Google doodle honoured India's "First Lady of the lens" in 2017 with a tapestry of Indian life and history drawn by guest doodler Sameer Kulavoor.

[10] Dossabhai and Soonabhai Hathiram, Homai's parents, were not well educated themselves but were focused on her studying English and enrolled her at Tardeo's Grant Road High School.

Homai frequently moved houses and travelled long miles to school due to her family's low financial situation.

Homai, like all other females in her village, had to endure great stigma during her menstrual periods, living in seclusion for the duration of them, preventing her from attending school.

At the onset of World War II, she started working on assignments for Mumbai-based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which published many of her most admired black-and-white images.

[15] Vyarawalla stated that because women were not taken seriously as journalists she was able to take high-quality, revealing photographs of her subjects without interference:[16]People were rather orthodox.

It was only when the pictures got published that people realized how seriously I was working for the place.Eventually her photography received notice at the national level, particularly after moving to Delhi in 1942 to join the British Information Services.

These inspirations may be seen in her early paintings of common urban life and modern young women in Mumbai, but because Vyarawalla was unknown and a woman, these were first published in the Illustrated Weekly and Bombay Chronicle under Maneckshaw's name.

In 1956, she photographed for Life Magazine the 14th Dalai Lama when he entered Sikkim in India for the first time via the Nathu La.

The reasons behind her choice of this name were that her birth year was 1913, she met her husband at the age of 13 and her first car's number plate read "DLD 13.″[13]

In 1970, shortly after her husband's death, Homai Vyarawalla decided to give up photography, lamenting "bad behaviour" of the new generation of photographers.

It showcased her photographs from the 1930s to 1970, alongside a biographical film on her extraordinary life and ephemera from her career including her cameras, personal correspondence and press passes.