit in the sun.

[Sabeena Gadihoke is Associate Professor at the AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia and author of India in Focus: Camera Chronicles of Homai Vyarawalla, Mapin/Parzor, 2006].

"Homai Vyarawalla, Pioneering Indian Photojournalist, Dies at 98"

by

Haresh Pandya

January 28th, 2012

New York Times

Homai Vyarawalla, a photojournalist celebrated in India for chronicling the country’s march toward independence and capturing enduring images of world figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh and American presidents of the mid-20th century, died on Jan. 15 in Vadodara, in west India. She was 98.

Hospital officials said she had been under their care for respiratory ailments when she died after falling from her bed and fracturing a thigh bone.

Ms. Vyarawalla was hailed as the first Indian woman to work as a photojournalist and remembered as a familiar sight on the streets of New Delhi, the capital, riding a bicycle to assignments, her sari flapping behind her, her bulging equipment bags slung across her shoulders.

To many Indians she was known as Dalda 13, a coinage derived from her license plate number, DLD-13.

In the 1950s, Ms. Vyarawalla photographed Zhou Enlai, China’s first prime minister under Mao Zedong, as well as the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and the Dalai Lama, just after he had escaped from Tibet. She recorded state visits by Queen Elizabeth II, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy and the first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy, often capturing them in lighter moments.

But it was her triumphant images of the country’s independence movement — of the departing Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, for example — that resonated most with Indians.

“Her images of Jawaharlal Nehru addressing a jubilant crowd in Delhi, and of the body of Mohandas K. Gandhi being prepared for cremation, give a vivid sense of the mood of a nation whose self-image was cast in a romantic epic mold,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in 1997 in a review of a show in Queens that featured Ms. Vyarawalla’s work.

“Much has happened since — sectarian violence, economic upheaval, the extended medical emergency of AIDS — to eat away at that initial tragedy-shadowed optimism,” Mr. Cotter wrote. “And the heightened, even exultant mood that runs through Ms. Vyarawalla’s pictures is nowhere to be found in the work of her younger colleagues.”

Ms. Vyarawalla called Nehru her “all-time favorite subject” and “extremely photogenic,” and when photographing him she would wait for an informal image to materialize — lighting a cigarette or releasing a pigeon. She was present at his funeral.

“When Nehru died,” she told the newspaper The Indian Express, “I felt like a child losing its favorite toy, and I cried, hiding my face from other photographers.”

Ms. Vyarawalla was born into a Parsi family on Dec. 9, 1913, in Navsari, a city in the western coastal state of Gujarat. Her father was an actor in a traveling theater company, and as a child she spent much time on the road with her family.

After the family settled in Bombay, now Mumbai, she learned photography from a friend and, at 13, began taking pictures of Bombay life. She earned an art school diploma and began working professionally as a photographer in her late teens. Her career took off after she married Manekshaw Vyarawalla, an accountant for The Times of India who also worked as a photographer for the newspaper.

In World War II, while working for the Far Eastern bureau of the British Information Services in New Delhi, Ms. Vyarawalla began accepting freelance assignments that gave her access to India’s political circles. Her photographs were published in Time, Life and The Illustrated Weekly of India, among other publications. In one series she recorded a day in the life of Indian firefighters during wartime.

Ms. Vyarawalla gave her collection of photographs to the New Delhi-based Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and last January received the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award.

Ms. Vyarawalla moved to Vadodara, then Baroda, in 1982 with her son, Farooq, her only child. A teacher, he died of cancer in 1989. Her husband died in 1970, the same year she gave up photography, abruptly packing up her cameras one day, disgusted by her peers.

“My colleagues had all been gentlemen,” she told India Today, “but the new crop did not know how to behave in high society. I did not want to be associated with such riffraff.”

Bhopal disaster--the $550 payoff

December 3rd, 1984 marked the day in Bhopal, India of mankind's worst industrial disaster and little has changed over the past 23 years except some perfunctory, minor monitoring and cleanup and a pittance [in some cases] of a $550 settlement. Union Carbide's quest for cheap labor and relaxed hazardous regulations yielded over 3,000 deaths and uncounted injured and an environment that reeks of dangerous products poisoning the land. Was the practice of social responsibility even considered from the beginning? Shame to an industry that profits from loss of life and environmental damage.

