The Bhistie
A contemporary artist's rendering of one of the most popular postcard subjects, the all important "bhistie" who brought water in an animal skin to the thirsty.
A contemporary artist's rendering of one of the most popular postcard subjects, the all important "bhistie" who brought water in an animal skin to the thirsty.
Probably one of the earliest if not the earliest postcard of Leh, capital of the former Kingdom of Ladakh. Little is known about R. E. Shorter, a photographer with offices in Sialkot, Punjab, on the route to Kashmir, and Kashmir.
Few if any politicians were as popular as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Maharashtrian politician and freedom fighter who spent many years in jail. He was referred to by British authorities as "the father of Indian unrest."
There are very few early postcards – besides a handful of missionary ones – of Assam, an area in northeastern India brought under British control in the first half of the 19th century following wars with the then Kingdom of Burma.
[Original caption] A RAJPUT V.C. "For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty in leaving cover to assist in his Commanding Officer who was lying wounded and helpless in the open.
A real photo postcard of Peshawar bazaar showing a minaret of Mahabat Khan mosque, built in the 17th century. This postcard was sent to a Mr.
An early real photo postcard where the deterioration of the chemicals on the margins contributes to the preciousness of the scene, said to be the view the imprisoned Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan enjoyed from Agra Fort of the tomb he had built for his
A unusual advertising postcard for one of Karachi's premiere merchants at the turn of the century. As the commercial directory Seaports of India Ceylon (Allister Macmillan, 1908) put it for the first firm in their "Commercial Karachi" section, "There
One of the more puzzling things in Raj postcard history is the lack of postcards from what is now Bangladesh; East Bengal and Dhaka in particular seem to have been far less covered by the new medium at the turn of the century than the rest of the
Sometimes postcards were journalism, in this case a real-time view of the deadliest earthquake in British India, which killed somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people in the capital of Balochistan on May 23, 1935. Butani was a military photographer