Travels of the humble postcard

BN Goswamy

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But, there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. — John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque, between those which please the eye in their natural state; and those which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated in painting. — William Gilpin, in Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty, 1768

It is with these crisp words, and thoughts, that Sangeeta and Ratnesh Mathur open their book, Picturesque India: A Journey in Early Picture Postcards (1896-1947). Picture postcards are not the only thing that interest this collector-couple though, for they are into other things too — old Indian comic books, for instance, maps, stamps, travel posters. But here, in this book, they stay completely ‘true and honest’ to what the title promises, and speak only of picture postcards. 

Slowly, at a very deliberate pace, they take the reader through a journey, not their own, but that of the object: how it all began, what turns and wrinkles developed along the way, what was the ‘golden era’, so to speak, of picture postcards, how it kept changing over the decades. We travel back with them to the 1860s, learn of the introduction in 1869 of the ‘Correspondence Card’, first ‘invented’ in Austria-Hungary — simple postcard for sending messages, not pictures; learn through them of how quickly the idea caught on in other European countries, and of course in England from where it came — almost naturally —  to India, even though it was not without the initial resistance from the Indian Postal Department itself. However, by 1879, all impediments had been cleared, all reservations put to sleep: the correspondence card was formally here in India. For the price of one paisa, which was one-fourth of an anna (sixteen annas made a rupee, if one recalls), a card could be delivered ‘anywhere across the vast geography of British India’. Some might remember the days when, in school textbooks, in the obligatory, unashamedly colonial chapter on Angrezi Raj ki Barkatein — literally, ‘The Great Blessings of the British Rule’ — this blessing figured with prominence. By 1883, as a matter of record, the Post Office ‘had recorded an annual sale of 26 million postcards within the country’. 

But changes were in the offing then. For this was also the time when photography had not only arrived in India, but had caught peoples’ imagination; had started becoming a factor in their lives in some manner. Quickly, very quickly, the sharpest among photographers then active in India, or coming from outside, jumped into the field and thus was born the picture postcard: a moderately priced product that had the capability of conveying images across long distances. The ‘function’ that at least a certain, if not major, part of ‘Company painting’ had been performing for years —recording castes and professions, trades and callings, types of people, a vast range of events and sights — could be taken over by picture postcards now. Lithographed postcards, featuring ‘Greetings from India’, started being produced in Austria, Germany, England and Luxemburg, during the 1870s and 1880s. Civil servants and tourists, Europeans and elite Indians were happy, as the authors note, sending ‘these pictures in large numbers to family and friends abroad’.

It is from this welter of events and developments that the book extracts a pattern for presenting the vast collection of picture postcards that belong to the Mathurs: take ‘travel guides and rail and road routes’ as a thread and curate a sequence ‘to showcase the visual experience of a traveller of that time’. The focus shifts from human beings and experiences to topographical views for the most part: towns and monuments are what we see in section after section of the book, from North-west Provinces and Panjab to Hyderabad, Mysore and Madras. The method has some merits, but one also gets the feeling that in following it much has been lost. However much these views might ‘fuel our imagination of a borderless world from the days of yore’, the texture of life wears a bit thin.

One gets to see and read an enormous amount, though. And one learns. I found, for instance, the section at the end, titled Picture Postcard Photographers, Printers and Publishers, remarkably rich and well-researched. Over something like forty pages, the authors speak of the vast range of photographers and publishers whose names come up in these postcards. Some of them one knew, of course, for they occur in other contexts also, but a whole host of others from obscure locations whom one had never heard of. There are the big names: De La Rue, Bourne & Shepherd, Johnston & Hoffmann, Mahatta & Co, Wiele & Klein, Ravi Verma Lithographic Press, for instance; but also in these pages one finds Jadu Kissen of Delhi, Ahmed Kasim of Poona, Dinshaw Hazary of Ootacamund, and Moorli Dhur & Sons of Ambala. 

At the end — since one writes from the Chandigarh of today — I found three or four picture postcards intriguing, for they bear the date 1911 and are marked “Chandigarh”. I had always thought that Chandigarh, even as a name, belonged to the post-Partition days of Le Corbusier, and the name closest to it from earlier times was ‘Chandi Mandir’. Of course, I was wrong. Apparently, early on, there used to be a small railway station, in these very surroundings, which bore the name “Chandigarh”. It is no longer there, of course.