"Decades Later, Toxic Sludge Torments Bhopal"

by

Somini Sengupta

July 7th, 2008

The New York Times

Hundreds of tons of waste still languish inside a tin-roofed warehouse in a corner of the old grounds of the Union Carbide pesticide factory here, nearly a quarter-century after a poison gas leak killed thousands and turned this ancient city into a notorious symbol of industrial disaster.

The toxic remains have yet to be carted away. No one has examined to what extent, over more than two decades, they have seeped into the soil and water, except in desultory checks by a state environmental agency, which turned up pesticide residues in the neighborhood wells far exceeding permissible levels.

Nor has anyone bothered to address the concerns of those who have drunk that water and tended kitchen gardens on this soil and who now present a wide range of ailments, including cleft palates and mental retardation, among their children as evidence of a second generation of Bhopal victims, though it is impossible to say with any certainty what is the source of the afflictions.

Why it has taken so long to deal with the disaster is an epic tale of the ineffectiveness and seeming apathy of India’s bureaucracy and of the government’s failure to make the factory owners do anything about the mess they left. But the question of who will pay for the cleanup of the 11-acre site has assumed new urgency in a country that today is increasingly keen to attract foreign investment.

It was here that on Dec. 3, 1984, a tank inside the factory released 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas, killing those who inhaled it while they slept. At the time, it was called the world’s worst industrial accident. At least 3,000 people were killed immediately. Thousands more may have died later from the aftereffects, though the exact death toll remains unclear.

More than 500,000 people were declared to be affected by the gas and awarded compensation, an average of $550. Some victims say they have yet to receive any money. Efforts to extradite Warren M. Anderson, the chief executive of Union Carbide at the time, from the United States continue, though apparently with little energy behind them.

Advocates for those who live near the site continue to hound the company and their government. They chain themselves to the prime minister’s residence one day and dog shareholder meetings on another, refusing to let Bhopal become the tragedy that India forgot. They insist that Dow Chemical Company, which bought Union Carbide in 2001, also bought its liabilities and should pay for the cleanup.

"Had the toxic waste been cleaned up, the contaminated groundwater would not have happened," says Mira Shiva, a doctor who heads the Voluntary Health Association, one of many groups pressing for Dow to take responsibility for the cleanup. "Dow was the first crime. The second crime was government negligence."

Dow, based in Michigan, says it bears no responsibility to clean up a mess it did not make. "As there was never any ownership, there is no responsibility and no liability — for the Bhopal tragedy or its aftermath," Scot Wheeler, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Wheeler pointed out that the former factory property, along with the waste it contained, had been turned over to the Madhya Pradesh State government in June 1998, and that "for whatever reason most of us do not know or fully understand, the site remains unremediated."

He went on to say that Dow could not finance remediation efforts, even if it wanted to, because it could potentially open up the company to further liabilities.

In a letter to the Indian ambassador to the United States in 2006, the Dow chairman, Andrew N. Liveris, sought assurance from the government that it would not be held liable for the mess on the old factory site, "in your efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate."

The claims have divided the government itself. It is now in the throes of a debate over who will pay — a debate that might have taken place behind closed doors were it not for a series of public information requests by advocates for Bhopal residents that turned up revealing government correspondence.

It showed that one arm of the government, the Chemicals and Petrochemicals Ministry, entrusted with the cleanup of the site, has wanted Dow to put down a $25 million deposit toward the cost of remediation, while other senior officials warned that forcing Dow’s hand could endanger future investments in the country.

A senior government official, prohibited from speaking publicly on such a contentious issue, described the quandary. "Do you want $1 billion in investment, or do you want this sticky situation to continue?" the official said, calling it a stalemate.

The government is expected to make a final decision later this year.

Beyond who will pay for the cleanup here, the question is why 425 tons of hazardous waste — some local advocates allege there is a great deal more, buried in the factory grounds — remain here 24 years after the leak?

