Telegraph Office - Calcutta
It is hard to overestimate the importance of the telegraph, introduced in 1840 to the Raj, as this grand edifice dedicated to the new medium and constructed in the 1870s suggests.
Buildings
Frere Hall, Karachi
A fine example of the performative act that sending a postcard was when they first became popular. The nicely positioned and cancelled stamp, the sender's signature, "Doux Baisers" ("Sweet Kisses"), sent to his wife in France.
Bombay - Great Western Hotel
A storied building, still standing, which was everything from a Governor's residence to Admiralty House and the first High Court of Bombay.
Soldiers' Married Quarters, Peshawar
Note how this advertisement for family life in the cantonment shows a woman and pram on the verandah.
The Raja Bazaar (Main Street) of Rawalpindi City
A rich bazaar view by a little known publisher once based in Peshawar whose wide variety of postcards of Punjab and NWFP is possibly unrivaled in the region during the early 20th century. Moorli Dhur & Sons of Amballa, and H.A.
The Muzzim, Call to Prayer
Although not signed, this may have been from a painting or drawing by Evelyn Stuart Hardy (1865?-1935) who illustrated a number of other "Child Life" series postcards for A. B. Shaw, a London printer and publisher.
Capitol Theatre Peshawar
A rare night time photograph of an old cinema in the Saddar Bazaar area of Peshawar, said to have been founded around 1913 and demolished in 2020.
The Gymkhana, Poona
A slightly mysterious postcard of a gymkhana, a facility invented by colonial residents as a place to play sports starting the 1860s, and slowly planted across cities and cantonments across the subcontinent.
Calcutta (A Monsoon Sunset)
Another painted postcard by the Anglo-Indian artist Frank Clinger Scallan (1870-1950) whose Kolkata series of nearly a dozen postcards reflects the pleasures of life in what was British India's largest metropolis.
Bombay War Hospitals
A postcard depicting hospitals in Mumbai used to treat some of the Indian troops who fought in World War I as part of the British Army.
