Heard Of Post Cancellation Marks? Meet A New Hobby

Marking World Post Day today, Sonali Bhatia, an avid post-mark collector, shares with us her incredible experience and expedition of gathering and making a treasure box of post cancellation marks, each of which has a tale to tell. 

This is an email generation, with physical letters (snail-mail) being relegated to memory. Those of us who have exchanged long, handwritten letters with friends, family and pen-pals know the joy of waiting for the postman and curling up with the correspondence he brought. Most of us have, at one time or another, collected stamps and exchanged these with fellow philatelists.

I’m going to talk about a slightly different quest that my friend Buvana and I are on. There are 1,56,600 post offices in India, of which two hundred post offices have special post cancellation marks allocated to them. A cancellation mark serves two basic purposes:

a. It defaces the stamp so that it can’t be re-used, and

b. it mentions the date and place at which the letter was ‘booked’, that is, the post office at which it began its journey.

In these two hundred post offices, the post-cancellation mark has another purpose, in addition to these two. It has a pictorial representation of an important landmark of the area. For example, if you visit the Agra post office and ask for the pictorial cancellation, you’ll get a picture of the Taj Mahal.

Karnataka has thirty-seven post offices with pictorial cancellations. It was my father, Mr. Arun Bhatia, who got me interested in seeking these out. When he visited Bandipur to photograph wildlife, he made a special detour to the post office to get me the ‘paw-print’ mark from the post office there. As Bandipur is a tiger reserve and national park, the ‘paw-print’ depicts what can be found there – tigers. A visit to the Philatelic Bureau at the GPO in Bangalore yielded a beautiful picture of the Vidhana Soudha, lending grace to the envelope we mailed out. Buvana and I then made a list of the post offices we wanted to visit and planned our trips. Our first one was to Nandi Hills. We had a climb up the hill, by foot and by buggy, before we reached the tiny, dimly-lit post office with a young clerk who knew about the post-mark depicting the ‘Nandi Bull’ and proudly showed us a framed photo of it.

However, it was his third day on the job and he was anxious to perform well, so he had detailed phone conversations with his seniors about the number of stamps to be affixed on each letter before stamping our letters for us. Our letters now had Nandi, with the date of our visit, across our stamp, to commemorate our visit to this famous temple region.

Our next trip was to Mysore. The clerks at the post office were exceedingly helpful, and we obtained the ‘elephant with howdah’ postmark within minutes. This is the elephant that gets decorated during the famous Duserah festival and is featured on the post-mark. Since we had made such good time, we proceeded to Chamundi Hills – and reached just as the clerk was downing the shutter for his lunch break. Catching sight of us running up, waving our letters, he smiled, opened the post office and proudly gave us the ‘Mahisasura’ stamp on our letters. The famous larger-than-life statue looks nice and compact as a post-cancellation!

In triumph, we planned an outing the following month to Srirangapatna. The post-mark here shows Tipu’s sword and helmet. We went there on Feb 25 – which means the date showed as 25-02-2020. The clerk took a long time to assemble this date, as he needed the digit ‘2’ four times on the stamp and had to search for it in his box of digits! He was extremely patient and did this work for us.

While one clerk was working on the date, another began to chat with us and shared his knowledge of philately and stamps. Being on the verge of retirement, he spoke of stamp released many years ago, which we remembered seeing as children. When he understood our quest, he explained the location of the Kokrebellur post office – and even telephoned the lady there, to inform her that we were on our way.

Kokrebellur is a lovely village famous for nesting painted storks and pelicans.

The villagers there believe that these birds are part of their family and do not disturb them. The postal cancellation shows a beautiful pelican in flight. I was anxious to obtain this post-mark and glad to find the post office open when we reached after some searching. The lady clerk told us that her working hours were actually over, she had waited for us because of the phone call from her colleague at Srirangapatna! She carefully stamped a stack of letters and postcards for us and advised us not to use glossy postcards as the ink does not catch on well on these and maybe rubbed off.

As the helpful lady had missed her transport back home, we gave her a lift to the main road in our cab. We stopped to photograph the nesting birds on the way, and she was happy to guide us as to where they could be found.

In this age of email and impersonal communication, Buvana and I have been on a quest for post-marks on snail mail and come across cheerfully helpful personnel. We are looking forward to more visits to special post offices once the pandemic subsides!

— By Sonali Bhatia