A postcard from India: How a colonial worldview travelled the Empire and beyond

By the early 1900s, there have been many India-based publishers of postcards. Clifton & Co. in Bombay was one of many first corporations to publish a sequence of all-India views. Others had been Higginbotham & Co. (Madras and Bangalore) and Thomas Paar (Darjeeling). Between 1900 and 1905, Clifton’s archaeologically themed postcards of temples, mosques and varied ruins amounted to about 20 per cent of the agency’s repertoire.

Postcards moved from the colony to the centre of the Empire. ‘England was among the many final to take up the story,’ wrote one observer. Postcards of India had been broadly offered by India-based publishers effectively earlier than these in Britain. Hartmann & Co. was the primary London-based writer to broadly promote India ‘View Playing cards’ in December 1902, in The Image Postcard and Collector’s Chronicle, a two-year outdated journal that charted the rising reputation of postcards as artwork and enterprise. Frederick Hartmann, a former indigo planter in India, was the person reputed to have pressured the British post-office to simply accept the ‘divided again’ postcard in 1902. Frequent on the continent, the format left your complete entrance out there for the picture and permitted a full message to be written on the again. Hartmann’s pioneering India sequence included numerous archaeological postcards, together with the Kutub Minar, Dewan Khan (Diwan-i Khas, Pink Fort) and Humayuon’s Tomb (all in Delhi), The Golden Temple, Amritsar and the Taj Mahal, Agra. E.W. Richardson, the founder-proprietor of The Image Postcard and Collector’s Chronicle, welcomed Hartmann’s India playing cards two months later. He famous that ‘among the finest features carried out by the Image Postcard is that of training the labouring lessons as much as a love of the gorgeous, and thus cooperating with all the opposite businesses for his or her uplifting.’ They had been ‘the primary artwork type for the unlettered particular person.’

The archaeological postcards allowed British clients to take part and flow into the bounties of their Empire. An anna or a penny purchased a fleeting sense of possession in one other place and time. No agency higher illustrated this framing of India’s previous and monuments than Raphael Tuck & Sons, who promoted themselves as ‘Artwork Publishers to Their Majesties the King & Queen, And T.R.H. [Their Royal Highnesses] The Prince & Princess of Wales’. Tuck was ‘arguably a very powerful publishing home within the historical past of image postcards.’ Tuck turned in all probability the single-largest writer of India-themed postcards, promoting a thousand or so titles between 1900 and 1915, the overwhelming majority of them ‘Oilettes’ (made to resemble oil work) of varied websites. They had been abundantly reprinted till the Forties. ‘Prospects had been inspired to see the image postcard as a fascinating object to be possessed,’ and the duvet envelope for the primary set of six Agra views of ‘veritable miniature Oil Work’, boasted these to be ‘already famed as essentially the most creative post-cards of essentially the most picturesque spots on this planet.’ A profitable advertising and marketing tactic was the internet hosting of annual collector competitions, wherein the winners, who had amassed 1000’s of various Tuck playing cards, had been awarded grand prizes. The 1902 winner, Mrs M. Eaton, for instance, collected 20,364 Tuck’s postcards; the 1903 winner, Miss Muriel Brown-Greaves, entered 25,439 playing cards; every received £100 for his or her efforts.

One wonders if postcards gave British girls a method to vicariously take part in an Empire that few of them may go to. A lot of the Tuck amassing competitors winners had been girls (the overwhelming majority ‘Miss’). Expectantly, the handle facet of the playing cards despatched from India to Europe all through the First World Warfare illustrate far bigger proportions of feminine receivers, some two-and-a-half to every male recipient.

The very first Tuck’s Agra sequence (which incorporates Exterior of Zenana, Agra) didn’t have textual content captions on the again. Subsequent printings, in all probability inside months, did. Few publishers (Joshi was an exception) invested in additional than a title on the image facet, for every run of the printing press and ink price extra (to not converse of the added price of writing the textual content). Descriptive textual content distinguished Tuck’s playing cards from the others. They seem by Could 1905, and E.W. Richardson said that ‘the precept right here launched is a wonderful one, however we can not so unreservedly commend the apply. The transient sentences, nonetheless, normally reach conveying some fascinating info regarding the photos.’

