A Table Servant
Note the liquor bottle, likely whisky and soda on the tray in the khitmatgar's hands.
Labor
Plucking Tea, Dambatenne Estate, Ceylon
Dambatenne Estate, established in 1890, is still part of the Lipton's team empire. Perhaps most noteworthy about this advertising postcard is the way the woman's orange clothing is both distinct from and engulfed by the tea leaves.
Rice Grinding [handwritten]
![Rice Grinding [handwritten]](https://www.paperjewels.org/sites/default/files/styles/square_thumbnail/public/slides/rice-grinding_0.jpg?itok=R7-LwAWK "Rice Grinding [handwritten]")
A rare individually hand-painted postcard of a woman with a traditional stone rice grinder, often used to grind rice batter to make South Indian idlis or dosas.
A Water Carrier, Central Provinces India.
[Original caption] Woman Water Carrier. It is no unusual sight in India to see women performing manual labour, and in some cases they perform harder tasks than the men.
Coolie with his Basket
A postcard by the great Indian painter M.V. Dhurandhar illustrating an Englishwoman looking over a coolie offering his services with an empty basket. Note the cleverly positioned Indian woman with a basket on her head in the background.
The message
A Cobbler
An early postcard that blends photography, the collotype printing process and colorization to produce what the Germans called a "Lichtdruck" or "light print" that resembles a painting.
A Water Carrier, Madras
Today goatskins, pigskins and earthen pitchers have given way to plastic jars and bottles and huge, lumbering dripping water tankers that supplement inadequate piped water supplies in towns and cities throughout South Asia.
Best Christmas Wishes 1908
A 101 years later, a look at a Christmas card from a major Calcutta retailer.
Sind Water Carriers
A rather rare postcard of Sindhi female water carriers, even if it was posed in a studio, and, on the back addressed from Kirkee cantonment near Poona on May 2, 1917: "I see the women go through camp every day carrying these pots, some are
Ceylon Tea Packers
[Original caption] The amount of tea exported from Ceylon annually exceeds 150,000,000 lbs., and about 400,000 coolies from Southern India are employed in the tea gardens.
