The post office is dying everywhere. Long live the post office

Both of these beings represent warring factions. So much like the modern variant of text communication, where we pour out our deepest ruminations and encode them in the syntax of digits, sending it off to the recipient, who unboxes the gift of our choicest meditations using their own criteria of comprehension. We are also warring, yes, but we are on the same side. In a world increasingly prone to instant polarisation, bridged by the absurd capacity of rapid digital communication, we ought to take it slow. The post office shows us the way.

The vanishing joy of serendipity

Even as an adult, I find that the open face of postcards presents a terrifying prospect for privacy. An oafish thought. The image of postmen, vital middlemen, trusted to carry our messages to distant lands is stirring, and, to be sentimental, one of the great indices of the shared, contemporaneous nature of humanity. Imagine relinquishing a cherished utterance of romance, or a wince of sorrow, or a gasp of surprise to a total stranger. To be a postman is to be the channel through which a talky nation finds its stride.

Crude forms of the postal system date back to 2000 BC, with the oldest existing mail from around 240 BC in Egypt. The postage system’s waning and waxing glory is also rooted in economics. In India, the first inklings of a postal system were observed during the fiscally astounding Mauryan empire, leading through various permutations to an informal, localised postal system, which was finally brought under the British Crown, aligned with further innovations such as unveiling the first adhesive stamps in Asia, founding societies dedicated to philately, and instituting a universal postage rate. The Indian government has always been at the forefront of national communication and its willingness to shoulder affordable conversation has made it the most consistent loss-making entity in Indian history, beyond even the Indian Railways, whose tickets always bear a striking reminder that it recovers only a fraction of its costs per ticket.

One may recall the Nora Ephron movie, You’ve Got Mail (1998), released during the salad days of Amazon, the online retailer, where a thoroughbred conventional bookstore (an “indie”, as they are called these days) loses out to a commercial behemoth that saps the joy out of serendipity and community. A similar fate has befallen national postal systems all over the world.

India Post comes to terms with India

In his supremely regal historical account, titled The Post Office of India and Its Story (1920), Geoffrey Clarke writes about a crucial realisation in colonial India: “The Indian villager dreads the presence of the Government officer in his neighbourhood, but he makes an exception in the case of Post Office employees. The postman is always a welcome visitor...”.

He is at pains to capture the diversity of the experience, which is coloured in the patchwork sky of colonial India’s many peculiarities: the postman has to wade through laughable addresses to “one with the limp leg”, and “one with the crooked back”, in a tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone else. Difficult also is taking mail to pilgrim and nomads, who are unmoored from the post’s requirement of fixity, and people whose families live on boats “in the great rivers of Bengal and Burma”.

Clarke takes immense joy in the difficulties of the postman, illiterate, having to carry mail from people, also illiterate, through the conduit of professional letter-writers, and how they developed an idiosyncratic code for understanding the English-language addresses narrated by the English postal clerks. In many ways, the postal system and its universal appeal was an impetus to the growth of nationalism in India, as propaganda and nationalist literature, secret messages were often covertly transmitted through these letters, unsuspected by the British overlords who knew no better.

A domino effect

The village postman, who Clarke dedicates an entire chapter to, often connects families across generations, but is subject to the same strictures of caste and religion as any other Indian citizen. Since people of the same community tend to live together, residents from high and low castes congregate in segregated quarters of the city, and a postman belonging to a lower caste background could not enter a high caste-residence, lest he should be resisted with brute force. Human memory today is evanescent, iridescent. Before we had yellowpages and phonebooks and digitised caller IDs, we had the faculty of recollection, which held dear to us our great elders, even if we hadn’t seen them in ages.

My mother, in her late 40s, tells me she wrote postcards to my father in coy prenuptial dispatches, an inconceivable process because that could not have been that further back in time, could it? Digital communication exploded into being only in the second half of the 2000s, when Facebook and Blackberry made text messaging ubiquitous, setting off a domino effect that would culminate in things like WhatsApp, which was launched in India only in 2012.

Today, it is used by around 600 million people in the subcontinent. It somehow doesn’t cohere with the same reality that enabled me to pursue a pastime in philately around 10 years ago. WhatsApp and other modes of communication have also precipitated a spate of horrifying developments, where “WhatsApp forwards” is infamously the coterie of false, enraging news for gullible people to broadcast. This has led to witchhunts, and, as some scholars surmise, doldrums in our collective political fortunes.

