The Devadasi who became a Maharani

This picture is of my mother, the little girl in the center, and her immediate family taken around 1931 or 1932 in a British photo studio in south Bombay [maybe Kalbadevi]. There is no stamp on the photograph so I can’t tell which studio it may have been. My grandfather in this picture brought his family to Bombay specifically for having a series of photographs taken in the studio. He was very fond of studio portraiture and would travel to Bombay often to get his pictures taken.

The Bicycle Soldiers of World War One

The bicycle had not long ago been invented and originally was thought to be a good way to get soldiers to move around, but the cyclists often found themselves attempting to negotiate unfriendly terrain, and on numerous occasions were forced to abandon their heavy army issue bicycles.