LONDON, U.K., September 30, 2018 (BBC): Picture postcards pieced together stories about life in British Indian cities. In the early 20th Century, picture postcards served as a kind of Instagram, giving Europeans a glimpse of the life their family and friends led in British colonial India. A recent exhibition at London’s SOAS university showcased more than 300 such postcards that were sent from India to Europe between 1900 and the 1930s. This display was drawn from the private collection of Dr. Hughes and Emily Rose Stevenson. They bought postcards on websites such as eBay, and at ephemera fairs, which sell things like antique and second hand books, and manuscripts. “We don’t want the postcards to be a vehicle of colonial nostalgia. It is the opposite of that,” Stephen Putnam Hughes, a co-curator of the exhibition told the BBC. “We wanted to provide enough evidence from the colonial past and allow people to look at the images critically.”
One set of postcards belonged to a popular series, called Masters, produced by a Chennai-based publisher in the early 1900s. It was meant as a “humorous” comment on the master-servant relationship at the heart of British rule in India, according to the note explaining the postcards. But it also played on “British anxieties” and “insecurities” about what the “servant” would do when the “master” was not around. The result: postcards depicting Indians “mocking their masters’ lifestyle choices.” They are shown drinking beer, smoking and reading with their feet up, all of which “were not equal opportunity activities” at the time. The postcards also reflect how Indians were often stereotyped based on ethnicity, gender, religion or caste. Some of these photos were carefully staged in studios, part of a common photographic genre known as the “native type,” according to the curators. Indians performing menial jobs for Europeans were also a common feature of these postcards.
Many of the postcards on display can be viewed at “source” above.