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Marianne Postans, Western India in 1838. By Mrs. Postans, Author of “Cutch.” In Two Volumes, London: Saunders and Otley, 1839

In 2 Volumes
Volume I: viii, frontispiece and 303 pages including 3 colour lithographs by W Walton after Captain Hart
Volume II: frontispiece and 295 pages including a tinted lithograph and colour lithograph by W Walton after Lieutenant Postans
Green clothbound with blind and gilt picture of a soldier with a camel (front and back), gilt embossed on the spine (each)
20.5 x 13.5 x 2.5 cm (each)

LIST OF PLATES
Volume I: 1. Toddy Tree (frontispiece) / 2. Hindoostan sepoy / 3. Wagheries / 4. Abdool Kureem Shirazee
Volume II: Girnar from the Uparkote (frontispiece) / 2. Rock and Ancient Inscriptions / 3. Russaldar of the Poonah Auxillary Horse

Marianne Postans provides insight in this book on the social life, people and customs of Bombay, Deccan, Surat and Saurashtra. Volume 1 is nearly entirely on Bombay and its social life.

“At the age of 22 on 9 February 1833, at St. George, Hanover Square, she married Thomas Postans (1808-1846), an ensign in the 15th regiment of the Bombay native infantry, who would rise to Captain by the time of his death. By 4 March they set sail bound for Bombay on the H.C.S. Farquharson and arrived later that year. In 1834, her husband was posted to Cutch, a western district of present-day Gujarat, India, and there she gathered the notes and made the drawings that would form the basis for her first publication, Cutch; or, Random Sketches, taken during a Residence in One of the Northern Provinces of Western India; Interspersed with Legends and Traditions, published in 1839. Encouraged by the reception of that book, she published shortly after a 2-volume account of her residence in India, Western India in 1838 (1839), again accompanied by her own drawings and broadening considerably her geographical and ethnological purview to include Bombay, the Deccan, Surat, and the Saurashtra peninsula. Her second book also received plaudits, the reviewer for the Literary Gazette calling her ‘one of the most intelligent lady-travellers and pleasant lady-writers of the day’”. (Benjamin Colbert, Postans, Marianne née Ridgway, later Young, 1811-1897, British Travel Writing, Online)

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