Raj Postcard Links

There is not much published material on postcards from India during the Raj, but things are slowly changing.

Books
Sangeeta and Ratnesh Mathur, Picturesque India, Niyogi Books, Delhi, 2018.
"The 550 postcards featured in this book visually document this growth, while also capturing evidences of earlier times in India’s fascinating polytemporal towns."

Sue Smallwood, To Dear Harry Boy, Impress, London, 2017.
"A dazzling pictorial journey across colonial India from an unusual perspective, To Dear Harry Boy records the impressions of a British cable joiner as he works his way around the subcontinent, through a series of postcards addressed to his young son."

Articles

Stephen Hughes and Emily Stevenson, South India Addresses the World: Postcards, Circulation, and Empire, Trans Asia Photography Review, Volume 2, No. 9, Spring 2019.
"By the turn of the twentieth century, the picture postcard was the most widely circulated and affordable mass-produced form of photography."

Maria Thomas, Europeans sent millions of postcards from colonial India—now Indians get to see them, Quartz India, Nov. 15, 2018.
"'We started visiting these fairs and we saw that there’s such a huge collection of picture postcards which had been sent by Europeans in India to their friends and family abroad,' Sangeeta Mathur told Quartz. '…we realised that there’s this whole wealth of information in picture postcards.'"

Emily Stevenson and Stephen Putnam Hughes, From Madras to Bangalore, Frontline, Sept. 14, 2018.
"A careful examination of picture postcards of Madras and Bangalore of the early 20th century shows that this medium tells us a complex story of colonial urbanism and the history of photography that sheds a new light on these two cities."

Nikhil Pandy, Do you feel jealous, old girl? Personal histories and postcards from Burma, Scroll India, June 07, 2015.
"Glimpses of 1920s Rangoon thanks to an Indian who owned one of its popular photographic studios."

Podcasts
A Postcardist interview with Stephen Putnam Hughes, Co-Curator of the groundbreaking From Madras to Bangalore exhibit at SOAS in London about postcards in the two colonial cities, Sept. 6, 2018.
"The world was a much more connected place at the beginning of the 20th century than we think of it."

Links
Sujaan Mukherjee, The story of the elusive man who made these fascinating pastel postcards of Calcutta, Scroll.in, March 2, 2017
"Indians and Europeans share equal space on Frank Clinger Scallan’s vibrant canvases without indication of social hierarchy."

Chasing Chinthes, The Sharman Minus collection of early postcards of Burma, or Myanmar.
"Exploring a family's hidden past in Burma, on this page are some of my vintage postcards of Burma, mostly from 1900-1939."