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Bangalore-Bengaluru: Stamped, sealed & delivered
Even postcards, inland letters, airmail envelopes and postage stamps, that indispensable supporting cast of every pre-90’s love story, now mostly exist as quaint rem(a)inders of an age that is retreating so fast in the rear-view mirrors of our memories that they may well have been part of a collective fever dream.
It’s July (what, already?!), or, by the Hindu calendar, the rainy month of Aashaada, when weddings and housewarmings are put on hold in our historically agrarian society so that every able-bodied human can be out working in the fields.Aashaada is also the temporal setting for Kalidasa’s lyrical work Meghadoota, in which a lovelorn yaksha begs a rain cloud to carry a message to his beloved.
Fortunately, we don’t need rain clouds to do us such favours any more, and yearning itself has lost its cachet with the coming of the WhatsApp video call. Even postcards, inland letters, airmail envelopes and postage stamps, that indispensable supporting cast of every pre-90’s love story, now mostly exist as quaint rem(a)inders of an age that is retreating so fast in the rear-view mirrors of our memories that they may well have been part of a collective fever dream.
But as a wonderful philatelic exhibition on Babasaheb Ambedkar (it runs until July 4) at the Bangalore International Centre shows, postal memorabilia, especially postage stamps, are a great portal into contemporary history. So which Bengaluru people and institutions have achieved postage stamp status over the years?
By way of context, the Bangalore General Post Office, or the Imperial Post Office, an outpost of the official British post and telecom carrier, was established in the city as early as 1800 CE, the fourth of its kind in India, following those at Calcutta (1774), Madras (1786) and Bombay (1794). For over a century before that, the Mysore country had enjoyed a postal system called the Mysuru Anche, established by Chikkadevaraja Wadiyar.
Probably the first Mysorean honoured with a stamp was Sir M Visvesvaraya (1960), on the occasion of his 100th birthday, a rare exception to the P&T department’s cardinal rule that forbids issuing stamps of living people. However, the first Kannadiga – an important distinction to some – to grace a postage stamp was the 12th century poet, statesman and social reformer, Basava, in 1967. A second stamp featuring Basava came out in 1997, making him one of the few Indians honoured with more than one stamp.
Basava wasn’t from Bengaluru, however. Neither were the Kannada literary luminaries who had stamps issued in their names, like DV Gundappa (1988), and Jnanpith Award winners Kuvempu, Da Ra Bendre, V K Gokak and Masti Venkatesh Iyengar (who all featured on the same stamp in 1997; poet laureate Kuvempu finally got a stamp to himself in 2017), although many of them lived and worked in this city for some part of their lives. Others from the state who have been ‘stamped’ include RK Narayan (2009), Mysorean; statesman S Nijalingappa (2003), a Davanagere man who served two terms as chief minister, and legendary actor-director Guru Dutt (2004), who was born Vasanth Kumar Padukone in the eponymous village near Udupi, and moved to Calcutta soon after (no, Deepika isn’t related).
What then of Bengaluru itself? The first Bengaluru institution to make it to a postage stamp was the St Martha’s Hospital (1986), commemorating a century of service to the people of the city. Others include the Bangalore GPO (1988), featuring the six-storeyed building, inaugurated 1985, that is its current home; the St Joseph’s Boys’ High School (in 2008, on its 150th anniversary); the Indian Institute of Science (a pair of stamps this time, issued in its centenary year, 2008); and the United Theological College (in 2011, for its centenary). As always, some inexplicable omissions with respect to both people and institutions, but c’est la vie.
PS: Did you know you can buy postcards at half price and have them customised at the GPO? And the name of this customizable postcard? Meghdoot!
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
