A Woman and Her Camera

The black-and-white days of India signify the days of struggle for independence and newness that was attempted by everyone post-independence. At a time when India was far away from the Kodak movement, a woman was capturing the world with the defying gaze of an expert. The camera in her hand was the key to freedom, freedom of expression, and art.

Twin sisters and amateur photographers Manobina and Debalina | Source: getbengal

Imagine a vivid scenario with just two objects in a camera drone, a woman in a sari, elegantly clutching a camera in her dainty bangles-clad hands as she tries to capture a vibrant action, forever within the time-freezed memory of the camera reels. Era and aeons are always remembered with a trend. The ‘swinging sixties’ in the West would always be associated with photographers and their outrageously flaming models loitering around a city, capturing the sophistication of both feminine and metropolitan beauty.

In India, however, the past centuries are earmarked with tensions of various kinds, at the bottom of it all would be found a single desire to attain independence. It was a time that men found themselves oppressed and ‘put down’, then one can imagine the virtually bleak scenario that Indian common women found themselves in. Yet, some women were privileged in terms of status and support from their male counterparts and hence managed to pursue careers or even unusual hobbies beyond the dismal walls of domesticity.

Manobina Roy wasn’t special in any context. Like any average traditional Indian woman, she was married off at the tender age of seventeen and became a mother at eighteen. Her ordinary day was spent doing and foreseeing the domestic chores of the middle-class Bengali family she belonged to. She was respected in society for being a chaste woman and was popular in her small yet ideal social circle. There was just one unusual thing though, that she owned a brownie camera, gifted by her father, and cradling the camera in her hands during most ideal hours, she used to capture photographs of whatever piqued her interest.

For the time when she existed, she was not a special Indian woman. She and her twin sister Debalina would sometimes join an Indian Photographer’s society, and the amateur photographers would admire each other’s work with great zeal, seeking an invitation to learn and improve. Manobina and Debalina were gifted the brownie cameras by their father who admired the perspective of his young daughters, encouraging them to find a new and interesting hobby apart from the tedious and stereotypical chores confined to Indian women. Little did Benode Behari know that by thrusting little brownie cameras into the hands of his daughters, he created a discourse and started a movement.

Though Manobina didn’t ever think about putting up an exhibition of her own along with her sister Debalina, their finesse as photographers had become quite popular in Bombay and even at the centre. The fact that Manobina was married to Bimal Roy, who worked in the entertainment industry, provided an informal window into Manobina’s works. Some of Manobina’s best works include portraits of her sister and fellow photographer Debalina. She captures the internal turmoil of a person through their eyes and body gestures so suavely that their mental state becomes imperative and crystal clear. Manobina captured many important faces such as Jawaharlal Nehru and the national poet Rabindranath Tagore. She introduced the eerily personal yet evocative concept of portrait vision in Indian photography.

In the year 2019, long past when Manobina is no more, her legacy as a photographer was cherished by her four children, who decided to put up an exhibition in memory of their extraordinary mother, showcasing the rare talents of a domestic middle-class woman with a unique skill of capturing the world from her intricate perspective. The exhibition was titled ‘A Woman and Her Camera’, words which had greater undertones of vision and character that Manobina’s photographs depict, as she captured India of hard times, India when women found different ways to defy and subserve the visible dogmas of stringent society.