Most American philatelists have only a loose understanding of Indian history. We know the India was a “British Colony” but are unaware that British rule was largely confined to major cities. Most of India was ruled by hundreds of Princely States, each with their own laws and rulers, pledging allegiance to Britain and allowing the British Raj to dictate foreign policy and relationships between the States but controlling their own internal politics. There has never been such a large scale sovereignty sharing arrangement with so many different independent political entities (at one point in the early twentieth century there were over 550) under another nation’s suzerainty. And the philatelic implications created some of the most interesting stamps in our hobby.
There are two broad types of Indian States stamps, and they relate to the political arrangements set up by the British. The two classes of states are Convention States and Feudatory States. The Convention States had a closer political arrangement with the ruling British, and the Feudatory States, more rural generally, had a much looser relationship with British rule. Ofte
n the Feudatory states were entirely locally ruled, paying only some form of tribute to the British. The stamps of the Convention States were the current British stamps of the period issued for India overprinted for use in the state. The Feudatory States are where the real fun is.
Indian Feudatory States stamps number in the hundreds of different major varieties and thousands of different stamps if you include minor varieties. They are some of the most primitive stamps ever issued in our hobby. Many of the Feudatory States were quite poor and had no need for stamps. They wished to issue stamps anyway as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century issuing stamps was seen as a way of establishing sovereignty—sort of philatelically flying the flag (this is why there are so many unnecessary French Offices in China issues and Portuguese Colonial issues). These Indian Feudatory States stamps were locally produced on primitive presses in weird inks on terrible paper. Add in the climate of India and many of these stamps, even extremely cheap ones as listed in the Scott catalog, are extremely hard to find in nice condition or often even hard to find at all.
There are only a few rules that seem to work when planning a collecting specialty that you wish to see go up in value over the years. One of them is to collect an area when the economy and educational level of the country is growing so that as the people native to your collecting area become wealthier (and some of them gravitate into the hobby), prices will rise. This is true for all of Indian philately. And the expatriate factor—the fact that when people emigrate from a country they often collect the stamps of their home country—means that the millions of successful Indians living away from their homeland can become collectors. This bodes well for the future popularity of Indian stamps in general and Indian States stamps in particular. Further, these stamps are truly rare and hard to find and philatelically and historically very challenging. I think if I were starting out in philately today I’d be a collector of Indian States.