SACHI (Society for Art & Cultural Heritage of India) and Asian Art
Museum, SAN FRANCISCO, are Proud to Present
PAPER JEWELS: POSTCARDS FROM THE RAJ
An Illuminating Presentation By Distinguished Scholar and San
Francisco based historian Omar Khan
A Reception follows in the Loggia at 3.30 PM.
Free with Museum Admission and Open to the Public.
Paper Jewels is the story of postcards during the Raj spanning India,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Burma. Postcards were the Instagram of their
time, depicting the subcontinent, its people, places and
preoccupations to the world. The first color and global visual
communications medium to represent India between 1892 and 1947, the
talk weaves together postcard artists, photographers, and publishers
that define the rich history of the postcard in the subcontinent.
Postcards were to the people in 1900 what the internet was to the
world in 2000. They represented the world’s first mass transfusion
of images. The world went from thousand to a billion postcards in a
very short span of time involving the finest artists from India,
Austria, and Japan. Omar Khan’s talk will lead us to the earliest
illustrated postcards of India in discussing the many technical,
commercial and political factors that went into shaping this then new
form of communication. The talk will introduce the first artist-signed
postcards of India (made in Austria); the Ravi Varma Press and the
first Indian-published postcards; and the first Raj publishers to
cater to mass audiences in multiple cities. We will meet the great
Indian postcard artist M.V. Dhurandhar and the people and stories of
Bombay he illustrated; the London-based Raphael Tuck & Sons, the
biggest global Indian postcard publisher; as well as early advertising
postcards of India by Singer, Liptons, Nestle and others.
SACHI Annual Event 2018 coincides with Omar Khan’s recent book
publication and an India exhibition launch of his collection at the
Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, (August 18-October 1, 2018) to be
followed by an exhibition at the Art Heritage Gallery, Delhi (opening
October 18, 2018).
Omar Khan, grew up in Vienna, Austria and in Islamabad, Pakistan. He
has researched early photography and ephemera of the subcontinent for
thirty years, and is the author of a prior publication, From Kashmir
to Kabul: The Photographs of John Burke and William Baker 1860- 1900
(Mapin, 2002). An avid historian, he acquired a large collection of
the early postcards from the Indian subcontinent now published in a
lavishly illustrated volume, Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj
(Mapin 2018) A graduate of Dartmouth College and Columbia and Stanford
Universities, Omar Khan is a software executive in San Francisco. His
award winning and popular website, www.harappa.com was launched in
1995.
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18/11/2018 Last update