Description
Postcards were to the people in 1900 what the Internet was to the world in 2000. They can be thought of as the world’s first mass transfusion of images. In a very short span of time, the world went from circulating thousands to a billion postcards, engaging some of the finest painters from India, Austria, and Japan.
Paper Jewels is the definitive story of postcards during the Raj, covering India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Burma between 1892 and 1947. The first comprehensive book on this subject, it presents hundreds of professionally restored images in their original format. The volume uncovers incredible gems, such as the early postcards of the great Indian painter M.V. Dhurandhar and the Ravi Varma Press, alongside the exceptional work of early Austrian lithographers in Kolkata and German lithographers in Mumbai.
Relying almost entirely on primary research conducted over twenty years in archives and private collections across India, Europe, and America, much of the story presented here is entirely new. The essays cover the major cities important to postcard publishing and explore key themes—from religion and dancers to tea, famines, fakirs, humour, and warfare. Many of these beautiful and popular images have never been published since their first print runs a century ago.
Praise for the Book:
“The publication of this unique collection of Indian postcards, painstakingly compiled and researched… constitutes a fascinating and evocative account of the social, cultural, economic and photographic environments in which they were produced.”
— John Falconer, author and former Curator of Photographs, The British Library
Table of Contents:
- Preface / Introduction
- Calcutta: Kolkata (Darjeeling)
- Benares: Varanasi
- Bombay: Mumbai (The Ravi Varma Press, M.V. Dhurandhar)
- Kashmir
- Delhi (Agra, Simla: Shimla)
- Lahore (Amritsar, Murree)
- Karachi (Sindh, Balochistan)
- Jeypore: Jaipur
- Madras: Chennai (Bangalore: Bengaluru, Ooty: Udagamandalam, Malabar)
- Ceylon: Sri Lanka
- North-West Frontier Province: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
- Independence
- Epilogue / Bibliography / Index / Acknowledgements
About the Author:
Omar Khan grew up in Vienna, Austria, and Islamabad, Pakistan. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Columbia, and Stanford Universities, he has researched early photography and ephemera of the subcontinent for thirty years. He is an avid historian, the author of From Kashmir to Kabul: The Photographs of John Burke and William Baker 1860-1900 (2002), and has run the website harappa.com since 1995.
Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj
By Omar Khan
Book Specifications:
- Category: History / Photography & Ephemera
- Pages: 364 pages
- Illustrations: 519 illustrations
- Dimensions: 9 x 12″ (229 x 305 mm), Hardcover (hc)
- ISBN: 978-81-89995-85-0
- Date of Publishing: 2018
- Language: English
Publisher: Mapin in association with The Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi.
