Something old, something new, and a whole lot of love for the city of Madras: this is what these postcards are made of. There are 15 of them, done mostly in black and white, bearing sketches of iconic buildings from the city with then-and-now renditions. Photographer and creative entrepreneur P Venkatesan, who has printed them through his venture Postcardsville.com, calls the collection Reflections: Madras/Chennai, and plans to release it on Madras Day.
The postcards will be on display alongside an exhibition of vintage images and postcards titled Serving the Raj - Hired Help in Colonial Madras, curated by Venkatesh Ramakrishnan of Madras Local History Group. They are Venkatesan’s tribute to ‘Lighthouse man’ D Hemachandra Rao, who passed away recently. Hemachandra, also a philatelist, had turned his house into the Maritime Heritage Museum. “He was a good friend and an inspiration and I hoped to get him to launch these postcards,“ says Venkatesh. “Last year on Madras Day, he visited four post offices in the city to create cancellation covers bearing the stamp with the date,” he remembers. “He did so despite his age; he was over 80 years old then.“
One of the postcards in the series depicts a bullock cart rolling by the clocktower at Mint Street. Others feature the towers of Madras High Court towers rising from thick tree cover; the Ice House standing on a near-empty road in which a horse-drawn cart trundles by…city artist Meganath Venkatesan has sketched a city of quiet roads as well as one that has been quick to adapt. Other buildings featured include Egmore and Central Railway Stations, Chepauk Palace, Egmore Museum, Anna University, and Spencer Plaza. “We picked places that had reliable old photos for reference,” says Venkatesan, who is currently based in Kanchipuram. Venkatesan and his six-member team form the core of Postcardsville, that the former started in 2020.
