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.
Labor
Coolie with his Basket
A postcard by the great Indian painter M.V. Dhurandhar illustrating an Englishwoman looking over a coolie offering his services with an empty basket. Note the cleverly positioned Indian woman with a basket on her head in the background.
The message
A Cobbler
An early postcard that blends photography, the collotype printing process and colorization to produce what the Germans called a "Lichtdruck" or "light print" that resembles a painting.
A Water Carrier, Madras
Today goatskins, pigskins and earthen pitchers have given way to plastic jars and bottles and huge, lumbering dripping water tankers that supplement inadequate piped water supplies in towns and cities throughout South Asia.
Best Christmas Wishes 1908
A 101 years later, a look at a Christmas card from a major Calcutta retailer.
Sind Water Carriers
A rather rare postcard of Sindhi female water carriers, even if it was posed in a studio, and, on the back addressed from Kirkee cantonment near Poona on May 2, 1917: "I see the women go through camp every day carrying these pots, some are
Ceylon Tea Packers
[Original caption] The amount of tea exported from Ceylon annually exceeds 150,000,000 lbs., and about 400,000 coolies from Southern India are employed in the tea gardens.
Shoe Maker
This is a hand-painted postcard from around 1905, rather rare in India compared to, say, China where at the time numerous hand-painted postcards were being sent abroad.
Hindoo Ayahs
An early court-sized card made from an albumen photograph with the studio inscribed in the glass negative at the bottom.
Hobson-Jobson defines "AYAH, s. A native lady's-maid or nurse-maid.
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
