Clive Street, Calcutta
[Original caption] Clive Street, Calcutta.
[Original caption] Clive Street, Calcutta.
Sepia postcards were printed in a brown colour instead of black inks, and went in and out of fashion from the early 1900s through the 1940s.
The garden in front of the Victoria Memorial is sometimes still called Curzon Gardens.
Lord Curzon was the Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905. He constructed Victoria Memorial in memory of Queen Victoria, the British monarch who died in 1901 after
[Original caption] “Chowringhee, Calcutta. Chowringhee Road runs past the sumptuous edifice of the Bengal Club and the nest residential quarter of Calcutta to St. Paul’s Cathedral.
An early and rare early photo postcard, made with a photograph pasted on card stock.
An Indian Bungalow or single story house.
The word bungalow derives from the Gujarati word baṅglo and means "Bengali", used to communicate "house in the Bengal style". Such houses were traditionally small, thatched and had a wide veranda.
One of the earliest postcards of India, Calcutta, published by W. Rossler, a German or Austrian photographer in the city in 1897. Lithograph, Court sized, Printed in Austria. Undivided back.
There are many such postcard views, trying to celebrate in a humorous way, life for colonists during the British Raj.
Compare to the black and white version.
A striking studio portrait in which the viewer's eyes are drawn by to subject's wide-open gaze. Was he asked not to blink? Or did the photographer amend the negative?
Around the time this postcard was published, H. St.J. B. Philby, the father of the famous British spy Kim Philby (born in Ambala in 1912) and then serving in India, wrote in his memoir Arabian Days (Robert Hale, 1948):
"The Great Eastern Hotel of