Pieces of the personal:

Postcards at MAP portray lesser-seen past

By Joyel K Pious

Long ago, at a time when I was still struggling to write my name in the English language, I would eagerly examine the unopened inland letters that often landed on our doorsteps from my mother’s sister living in Mangalore. The round postal seals and the intriguing six-digit PIN on each of these letters used to amuse me. Though they were no secrets, the contents of inland letters could be immaculately glued away from the eyes of the outside world. That the letter would have travelled a long distance and passed through the hands of several strangers before reaching home without fail amazed my naive mind. Since we didn’t have a telephone connection at that time, inland letters were the choicest and cheaper mode of communication. Yet, it was not the cheapest way to reach another person or a place. That would be the humble postcard.

My connection with postcards was almost non-existent, and there was no reason to assume that a seemingly insignificant and unrelated object like a postcard would resurrect some forgotten memories. Yet, some old postcards I saw recently made me board a train of thoughts taking me almost a century back in time. ‘Hello & Goodbye: Postcards from the early 20th century’, an exhibition at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, was an invitation to a brief but long trip in time. The exhibits consisted of postcards, most of them sent by the English men and women living in colonial India, the British Empire’s prized possession, to their homes across the seas. Barring one or two, none of the postcards in the exhibition was written by or addressed to any historical figure, but they all seemed to possess value – Not just because these objects were carefully preserved and showcased at a museum. It was as if the passage of time transformed them into artefacts of cultural and historical significance. How could mundane communication between individuals transform beyond the ordinary and become ‘historical’? Will my personal story, if I jot it down somewhere now and is discovered by someone in the future, become part of history one day? Moreover, how does my subjective experience of today’s world turn into a ‘fact’ for a future historian?

The fact that facts never come to us in a pure form is not disputed even by the doyens of historiography – the study of the writing of history – such as British historian E H Carr. “They (facts) do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.”

In the case of postcards, the people who had used them to record their personal experiences inadvertently became ‘historians’ as the postcards turned into objects of historical interest. In that logic, the ‘facts’ appearing in these cards were indeed clues about the ‘historians’ who had recorded them. The words and world of these ‘historians’ gradually unravelled themselves in front of me as I closely watched the more-than-a-century-old exhibits.

My interaction with them was not as an academic but rather as a ‘foreigner’, in terms of both time and space – Besides being younger by a century temporally, I would have been far removed from the living spaces of those ‘White People’ even if I had lived in those times. Moreover, the views presented in the cards were of people who had been living in a land that didn’t belong to them. Watching the cards meant two distinct ‘foreign’ gazes colliding in the museum space. The prejudices that often accompany ‘foreign’ gazes seem to compound in this case.

Conflicting gazes

Among the scores of postcards at the exhibition, a few grabbed my attention more than the others. One was a picture postcard showing a toddler drinking milk from a goat. The photograph was taken by the Gobindram Oodeyram studio in Jaipur. The firm was run by a father-son duo who had close connections with the Jaipur royals. The picture, taken by an Indian photographer, would have lured a European to buy it for the exotic imagery. For a native of that time, such a scene may not have elicited much curiosity. While glancing at this postcard, even while acknowledging the colonial gaze of the photographer, I too felt the scene to be exotic. Later, while thinking about this picture, several questions popped up in me: How would I photograph such a scene if I encountered it in the present time? Would I look at it the same way the Indian photographer saw it at that time? Did I feel the exoticism just because of the temporal gap? In a diverse country like India, the idea of ‘exotic’ could have a wider meaning. For a person from the Northeast, a scene in South India might seem exotic, or vice-versa. Or a person from mountainous Kashmir could find the lives of people in southern coastal villages too alien. Even so, such a view may not necessarily constitute a colonial gaze. What imparted a colonial gaze to the many pictures taken during the imperial times was a lack of respect and concern for privacy towards the people who were subjected to the ‘violence’ in photography. Moreover, the ‘Black’ natives were mere subjects – not citizens – for the ‘White’ masters. Hence, it was no surprise that the images and words on postcards from that era reflected this mindset.

