The Complex History Of India’s Controversial Railway Travel Posters
In the early twentieth century, travel posters of India became symbols of colonial control and nationalist resistance. What began as a government publicity campaign to promote tourism ended up exposing the growing political divide between Indian and British legislators during the last decades of the Raj. By the 1920s, the Indian railways had been nationalised under British control. The government wanted to increase revenue and saw tourism as one way to do so. The Central Publicity Bureau was set up in Bombay in 1927 to produce posters, brochures, and short films that would draw travellers from both within and outside India.
These “See India” and “Visit India” posters, produced between the mid-1920s and the early 1940s, presented the country through scenes of beauty and leisure: Kashmiri lakes, Darjeeling’s mountain dances, temple towns in the south, and grand forts of the north. They were displayed in major cities abroad — London, New York, and Tokyo — as part of reciprocal arrangements with foreign railways.
The posters were designed mostly by British artists such as Fred Taylor, Frank Newbould, Kay Nixon, and Victor Veevers. Their style reflected the European modernist trends of the interwar years: geometric shapes, bright blocks of colour, and simplified human forms. The India that appeared in these posters was an “exotic” fantasy: a place of timeless spirituality and picturesque calm, made to appeal to Western eyes.
This image ignored the everyday lives of Indians and reinforced the colonial idea that India was a land to be looked at, not lived in. In that sense, the posters were tools of imperial representation. They flattened India into an aesthetic spectacle and hid the economic and political inequalities that shaped it.
The glamour of these posters, however, did not impress everyone. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Indian members of the Imperial Legislative Council began questioning how the publicity campaign was being run. Their criticism focused on two main points: racial discrimination and financial waste.
Indian artists were rarely commissioned and, when they were, they were paid far less than their British counterparts. In one debate, legislator Bhuput Singh pointed out that the British artist M.M. Heanley had received Rs. 250 for a poster, while the Indian artist P. Samadar was paid only Rs. 100 for similar work. Singh accused the Railway Board of favouritism, asking why “a mere schoolgirl” with connections to railway officials was paid more than trained Indian professionals.
Indian legislators also criticised the government for spending large sums of public money on foreign publicity firms and on maintaining offices in London and New York. They argued that this money came from Indian taxpayers but served British interests. The posters, they said, were not meant to promote travel among Indians but to attract wealthy Europeans.
The controversy over the travel posters revealed how deeply colonial control extended into art and design. British officials argued that Indian artists lacked the technical skill or modern aesthetic sense required for commercial poster-making. Their response exposed how artistic standards themselves were defined by imperial hierarchies; “good design” meant design that matched European tastes.
Only a handful of Indian artists, such as Sobha Singh and Gauri Shanker, were able to contribute. Their work, however, rarely received the same visibility or credit. The absence of Indian voices in shaping how their own country was represented became a symbol of the larger struggle for cultural and political self-determination.
Today, these posters are admired as vintage art. They hang in galleries and are sold as retro prints online. But visual culture is never neutral. The same images that now seem charming once carried the weight of empire. Design, commerce, and politics can merge, and, even, something as simple as a travel poster can become a site of debate over who gets to represent a nation.
The Indian railway posters of the 1930s were part of a larger contest over identity and ownership. For the British, they projected the illusion of a peaceful and welcoming colony. For Indians, they exposed yet another space where colonial inequality had to be challenged.
