Bazaar is a strange word; banal in its everyday transparency and elusive in its technical meanings. From economists and historians, to anthropologists and art historians, all have offered technical definitions for the bazaar. Some of these definitions are more persuasive than others, but their sheer proliferation stands in stark contrast to the casual way in which the word is used in a variety of quotidian contexts.
Bazaar cards were ephemeral embodiments of this interplay betwixt banality and technical complexity. Put simply, they were cheap, locally printed postcards that were predominantly used for mercantile communications. Notwithstanding their occasional use for personal communications, unlike the more familiar picture postcards, the predominant use of these cards was for business communications. Dealers wrote to wholesalers, franchisees to agents and so on. As hard-nosed practical objects, they were not expected to be artistic masterpieces. Indeed, they need not even have been pretty in the way the regular picture postcards were.
And yet, many of them carried some small illustrations. The use of such illustrations — which, needless to say, raised the cost of production for these cards — reminds us that the businessmen of the past did not see efficiency and aesthetics as chalk and cheese. Standing out even within this general culture of illustrated bazaar cards is a smaller group depicting the merchants themselves.
These portrait cards are striking in bringing us face-to-face with forgotten merchants of the past. The oldest amongst these, dating from the dawn of the twentieth century, used a variety of bloc-printing techniques. Later, lithographic reproduction was also used. By the 1930s, we have fairly sophisticated photographic reproductions. No matter what the technical quality of the reproduction, the historical nature of these images is indubitable.
If we think of colonial portraits, mainly two images come to mind. One: the grand oil painting hung on the high walls of some palatial building. Two: the posed studio photograph carefully placed in an album with thick coloured pages. Some of the latter might well have started life as a carte-de-visite or CDVs, a photographic calling card, that the wealthy would sometimes exchange with friends and family. Both these forms of portraiture, in colonial Calcutta, were much more common amongst the wealthy Bengali babus and the ruling sahibs rather than the mercantile communities, which came to be called Marwaris.
Perhaps the absence of a prominent culture of portraiture has also contributed to the way that the Marwaris have largely been absent from the colonial nostalgia that tinges so many aspects of Calcutta’s self-image. The Bengali babus with their profligate habits and the pomposity of the sahibs now reduced to melancholy graves and neglected official buildings are the usual stock-in-trade of the urban nostalgia that drenches — and on occasion drowns — the City of Joy. But Marwaris seldom feature in this wistful reminiscing. Yet, they too have been part of the city’s life since its very beginnings.
Long seen as an ultraconservative community that eschewed the kind of profligacy that is euphemistically called the ‘babu culture’ of colonial Calcutta, the lack of any culture of portraiture seems almost natural to the Marwaris. The bazaar cards call such stereotypes into question. Not only does the very existence of the cards evince a degree of vanity, but the actual portraits also show the merchants making complex statements about their social standing.
One of the best early bazaar portrait cards I have seen is one used by a merchant named Isardass Dhannani, who had his shop on 105, Khengrapatty Street in the 1910s. The card, which used a fairly expensive process known as machine-drawn photogravure, showed a handsome young man with a slightly dreamy look. The young Isardass was dressed in rich brocade and a smartly patterned pagri. He also sported a fashionably thin, Errol Flynn-esque moustache. The overall impression the portrait conveyed was that of a young man of both wealth and style. In fact, he was not very different from the Bengali dandies of the day.
Another slightly older merchant, Sriramdas Nandkishor, who operated out of the small town of Beawar in Rajasthan but also had strong business contacts with Calcutta around a decade before Isardass, provides a good contrast to the younger Isardass. Like Isardass, Sriramdas also presented himself in a rich brocade dress and a turban. But there were clear differences as well. Sriramdas wore an elaborate tilak, prominently displaying his Vaishnavite faith. His moustache was thicker and firmly respectable, without being dandyish. His look, too, was more authoritative than dreamy. I have seen two different versions of Sriramdas’ portraits on bazaar cards. In one, he stares directly and authoritatively at the viewer (picture), while in another, he looks equally firmly but sideways at someone behind the camera. By contrast, Isardass looks a bit wistful and at no one in particular. The little differences taken together show the older Sriramdas as a man of faith, respectability, and authority whereas the younger Isardass appears as a fashionable, romantic dreamer.
The decades between the two World Wars were when the Marwaris began to gradually dominate Calcutta’s economy. Economic historians like the late Rajat Kanta Ray have pointed out that the colonial Indian economy had been bifurcated into two broad segments. One, which included rural agrarian production together with a number of related handicraft-based products. This sector was lubricated by credit networks that operated outside modern banks using instruments like hundis etc. Second, was a sector ungirded by the formal structures of credit linked to banks. Later, this was the sector that included modern industrial production. The Marwaris had mainly operated in the first sector and were largely excluded from the second one until after WWI. The Great Depression at the end of the 1920s and a number of other economic and political changes within the British Empire at the time created an opportunity for enterprising Marwari merchants to rapidly use their bazaar-capital to enter and, in short time, dominate the formal economy.
This new economic clout was also visible in mutations of the culture of bazaar portraiture. Consider, for instance, a card showing one Ganesh Prasad Agarwalla. Unlike the earlier cards that only dedicated a part of the card to the portrait, here we see Agarwalla’s portrait taking up one entire side of the postcard. It shows a young man dressed smartly in a suit and tie staring back at the viewer. The gaze is neither dreamy nor authoritative, but almost bored. Underneath the fulsome image appeared the caption: “Ganesh Prasad Agarwalla, P-13 Chittaranjan Avenure, Agarwalla Building, Calcutta”.
Chittaranjan Avenue had symbolic importance and Ganesh Prasad’s presentation of it on the card, beneath his own image, is telling. Unlike in Isardass’s or Sriramdas’ cases, here the address was not simply a piece of information. It was a statement. The fact that the entire building was named after Agarwalla signalled that he was an independent property owner. By this, Ganesh Prasad was demonstrating his social standing and wealth. The larger image, the European attire — rather than the brocade of the past — and the caption attesting to Ganesh Prasad’s ownership of prime real estate, all testified to the new profile of Marwari businessmen in the city. No longer just bazaaris operating from Bara Bazaar, they were now modern businessmen with fashionable addresses at the heart of 1930s Calcutta.
While bazaar cards have begun to gain some attention from collectors in recent years and one eminent collector, Praful Thakkar, has even helpfully brought out a basic catalogue, they have largely been ignored by historians as a valuable archive. The merchant portraits moreover are doubly neglected. Even amongst private collectors, it is often the cards with images of various nationalist leaders or deities that are more actively sought after. Yet, the existence of these bazaar portrait cards forces us to rethink not only the history of portraiture but also business and urban histories.
Projit Bihari Mukharji is the head of the History Department at Ashoka University. He researches the history of science and collects old postcards