I came across an inquiry into white elephant snuff and googled it. I came across a New Delhi dealer that sells 41 photo white elephant along with a couple other 41 photo snuffs. What’s with the word photo and the number designations?
The guy from 6 photo explained once that sense literacy is (or historically was) fairly low in India, people would just count the faces on their favourite snuff to know which one was which. There was a 5 photo on mrsnuff a couple years ago (himalaya was one of their popular ones, similar to kalish) and I guess there are several others. I’m sure you probably know but the equivalents to white elephant is 6photo cheetah and dholakia white. There’s also a kind of Tibetan snuff I’ve heard about that has a greyish color and I think is similar to these.
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They must have swayed from the concept. My 6 photo cans have fewer than 6 faces or even pictures on them. The 41 photo cans in the link have what appears(I can’t turn the can)fewer than 6 also.
41 photos? I guess that works for the illiterate math genius! I love the no smoking sign posted in front of a tobacco plant.
The guy from 6 photo explained once that sense literacy is (or historically was) fairly low in India, people would just count the faces on their favourite snuff to know which one was which. There was a 5 photo on mrsnuff a couple years ago (himalaya was one of their popular ones, similar to kalish) and I guess there are several others. I’m sure you probably know but the equivalents to white elephant is 6photo cheetah and dholakia white. There’s also a kind of Tibetan snuff I’ve heard about that has a greyish color and I think is similar to these.
I still have a few 5 photo snuffs in my possession. Nice snuff for sure.
They must have swayed from the concept. My 6 photo cans have fewer than 6 faces or even pictures on them. The 41 photo cans in the link have what appears(I can’t turn the can)fewer than 6 also.
All my 6 photo tins have 6 faces on them but the smaller plastic ones just have a 6 printed on the lid… although I think they came wrapped in something that might have had the 6 faces. I’m sure it varies some and I doubt they can fit 41 faces on a label but all the 6 photo containers have 6 faces on them. At least the 25g+ ones. Excluding anarkali 45g for some reason.
http://www.indiamart.com/41photosnuff/tabacco-snuff.html#himtaj-golden
The minimum order is 150 boxes of 10- 35gram tins That is a lot of snuff! 115 and 3/4 pounds.
I had noticed that @basement_shaman, perhaps that explains the suppose scarcity of this white elephant snuff.