When I was a child in the 1970s, stamp collecting was a popular hobby amongst some of my peers. I never really took to it. I was interested in other countries, and I remember liking some of the designs on stamps that arrived on postcards sent by family members and friends from their holidays. Exotic birds and animals, and other countries’ famous people and buildings, drew me in, but never enough to make me invest time and energy in building a proper collection. My brother dabbled, and took the Stanley Gibbons catalogue out of our local library, but I think this was more with a view to seeing what money could be made from this hobby rather than for the sake of the hobby itself. I’m pretty sure he never showed a profit.
As a historian, postage stamps have taken on a different kind of value to me. Like any other kind of ephemera, they can tell us a great deal about when and where they come from. The fact that they are state-issued adds to this value, as the images give us an insight on what stories a country’s government wanted to tell about its country at any given time. Whose portraits appear on the stamps? Which buildings or natural features were celebrated? What events were being marked or commemorated. Using a public history lens, the images on stamps tell us who or what a state values, and by extension, who or what it did not regard as valuable.
I was in India recently for my son’s wedding, and we built in a lot of sight-seeing around the celebration. I clocked up more UNESCO World Heritage Sites in ten days than I have in some whole years! Tucked away inside one such site, Delhi’s Red Fort Complex, is a small gallery that got me thinking about postage stamps again. The Philately Gallery, run by India Post, offers a small but wide-ranging collection of stamp designs and other postal history items, including decommissioned post boxes from around the country, and a wax model of Mahatma Gandhi writing a letter. The stamps are not originals – they have all been reproduced in large formats to make sure that visitors can see all of their details clearly. Some are arranged thematically, others historically, like the India@75 wall that showcases stamp designs from 2022. All of the stamps on display have the kind of public history value that is common to any ephemera designed to celebrate.
And it’s here that sport really comes into its own as a key feature in India’s image of itself, and as something that its postal service knows is worth celebrating and commemorating.
The collection includes stamps issued to mark India’s participation in various Olympic Games, like the hockey action shown in stamps from Munich 1972 and Barcelona 1992, and the badminton player for London 2012. For the Commonwealth Games, it is Delhi’s own edition, that of 2010, that is celebrated with an archery design. Other events hosted in India that received the approval of India Post to be displayed here include the 2022 FIDE Chess Olympiad, held in Chennai. Meanwhile, the familiar postage stamp design of celebrating a hero finds it sporting form in the 2013 issue that marked cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar’s 200th test match, played against the West Indies in Mumbai. This small sample gives us a way into India’s post-Partition sense of itself as an outward looking nation that competes on the world stage, a welcoming place for global visitors, and, in line with long-term tropes in Indian history, a place of heroes.
Postage stamps are something of a dying art form, as electronic communications gradually replace the letter, the greetings card, and the postcard as dominant forms. All the more reason for us as historians to to assess past designs as a primary source for national history.
