What’s common to these iconic Indian photos? | #165
Also, Barbie? Rajesh Roshan?! 🤔
Hello friends,
The most famous photograph of Mahatma Gandhi - seated beside a Charaka and reading a book, was captured by Margaret Bourke-White, a pioneering American journalist who also managed to photograph Soviet Union’s 5 year plans, the partition of India and the Korean War.
This got us thinking about women photojournalists from India. This week’s newsletter is dedicated to these pioneers
Things we learnt this week 🤓
India’s first woman photojournalist was Homai Vyarawalla. When she started her career in the 1930’s, her photographs were credited to her husband, who was also a photographer at the Times of India. In 1942, she moved to Delhi and captured not only the rites of Independence but also the construction of dams and steel plants, along with the momentous state visits of iconic figures from 20th-century history. Her subjects included Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ho Chi Minh, Marshall Tito, and Russian leaders Brezhnev and Khruschev. Among her most famous photographs is the entry of the Dalai Lama into India through the Nathu La pass. The film Qala gives a nice tribute by having the character of Huma, based on Vyarawalla.
There is a joke that all Indian engineers become stand-up comics and photographers. Only Anushree Fadnavis was good at photography. Inspired by her father, who constantly took photographs of her and her sister, Anushree decided to take up photography as a hobby and ended up at Reuters as a photojournalist. Her moment of fame was in 2020 when she won the Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News Category. Her photo shows how pro-democracy protestors had disrupted the metro service and how people were wading through the obstacles to reach the airport. She had the perfect exposure.
Anushree Fadnavis’ award winning photo
India had its best Olympics in Tokyo in 2021. Among the limited journalist community that were allowed to be present at the games, Gitika Talukdar was the only photojournalist from North East India. Born in Arunachal Pradesh and having grown up in all parts of India, thanks to her father’s transferable job, Gitika loved sports and became a sports photojournalist. She has been at numerous sports events all over the world including the FIFA world cups of 2018 and 2022. This famous pic of Neeraj Chopra proudly displaying his gold medal was clicked by Gitika.
From IWTK, with love 💌
This is a song from the Akshaye Khanna starrer Laawaris. Tell us where you have heard this song before?
A fantastic story of how Madan Mohan Malviya tricked the richest man in the world, the Nizam of Hyderabad into funding Banaras Hindu University. Or did he?
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