A Mountebank
A curious case of an Italian word finding itself stamped upon a postcard of a characteristic type in India (the fakir, in this case a mendacious one). Mountebank is an old word for a charlatan, or salesman of quack medicines.
Undivided back
Hajee Ismail Saits New Sawmill, Kolar Gold Fields
A postcard that celebrates the arrival of a new machine at the Kolar gold fields, 160 miles west of Madras (Chennai). The mill was already described as being powered by electricity in 1902. This postcard by Wiele & Klein in Madras shows how the
Mohamedan Marriage
Some of the most beautiful and rarest early postcards of India are hand-painted, often with penciled titles and the simply printed word "post card" on the back.
Ganges Pagoda
[Original] Souvenir East Indies Pagode des Ganges [end]
Among the earliest postcard series of India, with postally used samples dating back to 1897, according to Ratnesh Mathur, co-author of Picturesque India. Interestingly this is a crude halftone
Bombay Native Bazaar
Bourne & Shepherd are said to have begun their photographic activities in 1840, a year after the invention of photography (see Macmillan, Seaports of India and Ceylon, 1928, p.
Bombay
A magnificent early lithographic postcard of Bombay, show Marine Drive before the Art Deco buildings became a dominant feature in the 1930s.
Maner Bihar
This unusual, sepia-ish lithographic postcard is probably by Paul Gerhardt at the Ravi Varma Press even though it is not signed by him with the Press imprint.
Calcutta
Nautch dancers inspired stories like Hassan Shah’s The Nautch Girl, “the first known modern Indian novel” in the 1790s, as well as the first Urdu novel, the story of the Lucknow courtesan Umrao Jaan Ada in 1899.
A version of this card was sent by
Greetings from South India
One of the earliest roughly dateable postcards of India, made by a German firm that soon seems to have vanished from history. It probably dates to 1896, when a similar card of Haiti was made (see Haiti's First Postcard by Peter. C. Jeannopoulus in
The Deccan Postal Service
[Original French] La Poste Au Deccan. [end]
Kunzli Freres was a Swiss company known for high-quality lithographic printing, and this was part of a series of postcards celebrating the way mail was delivered around the world.
