First Contact

The stamp collector who is familiar with finely-wrought engravings of the 19th century will likely find himself at a loss when first dealing with the early handstamped impressions of Jammu & Kashmir. Truth to tell, some of us never quite regain composure. These curious stamps were done in watercolor pigments, which may still smear in high humidity.

The paper itself is a gloriously resilient local production that may outlive all other stamp papers. We are spared the usual frets about hinge marks (no gum) and short perfs (no perfs). We do still care about good centering, wide margins, and clean impressions in all but the rarities. The image above, rare as rare on cover, is that of the ½-anna yellow watercolor circular, SG23, a detail from a railway cover to Calcutta, 17 July 1876, collection Hellrigl.

But let us not distort things too much; along its own dimensions some of the Kashmir material is attractive indeed. The scan above is taken from the cover of the Dawson auction catalog 1967. It shows the 4a “myrtle green” SG100a (still unlisted in Scott) and which is attested perhaps only once more on cover.

The price-to-rarity ratio of J&K stamps is remarkably low compared with that of more popular and better understood collecting areas. The collector of ordinary means and modest patience can still acquire items of true rarity. Only a hundred or so copies of some of the middle-priced issues are likely existent now. The higher-priced material (>£600 in the catalogue) is truly rare, ranging from possibly non-existent in at least one case to at most a couple of dozen copies. Some very diverse-looking material is often bundled up under a single entry in our catalogues. Truly scarce material thereby passes from hand to hand at much lower prices than would be the case had we recourse to an authoritative and widely-used specialist handbook.

So Where Are We?

And when? The map below (not really meant to be legible) shows the administrative lay of the land in the mid-1890s when the postal arrangements of the entire region, Kashmir, Jammu, and the Punjab, were formalized under British authority. Our story pertains to the preceding three decades (1866-1894) when Jammu-Kashmir issued its own stamps. The British post office worked in a kind of collaboration with these native offices for handling mail crossing the border to more overt British territory. Puńch nestles in there somewhere too, and she issued her own stamps for part of the same period. These were also watercolors, and the designs may have been cut by the same seal cutter, a certain Rahat Ju of Srinagar. Map: D. Appleton Co. NY, 1890s:

Kashmir and Jammu are respectively the northern and southern provinces of an unlikely State that straddles the western-most reaches of the Himalayas. J&K philately sits uncomfortably, however, under the purview of “Himalayan philately.” Most of the postal activity looked south to the hot plains of the British Punjab and beyond. That is not so surprising considering the daunting barriers in the other directions. Tibet in the east was non-existent so far as the postal record of our period goes, and there are only a few Kashmir-Afghan covers still extant. Though the northern frontier is formed from the Hindu Kush and the frightful Karakoram range (with a pass at 18,000') there was a curious and sporadic postal connection between Yarkand in Chinese Turkestan to Hoshiarpur in India along an old traders’ route. Since the route passed through Ladakh, Kashmir postage was added at Leh where the item entered the postal system for onward transmission. The passage one way took a couple of months by caravan. In stark contrast, internal mailings between Srinagar (the summer capital) and Jammu City (the winter capital) would take only a couple of days, with relays of runners pressing on through the night with torches. That important local route was onerous enough, and snow often blocked the high passes, such as the 8,600' Hājī Pīr north of Punch, the 8,900' Banihāl (which means ‘blizzard’), or the 12,200' Pīr Panjāl. The rough east-west distance across Kashmir at the time was about 300 miles, Himalayan crow style.

Old Srinagar on the Jhelum. Srinagar was the northern/summer capital of the union. The town itself was often referred to as “Cashmere,” and the early British postmarks used at Srinagar were so inscribed. The population in 1891 was about 120,000. This scan of Srinagar’s Third City Bridge is taken from Winthrop Boggs’ 1941 philatelic article, which is reproduced on-site.

