Letters for the Nation: Languages, Scripts, and Postage Stamps in Colonial India

By Vaibhav Singh, Visiting Research Fellow

In view of the rich linguistic diversity of the Indian subcontinent, how have postage stamps addressed the possibility of representing information in more than one language and script?

With the support of Smithsonian National Postal Museum research funds, I was able to develop my research project on languages, scripts, and identity on the postage stamps of South Asia. My research utilized the extensive collections of the NPM, focusing on its South Asian philatelic materials (broadly covering India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), for a comparative study of stamps issued by various political entities in the Indian subcontinent, roughly between 1880–1950. I was fortunate to have access to NPM’s valuable resources and benefit from the assistance and critical guidance of NPM’s curators in exploring aspects of multilingualism, typography, and state power in 19th- and 20th-century stamps of South Asia. NPM’s collections afforded my research a comprehensive overview of colonial and postcolonial Indian philatelic history, and the possibility of in-depth investigation of specific practices of design and production. Direct access to the library and collections also helped me explore significant technical details and material qualities of postage stamps as printed artefacts. I gratefully acknowledge the help of NPM’s curatorial and administrative staff, and the invaluable support of the Research Grant that helped me pursue this work.

Connections between the state, postage stamps, and projects of nation-building are often understood and formulated through visual imagery. For instance, key cultural or political locations or personalities and their iconic depictions frequently act as instruments through which ideas and ideals of a nation are expressed. But isn’t it interesting that the literally legible matter on stamps – often just a few words and numbers, though in a specific language and script – is mostly thought of as neutral information or simply as default background material?

Textual matter on stamps may seem like something entirely self-evident, as if it conveys no meaning beyond the purely informational, but this is hardly ever the case. Overlooking the many qualities – not to mention quandaries – of text and its appearance on stamps is certainly surprising when we think how often languages and scripts tend to be defining concerns in projects of nation-building and identity formation. Indeed, the language and script, as well as the form or style that it appears in on a postage stamp, can tell us a great deal about the political and social histories of a period and a place. This is especially significant in a region as complex and richly imbued with cultural and linguistic diversity as South Asia.

One nation many scripts

The idea of nationhood is often tied to an implicit or explicit agreement, or sometimes an unquestioned assumption, that one language and one script represent one nation – even if social conditions and lived experience suggest otherwise. Sometimes political and cultural movements introduce or enforce a specific connection between language, script, and state: the most widely known example may be the Turkish Republic during the 1920s, where the Latin alphabet officially replaced the Arabic script, but there are also various instances of switching between Cyrillic, Arabic, and Latin in post-Soviet states.

The Indian subcontinent, on the other hand, offers a substantially different case where within its national frameworks regional identities remain deeply tied to specific, sometimes multiple, languages and scripts. These have coexisted, and continue to coexist in a state of plurality such that multilingualism is not the exception but more-or-less the norm. The deployment and fluctuating status of multiple languages and scripts in such a scenario is often connected to changes in the social fabric, evolving communal aspirations, and/or restructuring of the boundaries of states and nations.

Over its complex colonial and post-colonial history, the Indian subcontinent has seen a wide variety of languages and scripts represented on stamps issued by various authorities. Given the fluidity and complicated nature of the boundaries of governed territories, as well as of the movement of peoples and cultures, it is not surprising that linguistic regions in the subcontinent have never mapped neatly or directly over political regions. These intersections, overlaps, and states of flux have made the use of multiple languages and scripts on stamps a natural and desirable outcome, if not an outright necessity.

Stamps of Indian Feudatory states

Roughly between 1750s and 1947, large parts of the Indian subcontinent were annexed by the British empire. From 1858 various regions across the subcontinent came to be governed directly under the British crown. In addition, colonial India was formed of a collection of Princely States, or Feudatory States, most of whom operated as vassal entities owing allegiance to the British. Numbering in the hundreds (500–700 by various accounts), these states were controlled by the British, but they were governed by local aristocratic or feudal families under a hereditary arrangement. British imperial post in the subcontinent thus coexisted with postal systems of native states which produced stamps for use within their own territories.

Within native territories, two distinct categories exited: Feudatory States and Convention States. Feudatory States maintained their own postal services and issued stamps, while Convention States were those that had postal agreements with the British imperial post, and they used overprinted stamps of British India within their territories. While the stamps of British India contain text only in the Latin alphabet, stamps issued by the Feudatory States show a rich mix of languages and scripts relevant to their respective regions (often, but not always, alongside Latin).

The connection between governance and language/script used on postage stamps is, of course, made forcefully apparent in cases where a Feudatory State became a Convention State, such as Faridkot in 1886–87. While Feudatory stamps of Faridkot contain text in Gurmukhi and Perso-Arabic scripts with no Latin, its Convention stamps are simply imperial issues with textual elements – including the overprints – solely rendered in the Latin alphabet. Colonial developments in the subcontinent on the whole could be seen reflected in the gradual shift towards the inclusion of English-language text and denominations, with an increasing number of Feudatory States’ stamps employing the Latin alphabet by the turn of the twentieth century.

