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Ballpoint Pens in India before 1951?


Auntor

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Okay...so my question has a back story.

 

Yesterday, I saw the photograph given below in a book.

IMG-20240331-WA0005.jpg.96bb3bf19e27a5c3d83499c462b727de.jpg

It is a picture of Abanindranath Tagore, master-painter and nephew of Rabindranath Tagore. He is writing something with a pen in this picture. Naturally, I tried to identify the pen in his hand but failed. 

I searched the Internet and took this screenshot of two pens used by Abanindranath (as labeled) from a virtual tour of Jorasanko Thakur Bari Museum.

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To me, these look like ballpoint pens.

But A.N. Tagore died in 1951.

He belonged to an aristocratic family and therefore using an imported ballpoint pen is not surprising. But, the pens appear to be made by indian craftsmen. (Similar pens are still made by bengali artisans of Shantiniketan in West Bengal).

Where ballpoint pens manufactured in India before 1951? 

Even serious is the fact that if these pens were manufactured after '51 than the museum has labeled them wrongfully.

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possibly a stylographic pen instead of a ball point pen.

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That is an interesting question. A ballpoint pen from 1951 or earlier would be an early model (the first ballpoint pen was introduced by Eversharp in the summer of 1946) and these early ballpoints had a rather blunt shaped ball bearing tip. But the two pens in your picture have a long and fine writing tip, so they are unlikely to be early ballpoint pens. They are either stylographic pens or pencils.

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