Handstruck Stamps of India

What is a handstruck stamp?

A handstruck stamp is an impression made by a handstamp — a die, usually of brass or steel, inked and pressed onto a letter by hand at the post office counter. The word stamp here means the act of stamping, not the gummed label the term later came to describe. Before adhesive postage existed there was nothing to stick on an envelope: everything a postmaster needed to record was struck directly onto the folded sheet.

That is why the standard reference literature uses the phrase at all. D. Hammond Giles titled his catalogue The Handstruck Postage Stamps of India precisely because these marks were the postage stamps of their period — the only evidence on the letter that postage had been paid, or was owed on delivery.

The types of handstruck stamps of India

Every marking answers a question a postmaster once had to settle: where was this posted, when, what was paid, and how did it travel. The recorded material falls into a handful of families:

• Town datestamps — the office name and date, the commonest and most useful mark for dating a cover.
• “Post Paid”, “Post Free” and “Bearing” marks — whether postage was prepaid by the sender or collected from the recipient.
• Maritime marks — Ship Letter, Ship Despatch and Ship Receipt marks applied to mail carried by sea. See the ship letter markings guide.
• Receiving house marks — sub-office handstamps, notably the Madras “MX” series. See the receiving house marks guide.
• Bishop marks — the earliest datestamps used in India, struck at Calcutta from 1774. See the Indian Bishop mark.
• Forwarding-agent cachets — private handstamps of commercial agents such as Thomas Waghorn, applied to mail in transit.

How the handstruck stamps of India are numbered

The reference standard is the work of Derek Hammond Giles (1913–2003), whose catalogues assign every recorded marking at a post office a figure number — HG 1, HG 2, and onward — with separate series for Ship Despatch (SD), Ship Receipt (SR) and other categories. A mark is cited by office and number, as in Madras HG 1. The guide to HG numbers explains the system in full.

Giles is a fixed reference, but discovery did not stop when it was printed. This archive follows his numbering and extends it into a living census: markings unrecorded by Giles, verified by the editors, enter alongside the catalogued figures, so the published record of the handstruck stamps of India keeps growing as covers surface.

Where they were struck: the presidencies

British India’s posts were run by presidency, each with its own offices, rates and handstamp designs:

• Bengal Presidency — from Fort William at Calcutta across Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Assam.
• Madras Presidency — the southern peninsula, with the largest recorded body of handstamps in the census.
• Bombay Presidency — the western seaboard and the Deccan routes inland.
• North-Western Provinces — Agra, Delhi, Benares and the hill stations of the upper Ganges.
• Punjab — annexed 1849, from the Cis-Sutlej states to the Peshawar frontier.
• Sindh — conquered 1843, the lower Indus from Karachi through Hyderabad.

Identifying a handstruck stamp on your cover

Work from the office name in the marking, not from the letter. Find that office in the index of 440 recorded post offices and compare your impression against its recorded figures — each shows the design, the ink colours known for it, and the range of dates within which it was in use. When the design matches, open that figure to see every surviving cover recorded with it.

The mark index approaches it from the other direction, showing how one Giles figure number appears across different offices. If your marking matches nothing on record, it may be unrecorded: photographs can be submitted from any office page for editorial review, and approved additions become new entries in the census.

Which handstruck stamps of India are rare?

Rarity in this archive is evidence, not opinion. Every grade is derived from the number of covers actually recorded bearing that marking: from one to five surviving examples the exact count is shown, and beyond that the grade collapses into tiers — rare, very scarce, scarce, common, very common. No price estimate is implied, and none is offered; the census reports what survives.

The scarcest markings across the whole archive are gathered in the Rarity Club, and the rare handstruck stamps guide explains what makes a marking scarce and why some offices produced so few surviving covers.