India's first woman photojournalist at Fort Kochi's freedom jail?

Imagine this. It's 1947 Delhi. A woman in a sari is cycling through the capital with a nine-kilogram camera strapped to her back. Every other photographer at the press events is a man. Nobody takes her seriously.

That was her advantage.

Her name was Homai Vyarawalla — India's first woman photojournalist. She photographed the first flag hoisting at Red Fort, Mountbatten's last salute, and Gandhi's funeral. She shot Nehru, Jacqueline Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Dalai Lama. Her early photographs? Published under her husband's name, because editors didn't think a woman's byline would be taken seriously.

Most people have never heard of her.

Now her photographs are on display at the Kochi Biennale — and where they're hanging matters as much as what's in them.

The Jail of Freedom Struggle is a small compound behind the Fort Kochi police station that most Biennale visitors walk right past. Eight cramped cells, 50 square feet each, with concrete beds and cast iron doors. This is where freedom fighters like AK Gopalan and EMS Namboodiripad were locked up by the British.

Today, inside those cells: Homai's photographs of India's very first Republic Day parades — the brand-new nation performing itself for the first time. Photographs of freedom, displayed inside a prison built to crush it.

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