By the early 1900s, there were many India-based publishers of postcards. Clifton & Co. in Bombay was one of the first firms to publish a series of all-India views. Others were Higginbotham & Co. (Madras and Bangalore) and Thomas Paar (Darjeeling). Between 1900 and 1905, Clifton’s archaeologically themed postcards of temples, mosques and various ruins amounted to about 20 per cent of the firm’s repertoire.
Postcards moved from the colony to the centre of the Empire. ‘England was among the last to take up the tale,’ wrote one observer. Postcards of India were widely sold by India-based publishers well before those in Britain. Hartmann & Co. was the first London-based publisher to widely advertise India ‘View Cards’ in December 1902, in The Picture Postcard and Collector’s Chronicle, a two-year old magazine that charted the growing popularity of postcards as art and business. Frederick Hartmann, a former indigo planter in India, was the man reputed to have forced the British post-office to accept the ‘divided back’ postcard in 1902. Common on the continent, the format left the entire front available for the image and permitted a full message to be written on the back. Hartmann’s pioneering India series included a number of archaeological postcards, including the Kutub Minar, Dewan Khan (Diwan-i Khas, Red Fort) and Humayuon’s Tomb (all in Delhi), The Golden Temple, Amritsar and the Taj Mahal, Agra. E.W. Richardson, the founder-proprietor of The Picture Postcard and Collector’s Chronicle, welcomed Hartmann’s India cards two months later. He noted that ‘one of the best functions performed by the Picture Postcard is that of educating the labouring classes up to a love of the beautiful, and thus cooperating with all the other agencies for their uplifting.’ They were ‘the first art form for the unlettered person.’
The archaeological postcards allowed British customers to participate and circulate the bounties of their Empire. An anna or a penny bought a fleeting sense of ownership in another place and time. No firm better illustrated this framing of India’s past and monuments than Raphael Tuck & Sons, who promoted themselves as ‘Art Publishers to Their Majesties the King & Queen, And T.R.H. [Their Royal Highnesses] The Prince & Princess of Wales’. Tuck was ‘arguably the most important publishing house in the history of picture postcards.’ Tuck became probably the single-largest publisher of India-themed postcards, selling a thousand or so titles between 1900 and 1915, the vast majority of them ‘Oilettes’ (made to resemble oil paintings) of various sites. They were abundantly reprinted until the 1940s. ‘Customers were encouraged to see the picture postcard as a desirable object to be possessed,’ and the cover envelope for the first set of six Agra views of ‘veritable miniature Oil Paintings’, boasted these to be ‘already famed as the most artistic post-cards of the most picturesque spots in the world.’ A successful marketing tactic was the hosting of annual collector competitions, in which the winners, who had amassed thousands of different Tuck cards, were awarded grand prizes. The 1902 winner, Mrs M. Eaton, for example, collected 20,364 Tuck’s postcards; the 1903 winner, Miss Muriel Brown-Greaves, entered 25,439 cards; each won £100 for their efforts.
One wonders if postcards gave British women a means to vicariously participate in an Empire that few of them could visit. Most of the Tuck collecting competition winners were women (the vast majority ‘Miss’). Expectantly, the address side of the cards sent from India to Europe throughout the First World War illustrate far larger proportions of female receivers, some two-and-a-half to each male recipient.
The very first Tuck’s Agra series (which includes Exterior of Zenana, Agra) did not have text captions on the back. Subsequent printings, probably within months, did. Few publishers (Joshi was an exception) invested in more than a title on the picture side, for each run of the printing press and ink cost more (not to speak of the added cost of writing the text). Descriptive text distinguished Tuck’s cards from the others. They appear by May 1905, and E.W. Richardson stated that ‘the principle here introduced is an excellent one, but we cannot so unreservedly commend the practice. The brief sentences, however, usually succeed in conveying some interesting information concerning the pictures.’
The texts convey colonial worldviews. For example, the caption of Tuck’s The Taj Mahal, from the River, Agra reads: ‘It is said that Shah Jehan designed a bridge to connect this last resting place of his wife with a similar Taj on the far side of the river. Masons, jewelers, and workmen spent 17 years and four million sterling in collecting materials for what still remains “The Wonder of the Earth”.’ A postcard from the early Oilette series of Delhi, Tomb of Nizam-ood-din, Delhi showing the tomb of the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya (1238-1325), claimed it as the ‘Tomb of the reputed founder of Thuggism, who is supposed to have murdered the Emperor Tughlak.’
Another, of Hooseinabad Gateway, Lucknow, emphasises that ‘the florid excess of stucco ornamentation is but one sign of the decay of Indian architecture in modern times,’ little acknowledging the French designs that inspired its construction in the 1830s. Here is an a priori Western assumption of the decay of Indian architectural traditions in the period.
Tuck’s postcards of The Memorial Well at Cawnpur [Kanpur], the images of which circulated prolifically from the late-nineteenth century, bore lengthy descriptions about the repugnant mutineers. An example is: ‘Over the arch of the Gothic wall surrounding the last resting place of the 125 women slaughtered by the rebels and cast into the Well, are recorded the words “These are they which came out of great tribulation. Inside is the pure white marble statue of an angel, by Marionetti, with arms folded in resignation, each hand bearing a palm as an emblem of peace.’” Postcards re -circulated emotionally charged pictures and kept alive the memories of the Mutiny among the British.
