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| Saturday, December 28, 2002 |
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The stamps issued between 1840s and 1870s have been named "the classics." The Indian classics comprise the Scinde Dawks, the Lithographs by the East India Company and the Crown Colony Issues. Sind was a
province in western India with an area of about 57000 square miles and
a population of about 2,500,000. In 1850, there were four post offices
in the province of Sind — Sukkur, Shikarpur, Hyderabad, and Karachi.
The mails from these places were carried to Bombay by runners called kasids. |
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In 1850, Sir Bartle Frere became the Chief Commissioner of Scinde. Being an admirer of Sir Rowland Hill, the man who introduced the first postage stamp of the world, the Penny Post, on May 6, 1840, making prepayment compulsory, he improved upon the postal system of the state by introducing a cheap and uniform rate for postage known as Dak or Dawk. With the help of Edward Lees Coffey, Postmaster of Karachi, he designed the first postage stamps of India, which ultimately came to be known as the "Scinde Dawk" stamps. The design on the stamps depicts a heart-shaped device divided into three segments, each containing one of the letters E.I.C. of the East India Company. Above this is the figure 4 and below your have the value ½ anna. The whole design is further enclosed in a circular belt with the inscription "Scinde district dawk" in capital letters. In the lower part of the belt is a buckle. Some records show that an order was placed with De La Rue and Co. of England for printing these stamps. These stamps are found in three different colours: red, white and blue. For long it has been held that the stamps were first printed in red on brittle vermilion wafers which were formally used as a seal on letters. The red stamps, however, were found to be too brittle for postal use and therefore a new supply was embossed without colour on whitish or bluish paper. It is not known how many stamps there were to a sheet but there does exist a large irregular block of 14 stamps which might originally have been 18 stamps. It can, therefore, be concluded that either the stamps were issued in four rows of eight stamps each, totalling to 32 stamps for Re 1 or a sheet contained eight rows of eight stamps in each row for Rs 2. In the second printing light blue lines were introduced to give some uniformity in margins between two stamps. These stamps were also found unsuitable because when fixed on a white cover they were not easily noticeable to postal clerks working at night in candle light. Therefore, a fresh order was placed in England to emboss them in blue. By the time these stamps arrived, an order was issued in September 1854 that the Scinde Dawk stamps should be withdrawn as stamps were being introduced on an all-India basis. The Scinde Dawk stamps remained in use for almost two years from July 1, 1852, to September 30, 1854. It seems the withdrawal order was not fully implemented, for in June 1856, the then Director-General of the Posts, India, received a letter addressed to him which had the Scinde Dawk stamps affixed on it. He immediately took stock of the situation and the balance stock was destroyed by the collector of Karachi. Even though several
thousands of Scinde Dawk stamps were used between 1852 and 1854, very
few survive now. A lot of forgeries do, however, exist in all three
colours. |
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IN
July this year Scinde Dawk stamps celebrated 150 years of their
release. Released in the province of Sind (a part of India under the
British Raj) by the then Chief Commissioner Sir Bartle Edward Frere,
these were Asia’s first postage stamps. In 1952, the Department of
Posts of India celebrated the centenary of the release of the postage
stamp by holding an exhibition but neither made any mention of it on
any of its postal stationery nor released a stamp depicting the Scinde
Dak, may be because Sind now happens to be a part of Pakistan.