A Benares Dancing Girl

When this card was first published from London, The Picture Postcard and Collector's Chronicle, a magazine that catered to collectors, businessmen and and aficionados of the new medium, hailed it as a “a fascinating dancing girl from Benares” (Jan. 1905). It was published by F. Hartmann & Co., one of the the first London-based publishers of India postcards. It was a colorized version of a photograph by Johnston & Hoffmann in Calcutta, a firm that had been publishing postcards since the late 1890s. The firm had previously published this one, also as A Benares Dancing Girl. In fact, and as one might expect, postcards of India were published by India-based firms, especially photography studios, many years before British-based publishers caught on.