Types of India. A Chat with a Friend
[Original caption] A Chat with a Friend. This picture gives good opportunity to study the Indian dress.
Men
A Lazy Father
A humourous postcard showing a sleeping father, who is supposed to be pulling the punkah [fan] string to cool the off-framed European, but instead has delegated the task to his son. The punkahwallah not doing his duty was a common postcard theme.
Playing the Game in India
A humourous card from Moorli Dhur & Sons referring to gambling, a habit which many British soldiers in particular – at least from the postcard evidence – seem to have indulged in. The servant on the left is saying "Mrs.
Darjeeling. Dandy and Bearers.
Darjeeling owes its name to a blend of the Tibetan words namely "Dorje" (thunderbolt) and "ling" (place), that translates to "The land of the thunderbolt."
[Original caption] Dandy and Bearers, Darjeeling.
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.
Down in the Mouth
A faux pre-written postcard which gives some sense of the life at least as experienced by British soldiers in cantonments, even while holding ale in one hand and a pipe in the other: "Dear _____, I am feeling "down in the mouth." India does not agree
Bearer
Although Hobson Jobson (1903, p. 77) defines Bearer as, besides a palanquin carrier, also as "b. (In the Bengal Presidency) a domestic servant who has charge of his master's clothes, household furniture, and (often) of his ready money.
Smoking Hookah
A distinctly colored postcard, with the pinkish mud offsetting the green grass and white garb of the smoker. Note the little boy and half-hidden woman watching from the hut.
A young Hindu married couple.
This card was made primarily for domestic audiences as the Hindi title, and secondary English title cleverly tucked into a corner vertically suggest. Note how the remnants of another postcard from a skewed cut is visible at the top.
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.
