Photo Moments

KG Maheshwari
KG Maheshwari would have been a singer,if only he’d held the notes better. A music teacher rejected his audition outright and the 15-year-old was left with only one option for a hobby — photography. Weeks of pocket money was saved to purchase a Norton box camera that cost Rs 2.14 at the time. Soon,the youngster was shooting everything that struck his imagination. The owner of a local photo studio that developed his negatives was impressed. “One day,he told me to send my pictures for a beginners’ competition,” says Maheshwari,87. He submitted a picture he’d taken of his younger brother,and won the bronze.
There was no turning back — Maheshwari started sending entries worldwide,winning over 400 awards. In 1946,he was made an Associate of Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and was later conferred the Honorary Life Membership by the Photographic Society of India. “I grew up reading columns on photography in The Illustrated Weekly. That is where my lessons came from,” he says. Life came full circle with The Illustrated Weekly published a photograph he had taken of Mahatma Gandhi in Birla House.
Photography,however,was a hobby that Maheshwari balanced with business,but every year when he visited Mussoorie on a family holiday,he’d photograph the hills and its Tibetan inhabitants.
His camera is still by his side and his recent shoots have been of his young granddaughters.

Benu Sen
He constructed his first camera in 1954 from scrap bought at Kolkata’s junkyards. “I had accompanied a friend to an Independence Day celebration and,when I asked him for his camera,he refused. That made me determined to build a camera of my own,” says Benu Sen,79. Ever since he made that first box camera,Sen has been capturing the world around him. His protagonists are the people he encounters — family and friends,and his photograph of a mother holding a child has won prizes across the world.
A ground engineer before he discovered photography,Sen left his job with an airline and,in 1957,he established the Photographic Association of Dumdum with friends to discuss and teach photography. Later,he was part of the photo department at the Indian Museum in Kolkata. “I treat a photo as a canvas,” says Sen.

Homai Vyarawalla
“Not many know that Jawaharlal Nehru used to smoke,” says Homai Vyarawalla,India’s first woman photojournalist. She thinks back — The BOAC Boeing was on its inaugural flight to London from New Delhi,and Nehru,having lit a cigarette for himself,was lighting one for the wife of the then British High Commissioner to India. Sitting across him,Vyarawalla captured that moment on her camera,little expecting the fame it has gathered down the decades.
Now a 97-year-old who hasn’t touched the camera for more than three decades,Vyarawalla is in the midst of preparing for an exhibition of her works at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi. She began her career in 1938,when she photographed members of the Women’s Club of JJ School of Art,Mumbai,at a picnic. Vyarawalla would be paid one rupee for every photograph published in The Bombay Chronicle.
Soon she began receiving assignments from The Illustrated Weekly of India and in 1942,moved to Delhi with her husband. The couple shared a Rolleiflex camera for several years and worked with the British Information Services.
Vyarawalla went on to photograph several important events—the swearing in of Lord Mountbatten as the first Governor General of independent India,Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death,and the Dalai Lama’s first visit to India in 1956,among others — as well as personalities — Ho Chi Minh,Queen Elizabeth,Jackie Kennedy and General Ayub Khan. Nehru,however,dominated her portfolio. Apart from shots of him embracing his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit,there are images of his dead body lying in state at the Teen Murti Bhavan as daughter Indira Gandhi looks on. “He was so handsome and dignified that the photographs had to be good,” says Vyarawalla,who currently lives in Vadodra. She decided to keep aside the camera in 1970. “My husband died in 1969. Also,photographers started getting a bad name because of some gate-crashing incidents,” she says.