[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.
Smiles on postcards from the early 1900s are rather rare, possibly because most portraits required the sitter to stay still for many seconds while the exposure was made, especially in the 19th century when most portraits were struck and re-purposed…
Nestor Gianaclis, like D. Macropolo & Co., another Greek-owned firm, was not primarily a photographer so much as a Greek tobacco merchant whose Calcutta office also issued collotype picture postcards and photographic prints in the early 1900s.
This lavishly illustrated card, embossed in gold outline, was printed in Germany. It shows how European figures and themes were easily repurposed for local holidays.
"In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain," wrote George Orwell in his first novel, Burmese Days (Chapter 2).