What letterforms tell us

Looking closely at the variously represented letterforms on the stamps of Feudatory States provides us with several insights and useful pieces of information: first of all, the languages and scripts that were considered sufficiently significant to include in the generally precious real estate of postage stamps; furthermore, the hierarchy that one or the other language and script implied in relation to others present; the considerations that went into achieving any form of correspondence or contrast in terms of design between various scripts; and, among other things, the contemporary technical possibilities, skilled labour, and points of reference available for representing text, not only in specific scripts but in specific styles.

A number of distinct formal qualities are evident in examples where, for instance, the text style references the classic style of seals or where a specific lettering style is mimicked or transferred from one script to another. In the image above, a postage stamp of the northern Feudatory State Poonch utilises a traditional style of calligraphic letterforms in two scripts, Devanagari above and Perso-Arabic below. The forms of letters derive from the affordance of the traditional writing tool: in the case of Devanagari, the reed pen cut at an angle exactly opposite to the angle of the broad-nib pen used in traditional Latin calligraphy. It is significant too that such stamps would have required the involvement of local craftspeople adept at rendering the scripts and styles in question in the desired manner or aesthetic. This often involved practices and forms of knowledge that contrasted with those of the replaceable (and culturally agnostic) industrial worker who could be employed in typographic composition.

In the image above, a stamp from the southern Feudatory State of Travancore, a different kind of skilled intervention is apparent. The style of the English text – broadly reflecting the nineteenth century development of fat face Latin display typefaces with heavily contrasting thick and thin strokes – is also reflected skilfully in the twentieth century engraved rendition of Malayalam characters. This transference of styles, periods, and contexts between unrelated scripts, when approached with sensitivity and skill, can present new directions and possibilities of exploration within an existing graphic landscape. But the direct importation and implied hierarchy in the unidirectional flow of influence is also significant. Indeed, this unidirectionality offers a fascinating case study for current trends and global projects of design, where a misguided quest for typographic ‘equivalence’ can flatten the nuances and distinctions between products of very different cultural heritages.

Unsurprisingly, stamps also show that technological developments are intrinsically connected to the formal appearance of the letterforms. The stamps of various Feudatory States, for instance, present a broad aesthetic landscape linked to their means of production. Interestingly, Feudatory States’ stamps that were printed using what are considered to be more primitive methods tend to show bolder stylistic choices in the design of the characters of multiple scripts. This suggests that certain methods, however crude or ad-hoc, likely afforded local craftsmen greater leeway in shaping the text compared to typographic characters that appear on some stamps in what is their far more limited, and limitations-ridden, form.

From many scripts to a few?

The profusion of scripts and writing styles, along with the challenges that it presented, was not lost on the postal administration of British India. A publication titled Specimens of various vernacular characters passing through the Post Office in India was compiled in 1877 by the Post Master General of the North West Provinces, which shows a curious sampling of handwritten styles in around 70 languages and dialects. Published without any introductory matter or commentary, the compilation appears as an oddity, perhaps in the long tradition of ‘exotic specimens’ and ethnographic tabulations.

Its purpose and original intent cannot be surmised with any certainty, but a copy was sent by the Director General of the Indian Postal Services to the Postmaster General in New Zealand in 1878, suggesting that it may have been circulated in professional and administrative circles as a relic of the indecipherability of the subcontinent or, equally, the bravado of carrying out postal work in India. The latter is invoked in Geoffrey Clarke’s The Post Office of India and its story (1921, p.24):

When one considers that there are more than twenty written languages in India in common use, and that a large number of addresses are almost illegible and are mixed up with invocations to the Deity and many other high-sounding phrases, one can only say, ‘Bravo, the Post Office! How do you do it?’

In the wake of Indian independence, projects of codification and formalisation at a national level extended new questions in relation to regional cultures in the subcontinent – with agendas that did not always take a favourable view of the diversity of languages and scripts. Invariably, this led to contentious debates over how one nation was to be construed and represented through multiple identities, particularly as expressed in language and script. The division of states within the newly independent country was officially carried out on the basis of language through the States Reorganisation Act: linguistic regions went on to define administrative bodies of the republic, and to a great extent they continue to do so.

Twenty-two languages, written in ten different scripts, are officially recognised in the Indian constitution. Today, it is estimated that well over 1500 languages are spoken within the country’s expanse, with more than twenty languages possessing upwards of a million speakers each. While the question of a ‘national’ language and script remains a thorny proposition, the postage stamps of the nation have nonetheless been gradually shifting towards the use of just a handful of scripts – in most cases just Latin and Devanagari – suggesting a more normative assertion of the idea of the nation state.

[Note: all images from the collection of the National Postal Museum]

References

• Clarke, Geoffrey. The Post Office of India and its story. London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1921.
• Cooper, Jal. A priced catalogue for India & Convention states’ stamps. Bombay: J. Cooper, 1952.
• Giles, D. Hammond. The handstruck postage stamps of India. [Bombay]: Philatelic Society of India, [1960].
• Hutchinson, C. W. Specimens of various vernacular characters passing through the Post Office in India: compiled in the year 1877. Calcutta: Government Central Press, 1877.
• Koeppel, Adolph. The court fee and revenue stamps of the Princely States of India: an encyclopedia and reference manual. Mineola, N.Y. : Fiscal Philatelic Foundation, [1983/84].
• Robinson, Howard. The British Post Office: a history. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948.

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