The Indian Bishop Mark

To the clerk, it was an ordinary part of the day’s work. Yet that routine action created an important piece of Indian postal history.

The letter now bears the earliest recorded postmark of India and is the earliest known cover carrying an Indian handstruck postal marking. The small divided circle was known as a Bishop mark, a design descended directly from the world’s first postmark.

The World’s First Postmark

The story of the Bishop mark begins in London during the reign of King Charles II.

In 1661, Henry Bishop, then Postmaster General of England, introduced a small circular stamp to be applied to letters passing through the Chief Post Office. The circle, measuring approximately thirteen millimetres across, was divided by a horizontal line. The month appeared in one half and the day in the other.

Bishop introduced the mark for a practical reason: to prevent letters from being deliberately delayed by postal employees. As he explained, the stamp was intended so:

“that no Letter Carrier may dare to detain a Letter from Post to Post, which before was usual.”

By recording the date on which a letter entered the postal system, the mark made postal workers accountable for delays. It was the first postmark ever used.

The design proved effective and was gradually adopted beyond London. Bishop marks appeared in Dublin, Edinburgh and other parts of the British postal system. As British postal administration expanded overseas, the small divided circle travelled with it.

More than a century after Henry Bishop introduced the design in England, a related form of the mark appeared in Bengal.

The Bishop Mark Reaches Calcutta

The authority for introducing a datestamp in India can be traced to Bye-Rule 8 of the Consultations dated 17 January 1774. The rule directed:

“that all letters shall be stamped with the day of the month on which they are delivered into any chief office.”

The new procedure came into operation at the General Post Office in Calcutta on 31 March 1774.

The surviving evidence strongly establishes Calcutta as the place where the Indian Bishop mark was introduced. It remains uncertain whether similar handstamps were supplied to the chief post offices at Madras or Bombay. No confirmed examples from those presidencies are presently recorded, and all known Indian Bishop marks are associated with Calcutta.

The earliest surviving strike is dated 2 February 1775.

It appears on a pre-stamp letter sent from Calcutta to Charles William Boughton Rous, Chief of the Provincial Council of Revenue at Dacca. The cover is exceptional for two reasons: it is the earliest recorded cover bearing an Indian handstruck postal marking, and it carries the earliest known Indian Bishop mark.

The cover remained unknown to philatelists until its discovery in 1941. It later formed part of the collection of Derek Hammond Giles, the great authority whose catalogue numbers are still used to identify the handstruck postage stamps of India.

In 1975, exactly two centuries after the letter was posted, the Indian Posts and Telegraphs Department reproduced the cover on a Rs.2 commemorative postage stamp issued for the bicentenary of the Indian postal service.

How to Recognise an Indian Bishop Mark

The Indian Bishop mark follows the same basic design as its London predecessor: a circle divided horizontally, with the day and month placed in the two halves. However, the Indian marks have several distinctive characteristics.

Most noticeably, the month is normally written in three or four letters — FEB, DEC, JULY. British, Irish, Scottish, Canadian and American Bishop marks usually abbreviated the month to only two letters, such as JA, FE or MR. The Indian marks are also considerably larger than the original thirteen-millimetre London design.

The arrangement of the date changed over time. On the earlier Calcutta marks, the day appeared in figures above the dividing line and the abbreviated month below. On later examples, this arrangement was reversed, with the month placed above and the date below.

Other postal markings were normally applied separately. A letter on which postage had already been paid received a straight-line “POST PAID” handstamp. Letters for which postage remained to be collected were marked “BEARING POSTAGE.” The town name, usually “CALCUTTA”, was applied with a separate straight-line handstamp. On certain related covers, the name “CULPEE” appears instead. Where a postal rate was shown, it was generally entered by hand or struck separately beside the postal markings.

Dating the Marks by Measurement

The Calcutta General Post Office appears to have intended that the design of the Bishop handstamp should be altered periodically, probably each year. For collectors, this provides an unusually useful method of identification. The length of the horizontal dividing line changed from one issue to another, allowing many strikes to be dated by measurement even when the impression is incomplete or indistinct.

The change introduced in 1777 was particularly noticeable. The month was moved into the upper half of the circle and written in full, with the date below it. This clearly distinguished the 1777 handstamp from the designs used in 1775 and 1776.

When a strike is faint, damaged or partly obscured by a fold, a difference of only a few millimetres in the dividing line can determine whether an attribution is reliable or merely speculative.

