For nostalgia collectors, picture postcards are a constant reminder of what places, people and things looked back in time

I have just acquired a sizeable collection of 19th and early 20th century Indian picture or period postcards. I say acquired, because I did not buy them but got them at an auction as part of a lot of old books together with an equally large packet of steel and copper engravings of the same period. I do not collect picture postcards or engravings but, as in this case, I occasionally get them in a box or carton of books. They seem to come as bonus with the books, though that is not true because auctioneers are too canny to do that. They hide the cost of box items into bid estimates, though some successful bidders are misled into believing they get them for free.

Period postcards are fascinating things. Like similar other memorabilia, they carry you to times long past. They show you people and places that once existed but are no longer there, not at least in the form they once were. People who fancy such collectables are called nostalgia collectors, for it is nostalgia in the first place that drives them to collect such things. They seem to feel transported back into time when they spread a set of period postcards all over their study table or on their bed. It feels like one has dropped through a time hole and is wandering in the bazaars, amongst peoples and buildings as they were a 100 or 200 years ago.

Picture postcards were the Facebook, You Tube or Skype of their time, or more like the mobile camera pictures that people today click during their travels and e-mail to their family and friends. Postcards, naturally, took a long, long time to travel distances because they travelled by mail on trains, steamers, buses, bicycles and all so often on horse or bullock carts and finally piggy riding in the bag of a postman to reach their ultimate destination.

Wikipedia says that the first known printed picture postcard was created in France in 1870, but souvenir cards with pictures really took off only with the building of the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1889-90. The tower attracted people from all over the world. Anybody and everybody, who then happened to be in some part of Europe, made it a point not to miss Paris to have a look at the fabulous steel structure. And, naturally, every one of them wanted to send a picture back home, a huge demand that the French traders were quick to cater to.

Over the years, other printers began marketing similar cards, depicting views of engineering and architectural marvels of their own countries. Soon, there appeared postcards with images of natural scenery, historical monuments, bazaars, city and country life, portraitures of men and women in different attires. Then came caricatures and cartoons to make friends at home laugh at the world. In later years, erotic postcards became a hot theme. Paris became the centre of such prurient and priapic cards, though these were seldom, if ever, posted by mail. They were usually taken home personally by visitors. Indian students and the rich and resourceful returning from Paris rarely forgot to take some back. They used to be fairly common to find in Sunday bazaars and kabaadi shops in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai up till the 1960s when their supply began to dry up.

I do not know when the first picture postcards of Indian scenes appeared, but they must have been marketed fairly early because they portrayed almost every aspect of India. Such minor, though interesting aspects of our history have been hardly, if ever, studied or written about. Before the picture postcards people conveyed images of Indian scenes, monuments and bazaar life through steel and copper engravings, and still later through hand-coloured lithographs like those of the Daniells. But these were rather costly and large in size, and difficult to post.

Picture postcards were a technical revolution for the times when they appeared. They made it all so easy for everybody, especially, the ordinary traveller to send pictures home from long distances so his written description of people and places felt more vivid. By the early 19th century, the world and its many different peoples and cultures had been largely well discovered and written about but travel to distant places was rather difficult for ordinary people and costly too. So, though much of the world had been explored, it had still not been visited by ordinary people. This only whetted their curiosity for information about distant places and people and that is where picture postcards came so handy.

By the late 18th century, a lot of new words and place names from India, such as nautch girls, darjee, bhishti, bunyan tree and place names like Darjeeling, Shimla and Apollo Bundar and Esplanade had travelled to distant parts of England and had become part of common parlance of there, but the things and men and women these terms denoted were still rather unfamiliar. So, there arose a great demand for picture postcards. Many of these cards were printed in England, Germany and France from black and white photographs, which were then handcoloured and sent back for sale to India. Still later, printing of such cards began in India itself. Clifton & Co. and G V Ghoni of Bombay and WG Valseechi of Calcutta seem to have had the largest portfolios of such cards. The greatest demand was for pictures of bazaar scenes and people of different occupations, especially nautch girls. Such images abound in the collection which has just landed on my table, though there are many others of buildings and historical monuments too.