The portrait of a stamp artist

Chitta Ranjan Pakrashi, 91, has been designing postage stamps for more than five decades.

The room is large, with swathes of natural light filtering in. It is somewhat austerely furnished but the walls paint an entirely different picture. Chitta Ranjan Pakrashi, 91, sits in his Kailash Colony home-cum-studio, surveying the commemorative stamp collection designed by him for the Indian Postal Service and a few foreign countries.

In two big frames, 54 stamp originals are arranged chronologically, from 1956 to 2008. His originals would fetch a pretty sum. His first stamp, issued in 1956 for the 2,500th anniversary of Buddha Jayanti, is trading at Rs 525 on the Philsensex, the price having quadrupled in just as many years. Pakrashi though, is dismissive; his time occupied by more pressing concerns — his art exhibition in the capital in November, editorial work with a privately circulated Bengali quarterly Hindol, his account of the Bengalis in Delhi which is being serialised in another magazine, and taking his memoir A Stamp is Born to publishers. "I don't have too much time. I have to pack in as much as I can," he says.

When Pakrashi decides to tell a story, he does in a very methodical fashion. He brings in all his letters, album sheets and first-day covers (FDCs) and then rewinds to the summer of 1945, when he first arrived in Delhi and joined the government as a technical assistant. In 1955, a government advertisement calling for design entries on the occasion of the 2,500th anniversary of Buddha Jayanti caught his eye. He had never worked on stamps before, the proportions and requirements were lost on him. And he knew little of the religion. Despite these obvious handicaps, he won the nationwide competition (and Rs 1,000 in cash). His design was issued on a two-anna stamp, "at that time widely circulated", he says. The design was a nod to a frequently recurring and revered motif in the Buddhist lore — the Bodhi tree, outlines of which he found in texts and even on a Mohenjodaro seal.

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