Cotton Cart
Cotton was the product that helped put 19th century Mumbai on the road to becoming one of the world's major cities. The product was celebrated on postcards like this virtual painting.
Labor
A Cobbler
Itinerant workers, cobblers can repair all sorts of things. Note the sophisticated lithographic printing of this image, which some early Clifton & Co.
Sampling and Weighing Cotton
Mumbai grew from the 1860s through the 1890s largely because of the international cotton trade, which went from exporting cotton to textile manufacturing mills dotting the city.
Armee Indio-Anglaise - Cordonnier Indien [Indian Shoemaker]
![Armee Indio-Anglaise - Cordonnier Indien [Indian Shoemaker]](https://www.paperjewels.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/slides/armee-indio-anglaise-cordonnier-indien.jpg?itok=Ghc3gIlV "Armee Indio-Anglaise - Cordonnier Indien [Indian Shoemaker]")
A striking portrait of an Indian shoemaker in France during World War I, who would have accompanied the 130,000 or so Indian troops who fought on the Western front during the first two years of the war.
The Jute Industry-stripping the fibre from the cane after steeping.
"Another sign of the transition from the wet to the dry season was to be seen in the immense number of jute-stem stacks standing on every field and lawn," wrote Nirad Chaudhry in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. "After the bark which yields
Water Bullock
Bullocks that ferried water were called "water bullocks." This colored image by Clifton & Company, one of the earliest mass publishers of postcards in Mumbai (Bombay) was fairly popular, perhaps because of its rich colors.
Cooly Woman, Darjeeling.
Although taken in the firm's studio, with the woman posing upright, one can from this portrait and the wooden beam infer the literally backbreaking work hillstation workers endured.
Water Bullock
A nice representation of water being extracted and transported by human and animal labor throughout a village.
Cocoa Palmleaf Plaiters, Malabar
Early postcards from the Malabar coast seem to be relatively rare. In the message below, "Dusk" seems to be a dog.
[Verso] "6-5-20. Aren't they smartly pretty? I expect Dusk would like to bite this calf don't you?
Packetting Tea, Colombo
A nice representation of a small portion of the human labor – a dozen people here – that went into the preparation and production of a commodity like tea.
