Views of the World, Market Day, Daijeeling, India

First of all, it's Darjeeling, not Daijeeling.  Whether it's a misprint, or the postcard's publisher didn't know the difference....well, who knows.

 As communities in India go, Darjeeling is a fairly recent one.  It started out as a hill station in the mid nineteenth century.  In a nutshell, India can be a pretty hot place, and it wasn't uncommon for the British occupiers to come up sick from heat, malaria, and a whole host of other nasty stuff that significantly shortened their lives.  So, build mini resorts with English architecture, gardens, food, fun, and drink.  Build them high enough in the Himalayan foothills so that things were cool enough to recall an English autumn, and with any luck, fewer soldiers and diplomats dropping dead.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

Click on Views of the World in labels to see more cards from the series.  

Bhutanese Milkmen in Stereo

I've written about Keystone, and Underwood & Underwood, the two largest stereoview companies in the United States in past posts. Anyone interested in going into more detail should click on stereoview in the labels section. In my post of November 28, 2009, "Underwood & Underwood, Geography" I dealt specifically with the Underwood brothers and their company. The backbone of the stereoview industry was geographic images. Staff photographers and free lancers provided many Americans with the only window on the wider world that they would ever know. I was born in 1955 and my first grade teacher still used old stereoviews to teach us geography. The caption on this card reads, "Bhutanese milkmen with curious bamboo-jars, at the public Fountain, Darjeeling, India. Copyright 1903 by Underwood &Underwood."