Modern Jammu on the Tawi. Jammu was the southern/winter capital of the union. The river, which was crossed by a suspension bridge in our postal period, flows roughly southwest in a narrow ravine to join the Chenab. The population in 1891 was about 35,000. Our thanks to Paul La Porte of Chicago for making this painterly photograph available to the public.

Panj-āb itself means “five waters”, so-named for some larger five of the many tributaries of the Indus River. By tradition, these rivers are: Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Sutlej, and Beas. The Jhelum was known to the Greeks as the Hydaspes, reached by the armies of Alexander. The Punjab came under British control in the spring of 1849.

Winthrop Boggs also provides this photo of a “typical Kashmir post office.” Maybe it is really one of the many chaukis, the kind of postal runners’ depot that eventually dotted the main routes. The Stamp Specialist, Blue Book, p 57 (1941).

Postal History

Postal history is the soul of the subject, and real discovery in this curious philatelic niche is open to all comers even now; indeed, especially now. Each province supported about three dozen POs, but covers attesting to some of them are hardly known. British Indian postage normally had to accompany native stamps on mail crossing the border. There was also an autonomous “Maharaja’s Post” to a few towns in Punjab and mail thus borne avoided British postage. So-called “javab” covers, so named for a characteristic manuscript notation that they bear, also often crossed the border without British postage. A number of prominent specialists had thus misconstrued a number of these as internal mailings, including the notable example upscreen with the myrtle stamp. That some javabs did carry British postage is one of our (many) unsolved puzzles.

Above: British Indian and Kashmir stamps together. This detail is from a letter that took the most popular route of all: Srinagar to Jammu and onward via Sialkot in India to Amritsar. Apart from being a notable religious site, Amritsar was an important commercial junction for the fabric trades. One will find many a Kashmir cover destined to the station at Katra Ahluwalia in Amritsar’s woolens district.

Sialkot and Amritsar are about 70 or so miles apart. Relays of runners would take about half a day to traverse the route between them. The short Sialkot to Jammu rail extension (about 27 miles) did not exist for most of our postal period, though the main stretch of the line between Lahore and Gujarat on the map (and onward ultimately to Peshawar) had already been built by the end of the 1870s. The Wazirabad-Sialkot branch was completed in 1880, and the extension to Jammu in early 1889. The map detail is from an early 1890s Constable.

There are a couple of desirable railway sorting-office markings that attest to mail on these two sections of line, the “L.7” for the Wazirabad-Sialkot branch, and the “L.51” for the Sialkot to Jammu extension (ref. Bard). The internet has repetitious entries to the effect that the Sialkot to Jammu branch was completed in 1890, though the datestamp shown above is from a May 1889 cover. Most every claim on these pages comes with an invisible tag: Is it really so?

The Jammu-Sialkot railroad link became defunct at the time of Partition in 1947, with Jammu remaining in India and Sialkot going to Pakistan. The India and Pakistan border also interrupts the line between Amritsar and Lahore, and thus the old runner line that connected Sialkot and Amritsar. Routes in the west were also broken. Just as Jammu was divorced from Sialkot, so Punch became separated from its erstwhile postal affiliate, Kahuta. One stretch of the current India-Pakistan border zigzags twice across the old runner’s line north of Puńch. Those of us who prefer to dwell in the 19th century find this new-fangled geometry passing strange.

Kashmir mail destined abroad to locations other than the British Isles are very scarce. Covers to or from Germany, Austria[-Hungary], France, and the USA are commanding high prices these days. And come to think upon’t, what others abroad are there? There just must be something to the Orient somewhere, or South-East Asia.

Summary of Printing Implements

The Watercolor Decade 1866-76

Three triplets of implements were used for the production of the watercolors: Three circular dies at Jammu, three rectangular dies at Srinagar, and three composite plates (one for Jammu, two for Srinagar). By ‘composite’ is meant that two different denominations are accomodated on a single plate. The dating of covers of this early period is hampered by the fact that the native cancellation was done by pen-marking or with three dateless seals:

The Kashmir Seal: A brick-red circular marking means cancelled at Srinagar, 1866-77. The same implement was used with black in the 1877-79 period.

