March 28

Today's deck is by far the poorest cut deck in the collection, but besides for the original designs the deck will always be a reminder too of how international trading used to be. We had only been a member of the IPCS for a few years, when out of the blue we received a letter from India. The esteemed collector Kishor Kordhandas, sadly not among us anymore, wrote a nice letter together with some b/w photocopies of a few decks that he had for sale. One of them was this deck. But this was in 1999: Kishor didn't have email yet and it was way before Paypal. So we wrote him a letter back and included cash dollars for 2 decks.
The deck was published c1940 as "Alphabet", an educational pack for children in the Hindi language. On each card there's a letter in capital and a word beginning with that letter. The illustration depicts the meaning of that word. In the left bottom corner there's a number, corresponding with the number of pips on the card. The deck was printed by the Chitrashala Press from Poona.