The Calcutta Bishop Marks by Month

The Calcutta Bishop mark appears to have been prepared separately for different months of the year. As a result, the office used a family of closely related marks, beginning with January and continuing through the calendar.

JanuaryCalcutta X1

FebruaryCalcutta X2

MarchCalcutta X3

AprilCalcutta X4

MayCalcutta X5

JuneCalcutta X6

JulyCalcutta X7

AugustCalcutta X8

DecemberCalcutta X12

The February mark, Calcutta X2, is the most historically important because it includes the strike dated 2 February 1775 — the earliest recorded Indian postmark. The July mark, Calcutta X7, represents the altered 1777 design, on which “JULY” is written in full above the dividing line with the date below. The December mark, Calcutta X12, is recorded with a dividing line of approximately 16½ millimetres, the day above and the abbreviated month below.

Recorded Bishop-Mark Covers

The following pre-stamp covers are presently recorded in connection with the Calcutta Bishop marks. Each provides evidence not only of the handstamp itself but also of the routes, rates and administrative practices of the early Bengal postal system.

Evidence from the Giles Papers

Much of what is known about these marks survives because of the careful work of Derek Hammond Giles.

Giles did not merely list the handstamps. He examined the original covers, reproduced the strikes on his reference sheets, measured their dimensions and recorded their dates, routes and accompanying postal markings. His working papers preserve the evidence from which the modern census was developed.

These reference sheets remain valuable because they preserve information about covers that may later have changed ownership, disappeared into private collections or become difficult to examine directly.

The Published Census

For much of the twentieth century, Indian Bishop marks were considered among the greatest rarities of early Indian postal history.

An article titled “A New Indian Bishop Mark” appeared in the October 1961 issue of The Philatelist. Giles subsequently wrote to correct and expand the information, and a formal census was published in the March 1962 issue. At that time, only four examples were recorded anywhere in the world:

Since 1962, further examples have been identified through auction catalogues, private collections, institutional archives and reports from specialists. The presently recorded monthly marks include:

This list should not be treated as permanently complete. New discoveries continue to alter the recorded census of early Indian postal markings.

Claud and Boyd Alexander

Several surviving Bishop-mark letters were written by Claud Alexander of Calcutta to Boyd Alexander.

The Alexanders belonged to a family closely connected with the commercial life of British India. Their firm, Alexander & Company, later became an important Calcutta agency house and bank. Among its notable financial dealings was the management of prize money belonging to Lord Combermere. The firm eventually failed in 1832, during the wider collapse of several Calcutta agency houses.

The surviving correspondence between members of the Alexander family provides more than postal evidence. It also offers a glimpse into the commercial and personal networks through which letters travelled in eighteenth-century India.

Incoming as Well as Outgoing Mail

The Cirencester-to-Calcutta cover recorded in the 1962 census is especially significant.

It shows that the Bengal Bishop mark was not confined to letters posted at Calcutta for inland delivery. The mark could also be applied to incoming mail after it entered the Bengal postal system.

This broadens our understanding of how the handstamp was used. It was not simply a departure mark. Its purpose was to record when a letter was received into the chief office, whether the letter had originated in Bengal or arrived from overseas.

Was the Calcutta Bishop Mark Really India’s First?

The 2 February 1775 Calcutta Bishop mark is the earliest recorded Indian postmark on a complete cover. On present evidence, it remains the earliest firmly established Indian handstruck postal marking of its kind. However, the question is not entirely closed.

In his supplement, Giles recorded that a handstamp from Chicacole, in the Madras Presidency, may already have existed in 1775. An example on piece, accompanied by a certificate from the British Philatelic Association, has been attributed to as early as 1773.

Should that date and attribution eventually be accepted without reservation, the beginning of Indian handstruck postal history would move back by two years.

This is one of the reasons early postal history must always be described carefully. “The earliest” usually means the earliest example presently recorded and accepted. A newly discovered cover, archive entry or contemporary postal instruction may still change the story.

Add a Bishop Mark to the Census

Every recorded Calcutta Bishop mark contributes to a better understanding of India’s early postal system. A previously unrecorded strike may establish a new date of use, reveal an unknown month, extend an existing period of use, confirm a postal route, identify a different handstamp state, or add a new cover to the census.

Collectors who own a Calcutta Bishop-mark cover, an unrecorded date or a clearer strike are encouraged to submit the details for study through the census of the Calcutta marks. Even a partial or faint impression can be important when supported by a complete cover, reliable provenance or measurable characteristics.