Two Jammu Seals: The first cancelling implement at Jammu was a circular seal used with purple pigment in the 1866-68 period and with black in the 1868-70 period. That seal was superseded by a square seal with cut-off corners (so technically an octagon). This implement had been fashioned for use at an iron mine some eight years before the advent of the the native postal service itself. Yes, an iron mine; such are the charms of J&K philatelly. We have tried to find out about the existence of an iron mine, its name and whereabouts, etc., but without real success, so far, except for a reference to some iron-works at Soap, “the ore for which is obtained from a bed of impure calcareous limonite intercalated in the limestones and rocks to the east of Achibal.” Tom D. Latouche, May 1890, check internet under “Sapphire Mines of Kashmir.”

The Transitional Year 1877-78

Beginning in the late spring of 1877 at Jammu, lively spates of paper and pigment experiments, mostly in oilcolors on native or on new European laid paper, were carried out with the original three circular dies and the Jammu plate. It was a time of evident floundering, and which of this test material found its way into actual postal use as an “issue” appears to have been a matter of fate. Some of this production was in clear anticipation of a new regime of plate-printing on European laid paper that was to ensue in May 1878.

Many of the oilcolor transitionals are delightfully awful, but at least they don’t drip. The stamp shown above, in fact, is a particular delight for those who have come to know it.

Paper and pigment experiments may also have been done at Srinagar during this same period. These productions included watercolors on a variety of unusual wove papers. Unlike the Jammu operation, the Srinagar office was evidently more careful in not allowing this test material out as actual postage. Those that did escape into postal use at Jammu have thus become de facto “issues,” a slightly uncomfortable state of affairs.

New Rectangulars 1878-94

The Old Period ended in May 1878 with the introduction of new plates and new native postal markings, which now bear despatch and dating information. Six new plates came into use, one a laggard by about five years. These new stamps make for some admittedly pedestrian fare compared with the extravagant and eccentric productions of the Old Period, but it is subtle, and has a way of growing on those who stay with it. Even though the later material is generally much more accessible to collectors, it has been studied with less penetration—or at least has been dwelt upon with less thoroughness in print. Even with the help of better triangulation from a broader range of postal markings, much remains murky about the dating of varieties.

The item on the left was printed at Jammu in a shade similar to that of the transitional circular oilcolor shown with it, both spring 1878. Indeed some of the New Rectangular “inks” seem to be just slightly thinned-out oilcolor. Some of the late circulars were even printed on precisely the same type of European laid paper that characterizes the first rectangulars.

This item, true to the new-is-always-worse theory in stamps, was printed from the same plate as was the preceding, but on thin wove paper at Srinagar. Notice the impression of a repairing screwhead in the floral margin. The plates may have been rebedded to a new base after their removal to Srinagar, perhaps from April 1881, when Srinagar resumed its annual stint of being capital of the State. The large stock of stamps that had been optimistically produced in this early Srinagar period were partially depleted during the dying years of the native post office, 1891-94. The term “re-issue” is often used to describe the late deployment of this early stock.

New Colors. After 1883 the different denominations could be distinguished by color, and a new eighth-anna in yellow was introduced. The failure with some of the yellow (as above) was due to turmeric mixed in the pigment. New Colors were slow to appear in postal use, and examples from their advent year are scarce, which is not so strange if their purpose was more philatelic than postal. In this way the New Colors stand as counterparts to the Special Printings of the old watercolor period, which also came in new colors (the yellow being something of a failure too) and of which postally used copies are also notably the scarcer.

This printing in pink was done in the very late period, just prior to the closing of the native offices in 1894. Since there was a good deal of early (pre-New Color) stock that was still being sopped up for postage, a number of these late items were likely also intended more for the philatelic market; certainly they are scarce in postally used condition.

