Bombay Mumbai

The fifth card in Dhurandhar's series about a new pretty maid who comes into a middle-class household. [Next]

When the bubonic plague struck Bombay in the 1890s, postcards were used, in part, by the business community to communicate that all was okay, and that patients were being well taken care of in facilities like this one with clean interiors and an…

Inside a studio, the barefoot milkmaid seems caught out of place.

Unlike many photographic postcards that emphasized the crowded nature of Bombay bazaars at the turn of the century, Gerhardt opens up the foreground in this painted depiction to create a more spacious and effect.

Initialed "MD" in the right corner, Dhurandhar deftly captures early Bombay life. The labourer on the cart nearly falls backwards as he pulls the box up. A pretty tree separates the bullocks from the cart.

The growth of a city like Bombay was largely dependent on the work of laborers who carried bricks and building materials on wicker baskets on construction sites, much like they do today, which must be part of the reason why they were such common…

The original black and white postcard predating the color version.

A truly multi-purpose postcard by Paul Gerhardt. The sender could fill in the blank, a nod to the fact that elite customers—Christian, Parsee, Hindu, Muslim—all had their own words to add after “Happy”: Diwali, Eid, Christmas, Navroze, indeed…

An early lithographic card by the elusive Bombay lithographer and publisher W. Cooper. Like some of this other cards, it seems to have originated in a photograph also published as a postcard by The Phototype Co. Note hos easy it was to slip out the…

The photographic original of one-half of the lithograph A Fair Exchange by W. Cooper. That postcard seems to have been made a few years previously (it is court-sized).