This became clearer from a picture postcard with the title ‘Groupe d’Indiens’ (Group of Indians), showing a scene from one of the French settlements in India. The photograph showed both White men and native men in one frame but on two separate floors of a building. A few White men wearing white suits were pictured on the first floor of the building while several natives were grouped on the ground. Among the many visual clues this image presented, one of the most obvious was the authoritative posture of the men on the top floor. The picture also showed that only a few foreigners could wield enormous power over millions of people in the conquered land. The photograph, taken from the ground level and at a short distance from the subjects, cemented the power dynamics involved in the scene.

Lesser-seen views

A striking aspect of turning a mundane object into a subject of historical importance is that it can unravel a past that is not ‘corrupted’ by any academic or intellectual perspective of that time. I would explain this through a picture postcard and a letter written on its back. The photograph was titled ‘A Nautch Girl and Musicians’. It showed a woman performing to the tunes of two musicians. All three of them looked lifeless, with their eyes displaying no emotions. On the reverse side of the card, there was a letter penned by a man in Calcutta to his son in England. The writer dubbed the percussion instrument tabla ‘Indian drum’ and the Sarangi ‘Indian fiddle’. He wrote that the dancing girl sang a song which sounded like a car that ‘has had no oil for weeks’. He concluded the letter by telling his son that ‘you don’t know how lucky you are to live in England and not be able to hear any Indian music’. Besides a lack of understanding about the ‘exotic’ instruments, the writer seemed to display his condescension towards the performers as well as their performance. From his narration of the music, it could be assumed that he might have listened to a live performance of the people depicted in the photograph. Or was it just his prejudice that made him write about these three people without actually experiencing the performance? This is not to generalise that all the English men and women who lived in India during the colonial period disliked the diverse musical traditions in the subcontinent but to bring home the point that mundane personal conversations can sometimes act as a guide to lesser-known versions of history.

The colonial depictions of India often oscillated between two extremes. On the one hand, they imagined the life and culture in the subcontinent as ‘uncultured’ and in need of ‘civilisational uplifting’. On the other hand, the conquered land was shown as a prized possession. India acted as a home away from home for many newly arrived White people who wanted to boast about the opportunities here to their kin back in Europe. Also at play was a larger business interest which made ample use of these depictions.

India turns into a souvenir

Postcards appeared in the subcontinent around a decade after their introduction in Austria-Hungary in 1869. The arrival of photography had already created in India a lucrative market for European presses which circulated images that fit their perspective of the colony. The introduction of picture postcards fuelled further interest in selling Indian images as souvenirs, many of them carrying errors and/or prejudices. For instance, a postcard with a picture of Jain Tirthankara Mahavira’s idol was titled ‘A Hindu Deity’. In another postcard, the photo of Hawa Mahal in Jaipur was termed as ‘Palace of the Wind’ instead of being called by its actual name.

The demand for souvenirs in England was so high by the end of the 19th century that many new players entered the business of printing and distributing picture postcards, reproducing already available depictions of ‘native life’. Some of these cards were even used by the civic bodies in England as ‘reward cards’ for students performing well in academics. These images, when looked at after a century, threw light on the way the European imagination collided with the varied cultures of the Indian subcontinent.

Fusion of ideas

While the initial benefactors of printed images in India were foreigners, native businessmen eventually entered the scene. Many of their photographs, souvenirs, postcards, stamps and textile labels depict gods and goddesses, especially the ones worshipped by Caste-Hindus. Among the exhibits were a few postcards printed in Europe by Indian businessmen. One of them, printed in Germany by S S Brij Basi & Sons, Karachi, showed Goddess Gayatri. This card looked expensive and was decorated with glitter, most probably catering to the wealthy class of Indians.

