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.
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