The texts convey colonial worldviews. For instance, the caption of Tuck’s The Taj Mahal, from the River, Agra reads: ‘It’s mentioned that Shah Jehan designed a bridge to attach this final resting place of his spouse with an identical Taj on the far facet of the river. Masons, jewelers, and workmen spent 17 years and 4 million sterling in amassing supplies for what nonetheless stays “The Marvel of the Earth”.’ A postcard from the early Oilette sequence of Delhi, Tomb of Nizam-ood-din, Delhi displaying the tomb of the nice Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya (1238-1325), claimed it because the ‘Tomb of the reputed founding father of Thuggism, who is meant to have murdered the Emperor Tughlak.’

One other, of Hooseinabad Gateway, Lucknow, emphasises that ‘the florid extra of stucco ornamentation is however one signal of the decay of Indian structure in trendy occasions,’ little acknowledging the French designs that impressed its building within the 1830s. Right here is an a priori Western assumption of the decay of Indian architectural traditions within the interval.

Tuck’s postcards of The Memorial Nicely at Cawnpur [Kanpur], the pictures of which circulated prolifically from the late-nineteenth century, bore prolonged descriptions concerning the repugnant mutineers. An instance is: ‘Over the arch of the Gothic wall surrounding the final resting place of the 125 girls slaughtered by the rebels and solid into the Nicely, are recorded the phrases “These are they which got here out of nice tribulation. Inside is the pure white marble statue of an angel, by Marionetti, with arms folded in resignation, every hand bearing a palm as an emblem of peace.’” Postcards re -circulated emotionally charged photos and stored alive the recollections of the Mutiny among the many British.

Visually enticing and vibrant, nearly all of Tuck’s Indian Oilettes had been truly printed color halftone variations of pictures. This technique of manufacture, utilizing tiny holes in metallic screens by which ink is sprayed on large presses, was inexpensive to provide than collotypes. Steel plates permitted bigger print runs; glass plates had been fragile and pale after just a few thousand copies had been struck. The human eye may fill in additional of a picture with the cautious spacing of halftones, say round 175 dots per inch, which saved prices, in comparison with the inkier collotypes. Halftones remained the most typical type of mass picture printing for good cause, though their rendition and constancy to pictures weren’t equal to the collotype, nor was the color high quality equal to lithography.

If postcards helped somewhat to broadly flow into ‘truths’ about India’s historic and complex Buddhist previous, additionally they performed a component in sharpening perceived divisions within the subcontinent between Hindu, Muslim, Jain and Christian communities and epochs. Histories and identities might be contested within the very titles of archaeological postcards, with publishers taking part in to present interpretations for advertising and marketing functions, or their very own beliefs, serving to to reify fraught identities. An instance is the Tuck’s Delhi postcard Colonnade, Hindoo Pillars, Kutub Minar with the caption: ‘The pillars, taken by the Mughal conquerors of India from a Hindoo temple, had been recut to free them from idols and used to type the colonnade to the mosque. A number of the Hindoo figures can nonetheless be seen.’ Such a postcard would contact a scar, by revisiting contentious histories.

There have been, nonetheless, variations. Clifton & Co. titled an identical view, Colonnade of Hindu Pillars, Delhi, whereas Jadu Kissen’s ‘Archaeological Picture -Works of India’ selected Hindu Colonnade of Pillars of Pure Hindu Structure Belonging to the ninth or tenth Century, Delhi. Town’s main postcard writer and competitor to Tuck’s, H.A. Mirza & Sons, opted to name the view Pirth[v]i Raj Temple, Delhi. Mirza was possible an observant Muslim, having photographed and revealed a few of the first postcards of Mecca in 1908. Publishers may select, and Mirza didn’t merely comply with the colonialist view.

Postcard captions stripped or created histories of monuments, fostered and entrenched colonialist and partisan historiography – or not. Postcards, by their circulation, disseminated skewered tales and prejudice to the plenty, or provided alternate conceptual sleeves for the photographs they confirmed.

