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.
Water Carrier
The Pakistani poet Daud Kamal (1935-1987) has a poem entitled Water-Carrier:
More patches on his clothes
than on the empty goatskin
slung across his shoulder.
Like the others
he waits his turn
at the Municipal tap.
Twice a day
he delivers water
free
Fisherman, Ceylon
John & Co., Ceylon was an early 20th‑century commercial postcard and view‑card publisher based in Colombo (and very likely also Kandy), part of the broader trade in photographic and printed views of colonial Ceylon.
Street Sweeper
Clifton & Co. published many studio-posed, ethnographic type postcards like this one, made from an albumen print with the firm's title and name inscribed in the negative and visible at the bottom of the frame on this court-sized card.
Manure Dryers, India
[Verso, in pencil] "You think your job is bad?" [end]
The Water Carrier (Bhistee)
Bhistees supplied water to households and regiments
In the past, water carriers used cured hides of animals to carry water. Today animal hides have been replaced by bottles and jars of plastic.
Toddy Drawers
The process begins with collecting sap from coconut or palm flowers as these men are doing. Fresh sap, known as 'Neera,' is initially sweet, lukewarm, and non-alcoholic and collected in small pots attached beneath sliced unopened palm flowers.
Indian Topics Cotton Weaving
J.D. Gondhalekar (1909-1981) produced a series of at least ten postcards called "Indian Topics" around 1942, among the few Indian-artist signed postcard series from colonial times.
