Nautch dancers inspired stories like Hassan Shah’s The Nautch Girl, “the first known modern Indian novel” in the 1790s, as well as the first Urdu novel, the story of the Lucknow courtesan Umrao Jaan Ada in 1899.
A version of this card was sent by
One of the earliest roughly dateable postcards of India, made by a German firm that soon seems to have vanished from history. It probably dates to 1896, when a similar card of Haiti was made (see Haiti's First Postcard by Peter. C. Jeannopoulus in
[Original French] La Poste Au Deccan. [end]
Kunzli Freres was a Swiss company known for high-quality lithographic printing, and this was part of a series of postcards celebrating the way mail was delivered around the world.
An early Belgian advertising card for Lux – but not the soap!
The GPO in Bombay was already the largest post office in India when this card was produced in 1899, with tens of millions of postcards passing through in a city of less than a million.
This postcard shows a nanny with a pram on the “Queen’s necklace” of Malabar beach in Bombay. The artist Dhurandhar and other fellow J.J.
[Original] Victoria Brunnen
Compagnie Comet seems to have been the earliest publisher of a series of cards on India, their name appearing as "Verlag [Firm] "Compagnie Comet", Fr. Th.
One of the most popular views of plague camps in Bombay at the turn of the century, here with a nicely positioned stamp. Postmarked June 30, 1906, Mumbai. Addressed to “Miss Amy L.
Postmarked 22 March 1905 in Bombay, and April 18 1905 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Addressed to “H. H. Rogers Esq. Konupa Makme-Kopunuka, Odessa South Russia-in-Europe." [Recto] “Magnificent station but far too big for requirements.” Today it is the
An extremely rare early postcard by an little-known lithographer, W. Cooper, in Bombay. It looks to crude to have been made at The Ravi Varma Press. Cooper seemed to prefer risque images.
