Bombay Ducks Roasted by Captain C M Browne, 12th Regiment N.I

Captain C M Browne, Bombay Ducks Roasted by Captain C.M. Browne, 12th Regiment N.I., Bombay: Printed and published at the Times of India Steam Press, 1876

[36] p., [30] leaves of plates including 30 caricatures printed by the photozincographic process with explanatory text on facing pages; original cloth with gilt title on cover
8.8 x 11.2 in (22 x 28 cm)

BOMBAY DUCKS: ROASTED — SATIRICAL CARICATURES OF COLONIAL BOMBAY BY CAPTAIN C. M. BROWNE, 1876

Issued at the Times of India Steam Press in 1876, Bombay Ducks: Roasted is a pointed—and often irreverent—visual chronicle of late-Victorian Bombay, produced by Captain C. M. Browne of the 12th Regiment, Native Infantry. The title plays a double pun: on the well-known local fish “Bombay duck” and on the act of “roasting” one’s subjects in print. Across thirty caricature plates, each paired with a printed facing caption, Browne dissects the social theatre of the Presidency capital—its civil and military officialdom, clubland and cantonment life, mercantile elites, monsoon inconveniences, and the teeming street with its hawkers, bhistis, hackney carriages, and processions.

What gives the album particular interest for historians of print is its photozincographic production. Photozincography—an early photomechanical process in which a photographic transfer was made to a zinc plate for printing—occupies a transitional moment between hand-worked lithography and fully mechanised halftone relief processes. In India, adoption of such techniques by a commercial press of stature (here, the Times of India) signals both technological ambition and an appetite for illustrated ephemera pitched to an educated Anglo-Indian readership. The process yields a crisp line that preserves the nervous energy of Browne’s draughtsmanship while allowing economical multiplication of plates; in surviving copies, tones remain clean and the bite of the line is unusually sharp for a satirical work produced at scale.

Browne’s point of view is recognisably that of the British officer-observer—worldly, sardonic, sometimes affectionate, and often caustic. The plates commonly juxtapose uniforms and mufti, municipal improvement and everyday chaos, and the etiquette of the drawing-room with the improvisations of the bazaar. A recurring pleasure is the artist’s command of physiognomy and posture: the slight forward lean of a broker in negotiation, the languor of a “grass widow” at the bandstand, the squared shoulders of a subaltern on parade, or the hunched determination of men wrestling a gharry through flooded streets. This compressed body language—half cartoon, half quick study—gives the album its documentary bite.

As with the broader satirical tradition—Punch in London, Oudh Punch and The Indian Charivari in the subcontinent—the humour is period-bound and not infrequently stereotyped; modern readers will recognise the colonial gaze at work. Yet, taken critically, the album is invaluable evidence for how Bombay’s multi-layered society was seen (and sold) to its English-speaking public in the decade after the cotton boom and in the run-up to the city’s late-nineteenth-century civic rebuild. It registers the textures of urban modernity—tramlines and railheads, harbour traffic, bandstands, gymkhanas, race-meets, promenades on the Esplanade—while catching smaller social rituals: umbrellas in the first downpour, the etiquette of calls and cards, and the delicate ballet of servants and sahibs in the bungalow.

Bibliographically, Bombay Ducks is desirable in a complete, unsophisticated state: thirty plates with their facing texts, original blue cloth gilt-titled on the upper cover, and sound inner hinges. Many copies were broken for the wall—hence intact examples are scarcer than their initial print run might suggest. For collectors of Bombay iconography, Anglo-Indian satire, or Indian photomechanical printing, the work occupies a keystone niche: it is both a lively pictorial record and an artefact of the city’s printing history. Its production by a leading Bombay newspaper press underscores the market for illustrated humour then emerging alongside the Presidency’s expanding public sphere.

NON-EXPORTABLE

This lot is offered at RESERVE

This lot will be shipped in "as is" condition. For further details, please refer to the images of individual lots as reference for the condition of each book.