The great Hindi/Urdu writer Munshi Premchand describes, from the point-of-view of Suman, the heroine of his first novel Sevasadan, the complex view she has of Bholi, a courtesan living across the street from her:
A skillfully done studio shot with real depth of field provided by the seating arrangement and sparse use of green, pink and white with a dash of glitter.
[Verso] Postmarked Mount Road, Madras, 17 Sep. 1903 at 11:30 a.m. and addressed to Miss Olive McMillan, St. Augustine's, Cliftonville, Margate, England.
A unusual real photo postcard that is both hand colored and has glitter finely applied to the hems of the woman's dress. She is resting her arm on a magnificent pedestal that suggests a north Indian studio, possibly in Lucknow.
While this postcard published in Jaipur may have had nothing directly to do with the Swadeshi movement then taking off in Bengal, the charkha was am emblem of that cause for self-sufficiency and using indigenous materials and processes instead of…
One of the earliest postcards of a Kashmiri nautch girl, this was mailed from Chennai (Madras) on Sept. 17, 1903 to Miss Olive McMillan, St. Augustine's, Cliftonville, Margate, England: "With many Salaams from Mother."