The ideas of patriotism and nationalism, too, found a space in this process. Underground printing presses were widely employed by anti-imperial forces to spread their idea of freedom through pamphlets and newspapers, which played a significant role in the Indian freedom movement. Two textile labels of the early 20th century at the exhibition gave some insights into how the concept of ‘India’ as a nation appeared in the imagination of artists and businessmen of that time. The first label, by Shaw Wallace and Co., depicted the subcontinent as an Indian woman wearing a saree and holding a trident. She was surrounded by four ‘angels’ representing four major colonial cities of the time namely, Karachi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Madras. The image also showed a Hindu seer showering flower petals on the ‘Goddess India’. Another angel carrying a lamp and a flag was flying on a falcon (Garuda?) over her head. This image showed how the Christian-centric European imagination tried to fuse with the perceived Indianness – an upper-caste view of the subcontinent. Another textile label, by The Kastoorchand Mills Co Ltd, also represented the subcontinent as a woman who carried a banner ‘Made in India’. The map in this label showed several cities, including the outlier towns of Shillong and Quetta. The woman’s attire gave the impression that she was a Muslim elite. This impression was strengthened by the image of an Islamic-style monument in the background. Interestingly, the women in both labels were shown as having an aura around them. However, both representations offered only a minuscule representation of the appearance of women, probably urban, in the subcontinent at that time. The second label, the one by an Indian merchant, however, tried to make use of the patriotic fervour by announcing that their products were made in India.

Whose history?

History has been the realm of male victors. Neither losers nor women have been part of history-writing, at least until recently. When we travel back in time through the words of historians, what we come across are mostly the versions of conquerors over the conquered. As we go back farther and farther from the present, it is almost impossible to get a view of the lives of ordinary people, especially women and children.

The ‘insignificant’ postcards at the exhibition painted a partial picture of the lives of the privileged women and children of colonial times. A boy had written that he missed his daddy. A woman had shared marital problems with another friend. Since postcards can’t hide secrets, whatever information we can gather from them may sound mundane. It also means that we get connected to these stories due to the everydayness of life and the similarity of human emotions, even if centuries separate us from them.

Despite knowing that history excluded more stories than what it included, I too would have missed out on this important aspect of the exhibition, had not a friend of mine pointed it out later. Besides throwing light on an otherwise-excluded version of the past, the letters of women and children – to which I had thrown only a casual glance – raised an important personal question. How convenient it was for me to ‘miss’ them in the flood of visuals and words created by men.

Object vs person

Time seems to transform everything, turning ‘unimportant’ objects of the present into historical ‘treasures’ in the future. Apart from sculptures, paintings and objects that were made with an artistic intention, museums across the world are filled with ‘ordinary’ objects used by common people in the distant past – beads, potsherds, kitchen utensils, etc. Despite having a historic value ascribed to them by us, they seem to be detached from the people who owned it – personal histories missing from an object-centric history – due to an unavoidable lack of sources. On the other hand, the postcards at the MAP exhibition carried a great volume of personal histories, that too in different forms of handwriting – a visual experience of written words – making these stories strongly tied to their owners.

Postscript

Outside the exhibition venue was a desk full of yellow postcards which could be used by the visitors as a souvenir: A novelty for many of us living in the age of instant messaging. There was also an option to create digital postcards and send them via email. Postcards upon their launch too were a novelty. Initially, people approached them with caution (no secrets could be written), then used them liberally, and almost abandoned them later for faster modes of communication. 

Postcards now occupy only a minuscule and niche corner of our communication space, and a lot has changed about how and why they are used. It reminds me of what Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said: ‘Medium is the message’.

‘Hello & Goodbye: Postcards from the early 20th century’ was on display at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, from April 6 to August 18, 2024.

Most of the exhibits were from the collection of Kenneth X. Robbins and Joyce Robbins.

(The writer would like to thank Varsha Jain for their valuable suggestions)