Princely state stamps

In Gujarati by HindiRinny1 Comment

Stamp, letter, and postcard collections are some of my favorite things to stumble upon… seeing typefaces, illustrations, and everyday handwriting all on one little artifact.

These stamps were found on Raj Kumar’s blog, IndiaStamp, in his collection of postage from the Princely States (those which were ruled indirectly by British Raj through an Indian ruler).

 

Comments

  1. You might be interested in this early example of printed Gujarati from 1822, which I just came across in Google Books

    http://ia700305.us.archive.org/15/items/atranslationnde00bahrgoog/atranslationnde00bahrgoog.pdf

    Among other things, it has the old Gujarati epsilon-shaped E letter, cognate with the Devanagari counterpart but since abandoned. The spelling is also clearly from a time before conjunct letter forms were introduced on the Devanagari model to write consonant clusters. I also find it striking how English words are written as ruby annotations above their transcribed counterparts in Gujarati script, something I have only seen otherwise in Japanese and Chinese scripts.

    Unfortunately, the quality of the reproduction isn’t the best…

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