Spook Tale. Certain New Rectangular ½a blacks appear and disappear from the stocks of collectors on certain anniversaries (typically late autumn when the wind is high) and invariably without an owner’s awareness. The story behind these disappearances and invasions remains mysterious.

Reading Covers

“Top edge eaten by rat, but still looking very good.”
—anonymous J&K auction dealer

The modern covers collector will definitely need to decipher a certain amount of Dogri and Indo-Persian script for learning dates and destinations. Having no real knowledge of the languages is no bar to espying matters of philatelic note. Familiar old covers gradually give up more of their secrets, and the puzzles left lurking are footholds for the next stage.

Left to right, Srinagar, az Ladākh, az Kashmīr, and az Jammūn. The az is Persian for “from.” Many destinations or despatch points simply have to be recognized as recurrent logograms, so cursive they may be.

Sialkot markings in Dogri script. Sialkot operated what was in effect an extraterritorial office for Jammu for some of our period. A postage due seal (above left) and an inseparable ‘duplex’ obliterator and datestamp (right) have come down to us from this operation. Syalkoţ is inscribed at the top of the datestamp, followed by the Hindu month maghar. Strangely, a number of prominent collectors of the past did not care to broach matters Dogri, and for many decades the duplex was thought to have been a Jammu marking proper. Speaking of such:

Both Masson’s and Séfi & Mortimer’s influential works listed this marking as being from an unidentified office of Jammu Province. While the name at the top is usually a blobby affair (left) there are many examples that are legible enough (right). In fact the name is Srinagar. One reason for not suspecting a Srinagar venue was that overt symbols of Dogra power were often suppressed in largely Mohammedan locales. Still, it was a curious and long-lasting lapse. It is common marking, and postal use alone should have made the matter clear. Belated realizations of such basic facts is a common experience for us J&Kers. May we all look forward to kicking ourselves about other blindness in the near future.

Some forms of the Dogri or Takri class of scripts, especially certain cursives casually known as “merchant scripts,” are notoriously difficult to decipher. Most specialists do learn to pick out dating information and the odd postal destination, but seldom more. Some of it may well harbor matter of postal significance that has so far eluded us.

Non-postal Productions

A good deal of material produced with the official printing implements never saw use as actual postage. It ranges from such rarified fare as unique engraver’s proofs to lowly reprints in wrong (“fancy”) colors on a circus of wove papers. Between the extremes, there is interesting and disparate fare of uncertain status, common to rare, for which the tradition tends to invoke the term “printing trial.” Non-postals produced with the same pigments and papers as originals have always hindered the fortunes of J&K philately. Some comments about reprints are given in the glossary at the bottom of the screen.

Forgery

The nature of the J&K material has invited its share of skulduggery. Apart from the deluge of modern facsimiles taken from the old illustrations in the SG catalogue, the most common type of forgery is known as the “missing-die” type, the result (as the ► received story has it) of corruption in the native post office. The prospective collector must learn to recognize this and other bogus material from fifty paces by day one, for seldom is the week that eBay and others are not proffering some of it at bad prices. Not amusing is the prospect able new forgery. The middle price range (in the logarithmic sense) is the chief worry, for it represents items most dangerous to the ambitious beginner.

Above: A missing-die forgery on the left compared with the authentic design on the right. There are many differences, but notice particularly the curlicue 3-like Dogri element near the top. That is the ḍa- in Dawk Jammu ~ Jammu Post. Its lower tail swoops left in the forgery to touch the neighboring Persian element, while in the original that tail is tucked well back, giving a markedly different slant to the element.

