[Original caption] Damayanti is creeping stealthily to catch the golden Hansa. [end]
In the Mahabharata Hansa, the swan, extolls the virtues of King Nala to her and says "If the peerless wed the peerless—blessed must the union be," in one of the
Most likely a dancer given her anklets, Goa, as a Portuguese Colony, was not well-represented in British Indian postcards.
Inside a studio, the barefoot milkmaid seems caught out of place.
The growth of a city like Bombay was largely dependent on the work of laborers who carried bricks and building materials on wicker baskets on construction sites, much like they do today, which must be part of the reason why they were such common
The original black and white postcard predating the color version.
A truly multi-purpose postcard by Paul Gerhardt.
A refreshing portrait of a woman looking straight back at the viewer, not contained by the frame. Most probably from a portrait by Charles Scowen in the 1870s, who photographed the same woman in slightly different poses.
An early lithographic card by the elusive Bombay lithographer and publisher W. Cooper. Like some of this other cards, it seems to have originated in a photograph also published as a postcard by The Phototype Co.
Although the women do look somewhat similar in this set of a dozen Mughal Empresses, they can be identified individually thanks to the Urdu captions beneath each: [From Top Left to Top Right, First Row] Jamila Khatoon W/o [Wife of] Muhammad Mirza,
The Princely State of Chamba appeared on few postcards during the Raj even though its rulers seemed to have good relationships with a number of Punjab-based photographers, including Fred Bremner and John Burke.