There are many answers. The company was allowed to dump the land on the government before it was cleaned up. Lawsuits by advocacy groups are still winding their way through the courts. And a network of often lethargic, seemingly apathetic government agencies do not always coordinate with one another.

The result is a wasteland in the city’s heart. The old factory grounds, frozen in time, are an overgrown 11-acre forest of corroded tanks and pipes buzzing with cicadas, where cattle graze and women forage for twigs to cook their evening meal.

Since the disaster, ill-considered decisions on the part of local residents have only compounded the problems and heightened their health risks. Just beyond the factory wall is a blue-black open pit. Once the repository of chemical sludge from the pesticide plant, it is now a pond where slum children and dogs dive on hot afternoons. Its banks are an open toilet. In the rainy season, it overflows through the slum's muddy alleys.

The slum rose up shortly after the gas leak. Poor people flocked here, seeking cheap land, and put up homes right up to the edge of the sludge pond. Once, the pond was sealed with concrete and plastic. But in the searing heat, the concrete cover eventually collapsed.

The first tests of groundwater began, inexplicably, 12 years after the gas leak. The state pollution control board turned up traces of pesticides, including endosulfan, lindane, trichlorobenzene and DDT. Soil sediments were not tested. The water was never compared with water in other city neighborhoods. The pollution board saw no cause for alarm.

Nevertheless, in 2004, complaints from residents led the Supreme Court to order the state to supply clean drinking water to the people living around the factory. By then, nearly 20 years had gone by.

"It is a scandal that the hazardous wastes left behind by Union Carbide unattended for 20 years have now migrated below ground and contaminated the groundwater below the factory and in its neighborhood," wrote Claude Alvares, a monitor for India's Supreme Court, who visited here in March 2005.

He tasted the water from one well. "I had to spit out everything," he wrote in his report. The water "had an appalling chemical taste." Neighborhood women brought out their utensils to show how the water had corroded them.

As his report went on to point out, the government was long ago made aware of the likelihood of contamination. A government research center warned more than 10 years ago that, if left untreated, the toxic residue on the factory grounds would seep into the soil and water.

Around the same time, under public pressure, state authorities finally scooped up the toxic waste that had lain in clumps around the factory grounds, and stored it inside the tin-roofed warehouse. The warehouse was padlocked only about four years ago.

The waste was supposed to be taken to an incinerator in neighboring Gujarat, but the government has yet to find a contractor willing to pack it into small, transportable parcels. There have been delays in acquiring transport permits, too, with citizens groups raising new questions about the hazards of transporting the waste.

Ajay Vishoni, the state gas and health minister, said he was confident that none of the waste was hazardous anymore, nor had anyone proved to his satisfaction that it had ever caused the contamination of the groundwater. "There is hype," he said.

In 2005, a state-financed study called for long-term epidemiological studies to determine the impact of contaminated drinking water, concluding that while the levels of toxic contaminants were not very high, water and soil contamination had caused an increase in respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments.

In the Shiv Nagar slum about half a mile from the factory, there is a boy, Akash, who was born with an empty socket for a left eye. Now 6, he cannot see properly or speak. He is a cheerful child who plays in the lanes near his house.

His father, Shobha Ram, a maker of sweets who bought land here many years after the gas leak and built himself a two-room house, said the boy’s afflictions were caused by the hand-pumped well from where his family drew water on the edge of the sludge pond for years. He said it had not occurred to him that the water could be laced with pesticides.

"We knew the gas incident took place," he said. "We never thought the contaminated water would come all the way to our house."

The stories repeat themselves in the nearby slums. In Blue Moon, Muskan, a 2-year-old girl, cannot walk, speak or understand what is happening around her. Her father, Anwar, blames the water.

In Arif Nagar, Nawab and Hassan Mian, brothers who are 8 and 12, move through their house like newly hatched birds, barely able to stand. They have no control over their muscles. Their mother, Fareeda Bi, is unsure of exactly what caused their ailment, but she, too, blames the water.

"There are more children like this in the neighborhood," she said, "who cannot walk, who cannot see."

To compound the tragedy, there is no way to know to what extent the water is to blame. The government suspended long-term public health studies many years ago.