This postcard actually shows a young Gohar Jan (right) and her mother Malka Jan, both famous dancers and singers. Gohar Jan was the first recorded Indian artist, by the Gramophone company in 1904. She can be heard on YouTube.
This image was used
The Kolam tradition of creating complex geometric patterns, often passed down from mother to daughter, out of rice flour or chalk in front of the home is an ancient tradition in South India and elsewhere.
The bicycle was something quite new in Bombay at the turn of the century, and often featured on postcards, frequently with women as drivers.
This so-called "chromo-collotype" card was created by running an image derived from a black and white photograph through multiple color runs, after each color had dried, creating rich and translucent images.
Hindu woman wearing a white sari. Getting the shades and printing correct, especially the white, on this card would have required great skill, and apparently was done by the leading early German postcard printer Knackstedt and Roder.
Note the title, which attempts to justify the nude image as some sort of ethnographic study.
![[Woman at loom]](https://www.paperjewels.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/slides/woman-at-loom_0.jpg?itok=KOmoyvGo "[Woman at loom]")
K. Lall & Co. were a publisher of interesting real photo postcards, like this one of a cotton spinner, whose flat composition speaks to a style of portrait photography not common among photographers.
Howard Woody, a pioneer researcher of early German printing postcard technologies writes of this postcard that the collotype’s “light hues accent the woman’s layered costumer and create an attractive luminous image that contrasts with the muted
[Verso, in pencil] "You think your job is bad?" [end]
Saraswati is the goddess of learning and the arts (e.g., music), and is often seen playing the Veena, a string instrument. She is also worshipped as the goddess of thoughts of truth and forgiveness.
