Panditani by Fred Bremner. Circa 1900

Panditani by Fred Bremner. Circa 1900. I first came across this iconic image in 2008, it turned out to one of the rarest postcards in Kashmir series. It took a lot of waiting and searching and now I finally have it.

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The photograph of the same woman that was captioned as that on a boatwoman by National Geographic Magazine in 1921.

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The same woman that went on to be on cover of cover of ‘Made in Austria’ safety matchbox.

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Bhattni/Haenz’bai by Fred Bremner, 1900

Another beautiful case of disjoint text and images. In this case a simple goof-up by an ‘angreez’ leads to a funny situation where a ‘pandit’ photograph ends up getting tagged as ‘musalmaan’, and then almost a century later, due to a vacuum created by lack of information, on a ‘social network’ the photograph and the actual subject does the rounds in all three social groups, in a ‘secular’ manner, devoid of any specific context, as a symbol of ‘Kashmiri Beauty’.






From National Geographic, 1921. Photograph by Fred Bremner. What is interesting about this photograph is that the caption suggests that the woman pictured is a boatwoman while the special danglers in her ear point to the fact that she is a Pandit woman.



Another photograph. Another pose. Same woman. By Fred Bremner in around 1900.


 Titled ‘A Panditani [Hindu] Kashmir’ 



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