Delhi, Gaza and airmail, circa.1931

A wonderful piece of philatelic history that connects Delhi and Gaza as well as the histories of colonisation and the legacies of Empire! Here is a letterhead found on the internet that presents the first airmail exchange between Gaza, from the then British Mandate of Palestine and Delhi. It is addressed to J. Davis, the postmaster of the newly inaugurated city of New Delhi in 1931. The route of the flight can be traced through Karachi, another vital node of Empire.

At the time, both Gaza and Delhi were firmly embedded within imperial structures. Palestine had become a British Mandate in 1920 after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. While the British government instituted the mandate under the aegis of the League of Nations, it functioned less as a step toward self-determination and more as an instrument of imperial control—a compromise between colonial ambitions and the emerging tide of nationalist movements.

Similarly, the inauguration of New Delhi as the premier imperial city in 1931 marked a fresh phase of consolidation and spectacle in Britain’s rule over India. Both events—the mandate in Palestine and the ceremonial birth of New Delhi testify to the adaptability of empire, its shifting strategies of governance, and the enduring legacies that affect us today.

With Gaza, in solidarity.

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The rubble between the Jama Masjid and Lal Qila, 1862.

Another image from Samuel Bourne's collection focusing on Delhi. This was taken from the Jama Masjid in Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) and shows the Lal Qila (Red Fort) in the distance. Remarkably, since Bourne captured this photograph in 1862, it documents the freshly demolished area between the Fort and the Jama Masjid.

The mounds of rubble in the foreground are telling — they mark the remnants of entire neighbourhoods, havelis, mosques, and work quarters that were razed by the authorities. As we know, this demolition was carried out to create a ‘firing line’ from the Fort — a military measure intended to secure the city in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising.

I haven’t come across any other photographic records of the demolitions from this period, making this an especially valuable image. Bourne’s aesthetic of desolation — or, in other words, his inclination to depict Delhi in a state of decay — inadvertently captures the cataclysmic transformation of the city’s urban fabric.

MD Yaqoob and MD Ayoob, hair dye merchants in Saddar Bazar, Delhi, 1924

 

This is another, slightly longer post on Delhi’s postal and business history. Pictured above is an envelope from the office of Md. Yaqoob and Md. Ayoob, importers and exporters of hair dyes in the 1920s—discovered during an online search. Based in Delhi’s Saddar Bazar, the brothers were the sole agents importing and selling a Japanese product, The Night Star Hair Dye Powder, in Delhi and beyond. Intriguingly, the letter was addressed to an American company, offering a small but telling piece of evidence about trading networks and business ties that stretched beyond British imperial spaces.

Historians have written about Indian merchants under colonial rule and scholars such as Douglas Haynes have explored how advertising—by American and British firms—took root in India, and was transformed by appealing to a notion of the Indian middle-class family. Yet postal ephemera like this raises new questions about the role of newly industrialising nations, particularly Japan, and the allure their products held. Why were Japanese goods, such as hair dyes, popular in 1920s Delhi? And what did they signify to consumers at the time? 

Equally intriguing is the question of the merchants themselves. By the 1920s, Saddar Bazar was a bustling commercial hub with a history of migration. Were Yaqoob and Ayoob part of a newer generation of Delhi entrepreneurs whose roots lay outside the city? Plenty of questions—ones that invite deeper research into the intertwined histories of commerce, migration, and consumer culture in early 20th-century Delhi.

The view from Humayun's Tomb, circa 1860s.

 

Here is another photograph from amateur photographer Samuel Bourne’s set on Delhi, taken in the 1860s. This is taken from the top of Humayun’s tomb and gives us a sense of the scale of what is known today as the Humayun’s Tomb complex. In the foreground are the Afsarwala tomb and mosque, followed by Isa Khan’s tomb and its mosque in the background.

The photo contrasts slightly with the ruins of Tughlaqabad (I have posted on this earlier) but its composition is equally eerie. The lush landscape in the picture also conceals the village of Ghiyaspur containing Sheikh Nizamuddin’s dargah. 

As mentioned my previous posts, while the photograph captures a seemingly timeless landscape, it also reflects the colonial aesthetic of the picturesque, which was often entangled with political intentions. The desolation and decay represented in such images was set against the supposed progress and modernity of British colonial rule.