Visually attractive and colourful, the majority of Tuck’s Indian Oilettes were actually printed colour halftone versions of photographs. This method of manufacture, using tiny holes in metal screens through which ink is sprayed on giant presses, was less expensive to produce than collotypes. Metal plates permitted larger print runs; glass plates were fragile and faded after a few thousand copies were struck. The human eye could fill in more of an image with the careful spacing of halftones, say around 175 dots per inch, which saved costs, compared to the inkier collotypes. Halftones remained the most common form of mass image printing for good reason, even though their rendition and fidelity to photographs were not equal to the collotype, nor was the colour quality equal to lithography.
If postcards helped a little to widely circulate ‘truths’ about India’s ancient and sophisticated Buddhist past, they also played a part in sharpening perceived divisions in the subcontinent between Hindu, Muslim, Jain and Christian communities and epochs. Histories and identities could be contested in the very titles of archaeological postcards, with publishers playing to current interpretations for marketing purposes, or their own beliefs, helping to reify fraught identities. An example is the Tuck’s Delhi postcard Colonnade, Hindoo Pillars, Kutub Minar with the caption: ‘The pillars, taken by the Mughal conquerors of India from a Hindoo temple, were recut to free them from idols and used to form the colonnade to the mosque. Some of the Hindoo figures can still be seen.’ Such a postcard would touch a scar, by revisiting contentious histories.
There were, however, variations. Clifton & Co. titled a similar view, Colonnade of Hindu Pillars, Delhi, while Jadu Kissen’s ‘Archaeological Photo -Works of India’ chose Hindu Colonnade of Pillars of Pure Hindu Architecture Belonging to the 9th or 10th Century, Delhi. The city’s major postcard publisher and competitor to Tuck’s, H.A. Mirza & Sons, opted to call the view Pirth[v]i Raj Temple, Delhi. Mirza was likely an observant Muslim, having photographed and published some of the first postcards of Mecca in 1908. Publishers could choose, and Mirza did not simply follow the colonialist view.
Postcard captions stripped or created histories of monuments, fostered and entrenched colonialist and partisan historiography – or not. Postcards, through their circulation, disseminated skewered stories and prejudice to the masses, or offered alternate conceptual sleeves for the pictures they showed.
Words helped sail a postcard through imaginary registers into the heart of popular visual culture. The caption of Tuck’s Exterior of Zenana, Agra (fig. 2.8) reads: ‘Here white marble pavilions look out on delicate inlaid pillars and finely perforated screen’s [sic] thence across the Jumna. Here the ladies of Shah Jehan’s court once dreamed of a world beyond the confines of a zenana.’ H.A. Mirza’s similar view is entitled Summan Burj interior Fort Agra Built by Shahjahan in 1861 A.D. [sic].
There are subtle differences between the two postcards: the dreaming women of the zenana were probably added by the Oilette artist’s hand. The angle of the Tuck’s view is more expansive, the red -dyed ornaments eye-catching. They transport the reader into the realm of fantasy and desire. Tuck’s postcard aptly fits a definition of exoticism as ‘a particular mode of aesthetic perception – one which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them.’ Mirza’s card, while also colourful, leads the viewer’s eye into the photographic reality behind the hand tints, while Tuck’s guides it towards the fanciful brushstroke.
Over a third of the first sets of Tuck’s India Oilettes in 1905 were archaeological and historical views. Similar ratios apply to the hundreds of H.A. Mirza postcards of North India. Tuck’s cards would have been attractive to customers, appealing with their colour. However beautiful the tinted colour architectural cards of the firms of Mirza, Jadu Kissen, and Macropolo (among others) were, they did not evoke the rich combined fantasy of a Tuck’s card and caption.
Most British people who touched these postcards were aware that these places, though built by people centuries ago, were now part of their Empire. Tuck’s series had names like ‘Empire’, ‘Our Indian Troops’, ‘Famous British Battles’, and ‘Birth of Our Indian Empire’. Even before the Oilette, one of Tuck’s first India series – ‘The Gorgeous East’ – was based on painted visions of the 1903 Delhi Durbar. ‘Picture postcards staged the colonial space,’ and about some of the first India cards Richardson declared that ‘we must confess to an additional thrill of pleasure when interesting cards reach us from some distant part of the British Empire . . . the most casual reader must see how potent may become these tiny missives in spreading a knowledge of, and creating sympathy with, our fellow subjects in distant Hindustan.’
How much better the experience if the card was personalised! If one could also own and file it away in a box among many others, or share it with a friend, sign it with XXX’s – ‘kisses’ – like an early Oilette of Jaipur: ‘I will write you a longer letter next week and let you know how I have been enjoying myself this Xmas. I will close now wishing you a very Happy New Year from yours always xx Sincerely xx G.E. Flanagan xxx.’
H.A. Mirza’s titles and captions seem to offer a less Empire-stained worldview. They possibly allow us to see the ways in which Indians had begun to interrogate or dismiss the histories of India that were being written by the British. Mirza’s postcards appealed to Indian audiences and many highlight the Mughal architectural achievements. Views similar to Tuck’s The Taj Mahal from the River (fig. 2.9; cat. no 132) celebrate the ‘Wonderful Building in the world’. Those of the Tombs of Sultan Nizamuddin Aulia and Jahanara Begum, Delhi clarify for the buyer, through the extended caption on the front, that Shah Jahan’s daughter was buried in a sunken grave next to her favorite Sufi saint. Significantly, this postcard bears an English translation of the Arabic inscription on Jahanara’s tomb: ‘Let nothing but green grass cover my tomb. For it is the best grave cloth of the poor in spirit. The humble and mortal Jahanara Begum (Believer of Chishty Family).’ The photographer seems to speak to the Indian customers but educate the European ones.
This is an excerpt from the essay by Omar Khan from the book accompanying the eponymous DAG exhibition, Histories in the Making: Photographing Indian Monuments, 1855-1920, that is now on view until October 12 at DAG, New Delhi.
