Railways and postal services were introduced in colonial India in the early 1850s. In due course, these new technologies made long-distance travel and communication widely accessible and affordable. In a parallel development, the introduction of limited representation in legislatures in the 1890s added urgency to tap the potential trans-local identities enumerated in the decennial censuses beginning in 1871 – 72.

Given these developments, local communities, in particular, castes, tapped new technologies to connect with kindred groups across the country and combine to form pan-Indian communities. Post offices allowed members of these aggregate groupings to correspond with each other, while railways enabled them to meet periodically and devise strategies to capture a share in legislatures, educational institutions and public employment proportionate to their census population. Drawing upon philatelic material covering a century, the exhibition highlights the role of the postal system in this new politics.

The exhibition is divided into two broad parts that bring together correspondence and publications of several caste-based community organisations and individuals from across the country and the philatelic output of the post-colonial state. 

The exhibition has been curated by Vikas Kumar.

About the Curator

Vikas Kumar is a faculty member at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. His research explores the interfaces between politics and statistics, economics and religion and Kauṭilya’s Arthasastra and other pre-modern texts. He is the author of Numbers as Political Allies: The Census in Jammu and Kashmir (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Waiting for a Christmas Gift: Essays on Politics, Elections and Media in Nagaland (Heritage Publishing House, 2023) and the co-author of Numbers in India’s Periphery: The Political Economy of Government Statistics (with Ankush Agrawal, Cambridge University Press, 2020).

He curated the exhibitions Counting and Controlling Population: Postal Services, Census & Family Planning in Post-colonial India (1951 – 2011) (Bangalore International Centre, January 2023) and Baba Saheb: An Extraordinary Philatelic Journey (1966−2022) (India International Centre, New Delhi, June 2022).