"In the 1970s and 1980s, a few days before the festivals of Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Zuha, I regularly visited the Urdu bazaar opposite Jama Masjid in old Delhi with my parents to buy visually attractive Eid cards, then wrote short messages of greetings and salutations for friends and relatives residing in other towns, and dropped these into the nearby post box.

And true to expectation, within a couple of days the postman would start bringing a rich and colourful harvest of Eid cards from the other end as well."

So starts a rich essay on these complex postcards that borrowed from and expanded on a Western form. A superb piece of research.

Above: An Eid card from the 1940s