New Delhi: There is no photo of Mahatma Gandhi, Sankha Samanta is reasonably certain, which he would not recognize immediately. “The moment you show me one, I could tell you where it was taken, and when,” he says. “That is how much I have pored over them, to find ideas for stamps.”
Stamp act: India’s most prolific Gandhi stamp artist Sankha Samanta. Harikrishna Katragadda / Mint
Since 1947, the postal department has issued 33 commemorative stamps on Gandhi, in addition to a handful of more standard “definitives”. Of those 33, Samanta has designed 14, making him the most prolific Gandhi stamp artist. “We call him the Gandhi man,” says Suresh Kumar, one of the department’s six empanelled stamp artists. “While some of us may use graphics for our portraits, he does mostly hand-drawn portraits. And he does them very well.”
Samanta, a 44-year-old man with a square, pacific face, is a graduate of the very first master of fine arts batch from the Delhi College of Arts. Although not an employee of the department, the lion’s share of his work involves stamp design, commissioned at Rs9,300 per approved stamp and Rs2,300 per unapproved design. Occasionally, there is another project; when the chain of Barista coffee shops opened, Samanta, as design consultant, conceptualized its textured, streaked orange walls.
In 1987, Samanta visited Dak Bhavan, armed with his portfolio. As a test, he was asked for an Indira Gandhi portrait, which he “laboriously” worked on for 20 days. He now laughs at that. “A portrait takes just a few days at this point, but back then, I was still a student.”
Samanta passed that test and as an empanelled artist, sketched his first official stamp, on the execution of the freedom fighter Veer Narayan Singh, who was tied to the business end of a cannon shortly before it was fired. “I’d done a colour version, showing the British soldiers—I’d researched their uniforms at the time and everything,” he says. “That was all cut, because they wanted to be diplomatic!”
Since then, Samanta has designed nearly 250 stamps, although he is not sure of the exact number. “My father still scolds me about that, that I don’t preserve my stamps or catalogue them,” he says. He designed the first embossed stamp as well as the first scented one, a 2006 issue that, when rubbed, releases tiny puffs of a sandalwood aroma.
Not every stamp is equal, and those on Gandhi, among the department’s best-sellers, are accorded particular care. “Gandhi is among one of the very few exceptions to our internal rule, that a personality can form the basis of only one commemorative stamp,” says Manju Kumar, the department’s director of philately.