Phrases helped sail a postcard by imaginary registers into the center of in style visible tradition. The caption of Tuck’s Exterior of Zenana, Agra (fig. 2.8) reads: ‘Right here white marble pavilions look out on delicate inlaid pillars and finely perforated display screen’s [sic] thence throughout the Jumna. Right here the women of Shah Jehan’s court docket as soon as dreamed of a world past the confines of a zenana.’ H.A. Mirza’s related view is entitled Summan Burj inside Fort Agra Constructed by Shahjahan in 1861 A.D. [sic].

There are delicate variations between the 2 postcards: the dreaming girls of the zenana had been in all probability added by the Oilette artist’s hand. The angle of the Tuck’s view is extra expansive, the crimson -dyed ornaments eye-catching. They transport the reader into the realm of fantasy and need. Tuck’s postcard aptly suits a definition of exoticism as ‘a selected mode of aesthetic notion – one which renders folks, objects and locations unusual even because it domesticates them.’ Mirza’s card, whereas additionally vibrant, leads the viewer’s eye into the photographic actuality behind the hand tints, whereas Tuck’s guides it in the direction of the fanciful brushstroke.

Over a 3rd of the primary units of Tuck’s India Oilettes in 1905 had been archaeological and historic views. Related ratios apply to the lots of of H.A. Mirza postcards of North India. Tuck’s playing cards would have been enticing to clients, interesting with their color. Nonetheless lovely the tinted color architectural playing cards of the corporations of Mirza, Jadu Kissen, and Macropolo (amongst others) had been, they didn’t evoke the wealthy mixed fantasy of a Tuck’s card and caption.

Most British individuals who touched these postcards had been conscious that these locations, although constructed by folks centuries in the past, had been now a part of their Empire. Tuck’s sequence had names like ‘Empire’, ‘Our Indian Troops’, ‘Well-known British Battles’, and ‘Start of Our Indian Empire’. Even earlier than the Oilette, one in all Tuck’s first India sequence – ‘The Attractive East’ – was based mostly on painted visions of the 1903 Delhi Durbar. ‘Image postcards staged the colonial house,’ and about a few of the first India playing cards Richardson declared that ‘we should confess to a further thrill of delight when fascinating playing cards attain us from some distant a part of the British Empire . . . essentially the most informal reader should see how potent could develop into these tiny missives in spreading a data of, and creating sympathy with, our fellow topics in distant Hindustan.’

How significantly better the expertise if the cardboard was personalised! If one may additionally personal and file it away in a field amongst many others, or share it with a buddy, signal it with XXX’s – ‘kisses’ – like an early Oilette of Jaipur: ‘I’ll write you an extended letter subsequent week and let you understand how I’ve been having fun with myself this Xmas. I’ll shut now wishing you a really Blissful New 12 months from yours at all times xx Sincerely xx G.E. Flanagan xxx.’

H.A. Mirza’s titles and captions appear to supply a much less Empire-stained worldview. They probably enable us to see the methods wherein Indians had begun to interrogate or dismiss the histories of India that had been being written by the British. Mirza’s postcards appealed to Indian audiences and lots of spotlight the Mughal architectural achievements. Views just like Tuck’s The Taj Mahal from the River (fig. 2.9; cat. no 132) have fun the ‘Great Constructing on this planet’. These of the Tombs of Sultan Nizamuddin Aulia and Jahanara Begum, Delhi make clear for the client, by the prolonged caption on the entrance, that Shah Jahan’s daughter was buried in a sunken grave subsequent to her favourite Sufi saint. Considerably, this postcard bears an English translation of the Arabic inscription on Jahanara’s tomb: ‘Let nothing however inexperienced grass cowl my tomb. For it’s the finest grave fabric of the poor in spirit. The standard and mortal Jahanara Begum (Believer of Chishty Household).’ The photographer appears to talk to the Indian clients however educate the European ones.

That is an excerpt from the essay by Omar Khan from the guide accompanying the eponymous DAG exhibition, Histories within the Making: Photographing Indian Monuments, 1855-1920, that’s now on view till October 12 at DAG, New Delhi.