Views of India in Colour

Anonymous, Views of India in Colour, Bombay & Calcutta: Times of India Offices; London Agency: 187 Fleet Street, n.d. [c. 1910s–1920s].

Pictorial chromolithographic wrappers with a stylised sunset design and gilt lettering; 12 mounted chromolithographic plates after photographs and paintings, each on heavy card with a printed caption beneath; interleaved with guards. Original cloth-backed pictorial boards.
NTK SIZE

INDIA IN COLOUR: A TIMES OF INDIA ALBUM OF CHROMOLITHOGRAPHIC VIEWS, C. 1910S

This finely produced album presents a series of twelve mounted chromolithographic views of major Indian cities and landscapes, issued by the Times of India offices in Bombay and Calcutta in the early twentieth century. Among the cities represented are Calcutta, Bombay, Agra, Madras, Delhi, Darjeeling, Simla, Kashmir, Benares, Hyderabad, Lucknow and Ootacamund—an itinerary that encapsulates both imperial capitals and favoured hill stations of the Raj.

The colour plates, after photographs and paintings, offer richly saturated scenes of urban monuments, civic architecture, and natural landscapes. Views of Bombay include striking depictions of Marine Drive and Back Bay framed by palms, and the Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) with bustling street life—capturing the visual identity of the colonial metropolis at its zenith.

Albums such as these were produced for the expatriate and tourist market, celebrating the grandeur of India’s architectural and scenic wealth in a format both decorative and portable. They belong to a wider corpus of early twentieth-century souvenir view-books that combined modern chromolithographic technology with the imperial gaze, situating India as both exotic spectacle and civic modernity.

Today, such albums are valued as documents of the visual culture of empire, preserving the colour palette, monumental pride, and cultural imagination of colonial India on the eve of modern photography’s ascendancy.

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