It is fortunate that a few basic cues eliminate vast amounts of bogus matter. The field is not nearly so difficult in this respect as is sometimes intimated. Still, what were once widely accepted to be the rare first issues of the State (the ‘Die I’) were accepted eventually as forgeries. It is reported that £50 prices were paid in the 19th-century for examples, clearly a kingly sum for a stamp in those days. Today they are rarer still and of rather indeterminate market value:

The 4a indigo and ½a sap green ‘Die I’ watercolor forgeries. That such were ‘rough sketch’ essays for the first issue is unlikely. For one thing, the Persian betrays features that look slavishly copied from the issued stamps, yet by someone who evidently had no sense about what it was he was copying. It is conceivable that other revelations like the Die I saga lurk today. The nature of the Die I was revealed in 1899 by Sir David Parkes Masson (1846-1915), a figure who still bestrides our subject.

Were it not for Masson’s retrieval, preservation, and analysis of some implausible fraction of the covers that remains to us, J&K stampdom would be impoverished indeed. It is much to his credit, especially given philatelic practice of his day, that he did not soak off or cut stamps away from their covers. The red notations seen on many a cover of the early period are his. The image above was nicked from the internet in yet another of its serial thefts.

Certificates

A growing danger is the work of a latter-day breed of expertizers (expertisers) who are not qualified for J&K work. While doubtful or debatable certificates are to be expected with some of this material, we should be spared the absurd. One example was of a cover bearing a clear and unproblematic despatch date in Persian, which the self-styled expert ignored in favor of construing an ambiguous datestamp numeral in a way that would thrust the item into the pre-stamp period. Without comment, the cover was thus certified as bearing an impossible date. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Defacement Proofs and Reprints

In February 1898, all of the printing implements save the Kashmir ½a single die were officially mutilated with deep gashes to the metal. Some ten impressions were made of each, thus making for rarified auction fare today.

The wounded implements came to rest at the Sri Pratap Singh Museum in Srinagar. A few impressions of each in purple and black ink were made in August 1981 by Drs Frits Staal and B.P. Sharma in a wonderful summer adventure. The story is recounted in their essay, “Five Fruitful Days in Srinagar” in Staal’s text, The Stamps of Jammu and Kashmir (1983), a must for any J&K collector. A scan is of the ½a+1a Jammu Composite Plate is shown above. Five such reprints were produced from this implement. Reference: Staal pp 148-59.

In Memoriam

Dr Wolfgang Hellrigl 1941-2010

Glossary

Different collectors often use different terminology for the same thing. How we use some of it on this site, and specific to the J&K context, is given here:

Covers are stamped envelopes, addressed and officially marked in some way to show their legitimate passage through the mails. Cut-down covers are called thus only if the cutting down is severe enough that philatelic information has likely been lost. No distinction is made here between covers that do and do not still enclose a letter.

Entire is a term that we do not use, but it does show up in some of the publications that we have reproduced on-site. While it may refer simply to a cover, it may also refer specifically to those covers that still contain a letter. The older literature also sees the phrase “on original” to mean “on cover.”

Error is a term that we have not used in our own descriptions; the closest we dare is “color anomaly” and the like. Double impressions, backprints, offsets, etc. are here called “production anomalies.” Tête-bêches and semi-tête-bêches (the latter means one stamp is struck sideways in a pair) are also gathered under production anomalies.

Essays are those productions that have come down to us from the early design stage of a stamp when such designs differ in marked ways from those of the issued stamp (redrawn fleurons or spandrels, say). For J&K the only example ever extant is the unique unfinished essay of the Kashmir ½a single die. The term is used by default for the stillborn Convention State overprints.

Forgery, fakery, philatelic artifice.... Our terminology is unsystematic, casual, and erratic. J&K sports many diverse examples of skulduggery and intrigue, and may even offer a few special takes of its own. We will encounter authentic and faked cancels on both forged and authentic stamps in all combinations. Some authentic stamps cancelled with markings of sometime authentic use were purely philatelic concoctions that may or may not have proceeded through the post. The category of forgery moves through a penumbra of states into the nether regions of the type for which even the word forgery is too good a word:

Facsimiles, replicas, reproductions, .... Take your pick. A large, semi-recent, class of such were based on the illustrations in the older b/w SG catalogue, sometimes with catalogue type number included.

