That year, Eid–a national holiday– fell on August 18, at the peak of monsoon. At home in Kolkata, the stout looking olive-green phone, its thick black wire vanishing behind the ornate legs of our teakwood side table, rang like a rooster with no snooze button. It was Nani, my maternal grandmother, calling us over for lunch.

I remember setting off to hers guarded by my favourite big red umbrella. She had lovingly prepared a spread of Bengali-style pulao, a spicy mutton gravy, and a host of other delights.

Later, she spoiled us with gifts my mother never quite approved of like Tintin comics and make-up sets. Then came the storytelling sessions, after which we received our Eidi—small amounts of money often gifted to children after the morning Eid prayers. Nani was my go-to jukebox of tales, spinning stories from her girlhood in 1930s, pre-partition Kolkata.

Sometimes during these sessions, she’d show us her treasures—mementos she’d collected over a lifetime. There were beautifully enamelled Peek Freans biscuit tins repurposed as sewing kits, late Mughal silver betel nut boxes, and crystal animal figurines picked up during travels through northern Indian cities like Moradabad and Agra in the 1950s.

But on that rainy Eid afternoon, she revealed something more precious than a story.

Neatly wrapped in worn yellowing butter paper was a motley bunch of Eid greeting postcards, each with a short handwritten note. They were sent by someone named Jubeida, and each bore the postmark of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. The colours exquisite, the designs ornate. Through those cards, I discovered my grandmother’s best friend—someone she never heard from again after 1952.

She had saved eight precious cards; others had been misplaced after she married, more may have been lost during Partition—the 1947 division of British India into India and Pakistan, which triggered one of the largest mass migrations in history, marked by widespread violence and unimaginable loss.

I was just 11, but sulked for days, heartbroken over a friendship lost. “Why didn’t you look for Jubeida?” I kept asking. Nani would fall silent, then break into her warm smile, and say, “But her Eid cards are still here,” before returning to her household chores.

Now, five decades later, both she and her treasures are gone. But that monsoon Eid of 1981 lingers. So do those Eid greeting cards, with their worn-out edges and her handwriting—fragments of a tradition I’ve been drawn back to, retracing the fading trail of warmth and camaraderie once carried by post.

The personal touch

In today’s world of quick Whatsapp forward messages, few have time for a  handwritten Eid Greeting postcard that is either hand-delivered by a postman or dropped gently into a wooden letterbox. In fact, those letterboxes themselves—once keepers of warmth and anticipation—are disappearing from urban homes, discarded like relics of a slower time.

While Eid Greetings have always existed—more educated Muslim families exchanged handwritten messages for centuries—the tradition of sending printed cards blossomed at the turn of the 20th century in the Indian subcontinent.

India’s already established printing press—introduced to the region by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century—really took off in the late 1700s with James Augustus Hickey starting the first newspaper of India, the Bengal Gazette, in 1780.

The explosive growth of the railway network played a vital role too: what began as a 34km line between Mumbai and Thane grew into a staggering 25,000km network. By the 1930s, this connectivity had linked South Asia’s major urban centres—Kolkata, Delhi, Karachi, Lahore, Lucknow, Rangoon and more—enabling the exchange of Eid postcards to flourish.

With industrialisation and economic migration, many missed their families on festive days, like Eid. A card with a handwritten message became a tangible gesture of care. Some see these cards as quiet symbols of a growing national consciousness–a “new identity” slowly emerging from colonial shadows.

Omar Khan, a San Francisco based historian and author of Paper Jewels: Postcards from the Raj, told TRT World, “Eid cards were really big in the 1930s to1950s, if not the 1960s, and they still exist, though not as ornate as earlier nor in postcard format, as the use of postcards on a whole has had a downslide over the years.”

Early Eid cards in India were heavily influenced by British colonial design. They often mimicked traditional Christmas card scenes, with snow topped cottages and frosted trees, with Eid Mubarek etched on in Urdu, or Arabic verses from the Quran.

But by the 1930s, local aesthetics began to take root—thanks to regional printers like Muhammad Hussain & Brothers in Lahore, and Mahboob Al Matabah in Delhi. Cards began to feature girls swinging under mango trees in full bloom, pastoral village scenes, and images of Makkah and Media-–expressions of a collective cultural identity.

They were sold in bookshops, on specialist greeting card stalls that appeared ahead of Eid, or stuffed into jute sacks to be sold outside schools and colleges. Adorned with Urdu and Arabic calligraphy and poetic couplets, these cards carried the aesthetics and sentiments of the time. They weren’t just greetings; they were portable pieces of art.

Quiet but intentional

The rise of mobile phones and platforms like Whatsapp would ultimately change the way people communicated. Over the past two decades, handmade or printed Eid cards became largely replaced by quick e-cards or mass-forwarded standarised greetings. But the desire for beauty, effort, and meaningful connection hasn’t disappeared–it’s simply taken longer to find its way back.  

Daak Vaak, a digital platform curating forgotten stories and art from the subcontinent, has been experimenting with festive cards. “We’ve been redesigning Eid cards,” Insha, who handles Daak Vaak’s social media, told TRT World. Noticing a “slow shift” but an encouraging one, Insha reassures that “many of our customers are now buying postcards and sending handwritten notes to loved ones.”

California-based illustrator Haider Ali, who grew up on black-and-white Tamil films and an appreciation for devotional art, understands why Eid cards may be making a comeback. “People want to feel cared for again… They want someone to take time out of their day to send a card, to handwrite a message, to show they’re paying them special attention.”

This gentle resurgence is not just about aesthetics or trends. It’s also a quiet resistance against the disconnection that comes with digital life. As the world gets faster, people are slowing down—choosing to spend a few minutes writing a message instead of five seconds copying one.

In a time where everything feels disposable, a greetings card feels lasting. It can be tucked away in drawers, rediscovered years later, and still make you smile–like the stash my Nani once revealed to us, tucked in butter paper, worn soft with time.

I often return to that Eid in 1981, to my grandmother’s quiet smile as she unfolded those worn postcards from a friend lost to time.

In a world that moves faster than ever, perhaps the resurgence of Eid cards isn’t just nostalgia—it’s memory-turned intention.

Maybe today’s handwritten greetings are not trying to recreate the past, but to preserve what mattered most in it: the care, the time, the reaching out. A way of saying, you matter, with ink that lasts.