The jewel box
An exhibition of postcards from the early 20th century reminds us what things of beauty, utility and information they were, writes Ritika Kochhar
If you look carefully, you can find fascinating stories in mundane things like matchboxes, labels and even postcards. Forexample, one of the nuggets of information gleaned from an early 20 th-century European postcard is that, even at the height of British rule in India, one pound sterling was worth 15 rupees. Another postcard, a photograph of English people and their staff on a house boat in Srinagar explains that house boats became popular because the Ma ha raj a of Kashmir wouldn’ t let outside rs buy property in his state. These postcards feature in a recently published book called Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj by Omar Khan, visuals from which are on display at an eponymous travelling exhibition.
On view now at Mumbai’s Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, the exhibition focuses on postcards from India during the first half of the 20 th century. It is cu rated by Khan and Rah a ab All ana, of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, and relies almost entirely on Khan’ s personal collection. New research in archives and private collections in India, Pakistan, Europe and the US bolsters Khan’ s collection tot ella nuanced story about the changing face of Bombay, industrial is at ion, tourism and, eventually, the rise of the nationalist movement in the last 50 years of the Raj in India. It was an exciting time for India and the world. Photography had been invented 50 years earlier, and them ass-produced Kodak camera of the 1880 s helped democrat i se photography. The imperial project opened up travel, and newly created technologies like lithography allowed small workshops and artisans to become entrepreneurs. The illustrated postcard became the world’ s first mass transmission of colour images and enabled communication between families, friends and businesses anywhere in the world, leading to the sale of billions of postcards.
The finest painter sand graphic artists became involved in the birth of this new media form, including MV Dhurandhar, head of the famed JJ School of Art in Bombay, who also came to be regarded as the greatest postcard artist of Bombay. A separate section is devoted to the postcards made by this largely forgotten artist who during his life received every conceivable honour from the British .“So much of Dhurandhar’s work relates to the community and puts the people in perspective ,” says Tasneem Mehta, honorary director at the museum.
The growing national is ti cf erv our also meant that many Indians wanted to work with German sand Austrians rather than the British; Er win N eu mayer and Christine Sch el berger wrote ina biography of Raja Ravi Varma that the working language of his famous printing press in Bombay was German. Indeed, most postcards were first printed in Germany and Austria, with photographs being sent to Dresden by publishers in India, and postcards made by printers there shipped back to be sold tointernational tourists for a few ann as or pennies.
The exhibition, with its 300 postcards, old photographs, albums and clay models, offers an accessible treat. In addition, though, around 3,000 professionally restored postcards from British-India, Pakistan, SriLanka (Ceylon) and Myanmar( Burma) have been released online by the author and the Alkazi Foundation of the Arts under a free and open Creative Commons licence on Internet Archive.
“Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj” is on at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, till Oct 1. It will move to the Art Heritage Gallery, Delhi (Oct 17-Nov 17) and the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (Dec 15-22)