The postal system: A benevolent time machine

The malaise braved by people who are unable to participate in daily life, by reasons of mental or physical conditions, have been exacerbated, as they are rendered unable to get on the high-speed train of human communication. In her crisp novel, Long Live the Post Horn! (2012; English tr. by Charlotte Barslund: 2020), the Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth is at her contemplative best. She documents the struggles of a depressed woman who cannot relate to her sexual partner, is hardly able to feel herself, and is haunted by the ghosts of her boss, who died by suicide. She is enlisted to devise a campaign for the post office as an institution, which risks being destroyed because of a European Union directive. She takes it on as a chore.

Gradually, in increasingly intimate conversation with compatriots, she realises the value the postal system holds in the lives of the common masses. Take, for instance, the case of addresses you’ve forgotten to people you love. In a land untouched by modern communication, perhaps, Hjorth imagines a small universe of kindred people, where you may send a life-altering letter on an incomplete address with a prayer issued to God and faith reposed in the postman, in his knowledge of his environs.

It is sheltered by his deep personal knowledge of every living soul that basks in the rare sun around him, as he lugs his postbag from door to closed door. This is impossible in the impersonal, clinical spaces of online communication, where you are all but an alphanumeric index in a mesh of cellular networks. The book is a marvellous portrait of a person warming to the many spectacles of the human condition.

The postal system is dying everywhere

Geoffrey Clarke’s account was written during the colonial occupation of India. For a modern-day account of a humongous postal system and its trials and tribulations, the US Postal Service has its history summarised and interspersed with stark images in Neither Snow Nor Rain: a History of the United States Postal Service (2016) by Devin Leonard. From the contemporary Moses of the 1940s, James Rademacher, who “led postal workers out of an industrial dark age” and negotiated better salaries and stoppered arbitrary work suspensions, to present day when post offices that were once as raucously frequented as shopping malls (“You used to sell teacups and Tshirts,” a distressed lady says to a post office that is about to be shuttered for budgetary reasons. “That was awesome.”) are losing out to private players and Amazon, the historical account is a proxy for a study in an increasingly throttled space of communication. Patrons, locals, come to the post office to share their secrets with the office manager, not buying stamps or sending off any saliva-sealed communique.

Whether it be Anthony Comstock’s unwarranted censorship of Walt Whitman’s poems and birth control pills in the name of preventing indecency, or the Service’s small-hearted ambition in sustaining itself well past the heyday of online communication, one cannot help but reminisce at the meteoric role played by the postal system in “linking minds” (Alexis Tocqueville), and shiver at the foreboding note of the book that our cherished, red-blooded, republican system of communication which, as Winifred Gallagher argues in her book How the Post Office Created America, was the space of cerebral fusion, is dying a slow death.

In 2018, India Post was again pegged as the Indian Government’s biggest loss-making PSU. Similar to its American counterpart, it is losing out to private players, bleeding dry as telegrams and our beloved postcards, the charcuterie boards of essential arcana, decline in popularity and utility. The most vibrant remnants of the peak of India Post are its stamps, some of which are plastered gaily in an album back home, buried below an album where I collected flowers and ears of wheat. Stamps are the miniature windows into the beating heart of a country, peeking from the surface of book mail or a grant of bank insurance or your first royalties, and capturing in laminated paint the songs, the luminaries, and the many bounties of an all-inclusive citizenry that it holds dear.

Here, a stamp of a Zaniskari horse; there, a hexagonal stamp featuring a tortoise; further away, a lithograph of RD Burman, closer here: a mother breastfeeding a suckling baby whose hands grab at empty postal air. That the post office is a chimaera, a combination of the mythos of democracy — due to the recurrent ethic of talking to fellow countrymen, stitching them closer like crochet — and the pathos of its slow death, forebodes much more than a dryer mailbox. It opens up our worlds to less fastidious means of communication, untouched by the credo of human intellect and burgeoning collective sympathy, and calluses our sense of togetherness. Until the next series of stamps about the latest crop of India’s space satellites: long live the post office.