A visual history of Indian music as depicted on postage stamps

What constitutes Indian music?

The images carried on postage stamps are central in producing, projecting and experiencing the national community. From Mirabai of the Bhakti tradition to Hindi film playback singers and paintings of the Ragmala, India’s postage stamps reflect an evolving imagination of Indian music.

During the 1950s and 1960s, as a part of the process of nation-building, a search began for a “national culture” and efforts were made to project it. The visuals on the postage stamps were one of the many vehicles for this.

The saints, painters, novelists, and poets that were commemorated on stamps give Indians an idea about who the government considered to be key shapers of this national culture.

For a long time, only classical musicians were commemorated on stamps. But since the 1990s, musical themes on postage stamps have become more diverse.

Early years after Independence

The pantheon of Indian culture, as depicted on postage stamps from the 1950s and 1960s, was marked by a lack of musical figures.

These stamps included figures like Meera Bai and Rabindranath Tagore. They had contributed vastly to music, but cannot be called musicians in the conventional sense. Barring a couple of exceptions, musicians were largely absent on Indian stamps till the close of the 1960s.

During the 1970s and 1980s,...

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