Non-postals are stamps produced with the legitimate implements that are not attested in postal use. Subtypes include proofs, paper trials, pigment trials, reprints, ...

Originals are “postals,” our preferred expression. A postal item is a stamp variety that is attested by at least one cover that passed legitimately through the postal system. The term is also used as a specific oppositional to “reprint.” A distinct usage found in the older literature has the term as synonym for “still on cover.”

Proofs are preliminary productions executed from an approved plate or die before an issue has first been made available for postal use. Unique proofs from several of the implements were found in the notebook of the engraver Rahat Ju. Proofs need not be produced in the same colors or on the same papers of the issued stamps. If they happen to be indistinguishable from the issued stamps, only their documented provenance can provide them with that status. So-called “proof strips” in oilcolors from the two Kashmir plates were produced at unknown times, but definitely long after the advent dates of the plates. Whatever else they might be (pigment trials or later reprints) they are not “proofs” in the restricted sense used here.

Remainders refer to the stamps still being stored in the Treasury after the closing of the native posts in 1894. This stock may have been as high as 10,000 of certain denominations of the New Rectangulars, supposing all color varieties are counted together. That remaindered material was released in August 1898 to a certain Father Simons, who was intent on raising money for his church through its sale to collectors and dealers. It turned out that a portion of that stock consisted of forgeries that had been perpetrated by corrupt officialdom; such forgeries are not properly included under the remainder idea.

Reprints, as opposed to “oilcolor originals,” are productions executed from original plates and dies after these implements are retired from postal service. For the Old Period the transition month was May 1878. Reprints produced in their own special papers and “fancy colors” (as the tradition puts it) form a special subclass. Reprints have also been constrained by traditional rules of uncertain origin and validity: “No reprints on laid paper” and “No reprints in slate-blue” are two of the better-known rules, but both are eroding under the pressure of problematic cases and the lack of sufficient reason for observing them. That reprints must even be restricted to oilcolor pigment is not exactly a demonstrable proposition. It is also possible that some reprinting from the early-period implements was done for testing paper or pigments for certain New Rectangulars within the latter’s period, and are therefore also ‘trials’. Reprinting from the New Rectangular plates, i.e., printing done between the closing of the native posts in 1894 and the official defacement of those plates in February 1898, is often doubted on account of the large remainder stock that existed. Some of the late colors not known in postal use, however, might be reprints, no one knows for sure.

Specimen. Hitherto we had been using this term in a non-technical way, merely as a synonym for “stamp,” “item,” or “example.” Somewhere along the way, however, we cottoned to the notion that certain Kashmir stamps handstamped CANCELLED might well be some species of SPECIMEN. We now provisionally offer this designation for such stamps until we learn better. There is doubtless some conceptual overlap in the Kashmir context with “proof.”

Trials are unissued productions made with an original implement during its tenure of postal service (otherwise they would be deemed proofs if earlier or reprints if later). Some of these experimental printings may have found sporadic use as postage, so sullying our pristine taxonomies.

Unissued is a term that we avoid in our own descriptions, not always successfully, for it certainly has its uses. It is a term either too general (what with essays, proofs, trials, and reprints all being examples) or too specific in the direction of “prepared for use.” The latter is uncomfortably speculative in the murky J&K context. There are also inconsistent distinctions made in the literature as to which of ‘unissued’ and ‘prepared for use’ may or may not find attestation in postal use. The “unissued” stamps from the 12-plate, which was officially defaced along with the legitimate implements, is admittedly a challenge to nomenclature. We side with those who take its productions to be in a class kindred to the so-called Missing-Die forgeries, the implements for which were also sought for official defacement.

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