By Yashovardhan Sinha
Time was when the Post Office was at the centre of our lives – often, at the heart of our existence. Then came the courier agencies and a few years later the internet, and together they pushed the Post Office to the very periphery of our world, if not beyond.
But it is so very intimately intertwined with our past that when I recently came across the story of India’s Post Office written by an English ICS officer named Geoffrey Clarke who was Director General Posts and Telegraph, Govt of India a hundred years ago, I had to read it.
India had a functioning postal system long before the English came.
When Ibn Batuta came to India in the fourteenth century he found an organized system of couriers. Letters from and to the Court moved swiftly through a network of couriers on horseback as well as foot-couriers. While horses covered the trunk-routes, runners covered the last mile, which actually could go up to three miles.
However, by the time the British established their sway in India the indigenous system had probably collapsed and Robert Clive introduced a new postal system in 1766, which may be considered the beginning of the modern post.
Later, in 1837 Government assumed the exclusive right to convey letters for hire in the territories of the East India Company. Under the Post Office Act of 1837 if a man even used a personal messenger to send a letter to his friend this would incur a penalty of Rs. 50, a fine for which both the messenger and recipient were equally liable!
By now the Railway was spreading in India and it became the main conduit for posts. But, to quote the author, “The romance of the Post Office, however, must always lie in the mail runner, or hirkara as he is called in old books on India. The number of tigers sated with his flesh is past count, the Himalayan snows have overwhelmed him, flooded rivers have carried him off and oozy swamps sucked him down. But in the face of all these dangers, has the runner ever failed to do his duty?”
There are actual stories of dak-runners risking entering maneater-territory despite warning, out of a sense of duty, and getting killed!
To continue the quote, “Dishonesty among them is almost unknown and they are wonderfully true to their salt, which with them seldom exceeds twelve rupees a month.”
The sincerity and commitment to duty of the postal staff led to exemplary efficiency. To give a random example, in 1918 the Post Office handled 120 crore articles (half of them Postcards) out of which only 0.22% failed to reach their proper destination.
It surprised me to learn that the Post Office also served as a proto-type travel agency. When a traveller contemplated a journey he applied to the local postmaster for hitching a ride, giving, as a rule, two or three days’ previous notice. Horse daks, i.e . wheeled conveyances drawn by horses, were available only on the great trunk roads, which were metalled. On other roads, the journey, when not performed on horseback, was accomplished in a palanquin. The traveller provided his own palki, and the postmaster supplied the palki-burdars, eight in number, as well as two mashalchees or torchbearers and two bahangy-burdars or luggage porters.
There were no hotels or inns of course, but dak bungalows were established at places varying from fifteen to fifty miles apart , depending on the traffic on the road.
I was always curious to know why the Post Office needed these dak bungalows. Now I know.
Till a few years ago when telephone calls were expensive, we employed a jugaad known as missed calls to message our friends. I was amused to read that we were merely copying our ancestors. The author writes how post-paid postcards which were much in evidence in India, had to be abolished when it was discovered that they were frequently read and then returned to the postmen as refused. The writer generally concealed his identity from the officials, with the result that it was useless to try and recover the postage due! This was one of the reasons why postage stamps were introduced in 1854 as it meant prepayment by senders.
In 1877 the Value-Payable or Cash on Delivery system was introduced and was a big hit. Those days there was hardly any big shop outside the three Presidency towns. The VP system proved an inestimable convenience to the upcountry purchaser, who paid the Post Office for his purchases on receipt.
The next major innovation was the Money Order which came in 1880. It came as a big boon to the migrant worker. An Indian labourer in Burma, for example, who had saved a few rupees, wanted to return to his village, he seldom carried the money on his person. Banks were too grand for him. So he went to a post office and sent to himself a money order addressed to the post office nearest his home! Incidentally, the average value of a money order in 1917-18 was Rs. 18.
As I read the book I felt a pang for what is now dismissed as snail-mail- for the birthday boy eagerly awaiting his grandmother’s money order, for the happy young man holding a cryptic three- word telegram informing him that he had got a much sought-after job and for the lovelorn friend reciting Qamar Badayuni’s shaer addressed to the postman-
” nāma-bar tū hi batā, tŭ ne to dekhe honge
kaise hote hain vo khat jin ke javāb aate hain?”
