Hindoo Ayahs
An early court-sized card made from an albumen photograph with the studio inscribed in the glass negative at the bottom.
Hobson-Jobson defines "AYAH, s. A native lady's-maid or nurse-maid.
Women
A Group of Ayahs
A very evocative studio portrait of three – instead of the usual single - ayah which, intentionally or not, hints at something of the pathos of their work.
A Belle of Northern India
[Original caption] A Belle of Northern India. The women of Delhi and district are, to Western eyes, rather more pleasing than those of many other parts of India.
Kashmir Nautch Girl
A postcard that shows off the great detail achievable in the collotype printing process.
The Harvest
One of those postcards which remind you what an exceptional artist M.V. Dhurandhar was. In the midst of a harvest, with giant sheaves of the crop as if pulled apart like curtains, stands a woman in red with sickle in hand.
Thibetan [Tibetan] Woman, Darjeeling
![Thibetan [Tibetan] Woman, Darjeeling](https://www.paperjewels.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/slides/darjeeling-woman_0.jpg?itok=zqS4goau "Thibetan [Tibetan] Woman, Darjeeling")
Clare Harris in her book Photography and Tibet (Reaktion Books, 2016) writes of this postcard, "a portrait of a young woman that features prominently in The Buddhism of Tibet as a generic illustration of Tibetan femininity implies that she'd been
A Nair Lady, Malabar
Early postcards from the Malabar Coast are uncommon.
The Ayah
This postcard shows a nanny with a pram on the “Queen’s necklace” of Malabar beach in Bombay. The artist Dhurandhar and other fellow J.J.
Dancing Girls. Jaipur.
A postcard like this was the result of a careful and perhaps exhausting pose by the dancers. Note the man holding up the backdrop, which probably covered a studio wall or other scene.
A Trysting Place
An extremely rare early postcard by an little-known lithographer, W. Cooper, in Bombay. It looks to crude to have been made at The Ravi Varma Press. Cooper seemed to prefer risque images.
