Hoffmann's India

Among the many postcard publishers that appeared when illustrated postcards first did around 1898 was the Austrian firm of Joseph Heim. They published a series of "Artists Postcards" by the painter Joseph Hoffmann in Vienna in April 1898. The advertisement [below] in Die Illustrierte Postkarte, a new magazine in its second issue, noted that the postcards were printed in the finest Aquarell. Three of the postcards are of Benares, two are of Jaipur, and one each of Gwalior, Bombay and Hyderabad.

Joseph Hoffmann (1831-1904), like many European artists in search of inspiration, traveled to Persia and India in 1850. Hoffmann had begun his career with an exhibition at the age of fifteen, and studied briefly at the Viennese Academy. After returning from India at the age of 20, he worked for a well-known Vienna studio. Hoffmann settled down to a career exclusively as a historical landscape painter.

Clifton & Co.,Bombay

Clifton & Company appears in Bombay in the 1870s. The firm quickly became a popular provider of colorful postcards from a growing seaport. They record the transformation of Bombay from a harbour into a large merchant town. Clifton & Co. supplied the photographs for Playne's The Bombay Presidency (1918-1920), a thick book surveying businesses across the Raj. Their location is listed in 1918 at the Albert Buildings on Hornby Road.

Johnny Stores Karachi

Johnny Stores refers to a stall on Elphinstone Street (now Zeb-un-Nissa street) run by a man named Jankidas in the 1930s and 1940s. Commonly known as Janki, British soldiers changed this to "Johnny." Johnny Stores used to sell toffees, sweets, chewing gum, pencils, pens, battery cells, and other odds and ends. It also sold nicely printed black-and-white postcards of Karachi that may have been photographed by someone else. [Many thanks to Ardeshir Cowasjee for background infomation.]

Oodeyram's Jaipur

Many cities and towns were dominated by single photographic studio. Gobindram Oodeyram were the pre-eminent Jaipur studio for over a century.

The firm opened in the 1880s and survived until the 1970s, when it apparently split. Gobindram Oodeyram postcards are, like K.C. Marrott's, strong in images of people from all sectors of society. Certain cards, like those of the Maharajah and his family, were lightly hand-colored. Through the Maharajah, Gobindram Oodeyram were photographers to many visiting dignitaries. When Arch Duke Ferdinand of Austria visited in 1890, Gobindram Oodeyram created the leather-bound album commemorating his visit.

The firm also offered many photographs of nautch [dancing] girls.

Tuck's Lahore

Raphael Tuck & Sons of London were the world's premiere early postcard publisher. Tucks published its first Christmas cards in 1871 and first postcards, like many other firms, in 1898. The firm was a regular supplier of Christmas cards to Queen Victoria, and could boast the title "Art Publishers to Their Majesties the King & Queen."

Tucks reminds us that photographs were not the only source of images for postcards. Tucks cards are distinctive for their gorgeous use of color, from delicate impressionistic hues to thick brushstrokes of color. Their originals were in fact paintings, though not all Tucks cards are in color.

Tucks India cards start appearing around 1905. The many geographic and thematic series cover most major cities and regions. The numbering was very confusing. They came with detailed descriptive captions unlike those of any other publisher.

Marrotts Baluchistan

K.C. Marrott ran his own studio in Karachi in the early 1900s. His sepia postcards of the neighboring province of Baluchistan were quite popular and re-published by Quetta-based firms like Mullick Brothers and R.W. Rai & Sons. Unlike another early photographer of Baluchistan who focused on the official Raj, Fred Bremner, Marrott concentrated on the wide variety of people in Baluchistan. The Brahuis of the semi-independent Kalat state were among his most common subjects.

Melaram's Frontier

Mela Ram was among a small group of Peshawar-based photographers (others include the two Holmes and K.C. Mehra) whose postcards are among the rare visual documents of the Northwest Frontier Province during the Raj.

For example, among this handful of postcards is one of the Hijrat [Flight] Movement to Afghanistan, which peaked in August 1920. There are almost no photographs of those times surviving. Thousands of Mohajirins [Exiles] from Frontier and Punjab willingly became refugees from British rule and fled to Afghanistan that summer. After selling all their possessions, they migrated under the leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan to Kabul.

They were to return, disillusioned, a few months later. Nonetheless, it was an important moment in the Khilafat and Gandhi's First Non-Cooperation Movement. Mela Ram's war photographs of the British military campaigns in the Frontier during the 1920s and 1930s shown here are also rare images. Jamrud Fort outside Peshawar was the staging area for continuous "little" wars that reached all around the province and its border with Afghanistan at Landikotal for a century.

The postcard of Islamia College is possibly from its inauguration in 1913.

Kashmir Artistic Views

These "Six Artistic Views of Kashmir " were published by a painter with the initials 'E. E.' around 1910. Many European and American painters traveled through India in search of inspiration, one of whom could have been responsible for this series. Or it could have been a northwest India-based painter or photographer. Many European photographers, from Samuel Bourne to the Peshawar-based Randolph Holmes, were also painters. Some took their paintings more seriously than their photography.