B & W

B & W

The Great Hero of India

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."

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Tea Garden, Gauhati, Assam

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.

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Sepoy Chatta Singh V.C., of the 9th Bhopal Infantry

[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.

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[Peshawar Bazaar]

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.

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Shah Jahan's Last View

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

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Nuserwanjee & Co. [Advertising Card]

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

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Preaching by Riverside, Chittagong Hill

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

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"Quetta Earthquake" [handwritten]

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

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Elphinstone Street, Karachi

An view of one of Karachi's major arteries. This view by Fred Bremner is probably from 1889 or the early 1890s when he first settled in the city and became one of its earliest photographers.