ABSTRACT
The date of the postcard album of Miss Josephine Eppes, preserved in the Oriental and India Office Collections in London, is approximately 1900. Bound in a decorative red cloth cover with the words ‘Postcard Album’ embossed on the front, it contains private photos, loose clippings and other forms of personal memorabilia, as well as seventy-two different postcard views of people and places in Burma, Simla, Darjeeling, Calcutta, Lahore, Delhi, Bombay, and Agra. The preciousness of Josephine’s postcard album helps to distinguish it from another colonial collection, The People of India, an eight-volume catalogue published between 1868 and 1875 containing some five hundred photographs of India’s ‘ethnic types’. Here, as David MacDougall has noted, human beings are presented as scientific specimens as neatly ‘as butterflies impaled on pins’.1 But Josephine’s postcard album was never accorded the same scientific authority as this nineteenth century photographic collection, with its powerful claims to truth and objectivity. Instead, the postcard has remained decidedly unscientific, lacking the seriousness or exactitude accorded to the photograph.
