Dancing Girls
Professional dancing girls were among the most popular early postcard subjects. These two dancing girls are probably from Lucknow as the painting in the studio background on the left recalls the Chutter Manzil in Lucknow.
Undivided back
Kodaikanal
"Kodaikanal (Kody), though not so quite fashionable as Ooty," wrote Eustace Reynolds Hall in The Tourist's India (1907) "is rapidly coming into favour.
Byculla Club, Bombay
A postcard where the angle and architecture combine effectively to represent the role an institution once played in India's political and social life.
An Indian Well
A less-typical image of an "Indian well," with a rugged sloping foreground that reminds the viewer how far beneath water could lie and the messiness of its extraction.
[Zenana Carriage]
![[Zenana Carriage]](https://www.paperjewels.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/slides/carriage_0.jpg?itok=qY5XcnEW "[Zenana Carriage]")
A hand-painted postcard; given that cards retailed for one anna around this time, maybe two, after materials, one can only imagine how little the bazaar artist was paid.
[Verso handwritten] "Cawnpore [Kanpur]. Dec.
View from Grand Hotel Avenue, Simla
"Cattle borwsed homewards to small hidden hamlets in the valleys, all grew softer and greyer till it was quite dark and the lights came out where she had not thought there was any habitation at all – single lamps here and there in Kasauli, pinpricks
Bear-Leader (Darweshi)
A very early lithographed card by Paul Gerhardt, who ran the lithographic printers at the Ravi Varma Press.
Sent to Miss Ettoi Virmillion, 52 West & South, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, via San Francisco: [Recto] "Bombay 22 March 1905. Very bare. Will"
India, Bombay-Calcutta
An early "Greetings from" concept card, printed in Italy, possibly to market train service between Mumbai and Kolkata, rife with tropes that Europeans would have associated with India: a tiger (stalking the train?
A Group of the Maharaja's Elephants
One of the earliest Gobindram Oodeyram postcards, still "court-sized" from a period before the British postal service officially allowed for the larger European standard, two centimeters more in length (14 by 9 cm, though cards of this size
The Museum, Udaipur
A curious card, with the white space in the top corner intended for a written message by the sender before messages were allowed on the backs of postcard after 1905. The original Victoria Hall Museum, opened in 1890, has since moved to the City
