He never stood beside a celebrity for a photograph. He never chased an autograph at an airport or a public event. For nearly four decades, Priyabrat Biswal has done something far more old-fashioned: he writes letters. From a village in Odisha, his handwritten requests have travelled across the world — and returned carrying pieces of history.


By ARCHANA


THERE are no red carpets, flashing cameras or celebrity encounters behind Priyabrat Biswal’s collection. There is only a pen, a sheet of paper, an envelope and the long, uncertain wait for the postman. From Olihan, a village near Astarang in Puri district, the 57-year-old has spent nearly four decades writing to some of the most famous people on earth, requesting one thing: an autographed photograph. He has never met any of them. Yet, tucked away in his albums are more than 600 signed photographs and letters from presidents, prime ministers, astronauts, Nobel laureates, sporting legends, writers and film personalities.

What began as curiosity has quietly turned into an extraordinary personal archive. Priyabrat did not even know, when he started, that collecting autographed photographs was a recognised hobby elsewhere in the world. He was simply testing a question that had occurred to him: would a celebrated personality actually respond to a letter from an ordinary man living in a remote village? The answer, when it came, changed the course of his life. “Out of curiosity, I started writing letters to eminent personalities of the world, hardly realising that it could develop into a hobby,” he recalls. What followed was a lifelong experiment in patience, persistence and human connection.

His first attempt was made to the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Fate, however, intervened before the experiment could produce an answer; Gandhi was assassinated in 1984. Priyabrat gave up for a while, but eventually tried again, this time writing to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. When a response arrived from the woman famously known as the ‘Iron Lady’, it was more than a reply — it was validation. Someone he had never met, someone living in a world unimaginably distant from his own, had answered his letter. He began writing again, and this time he did not stop.

The list of those who responded reads almost like a roll call of modern history. His collection includes photographs and replies associated with US presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, besides Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Kofi Annan. There are literary names such as Manoj Das, Vikram Seth and Dominique Lapierre, and icons from sport including Pele, Michael Jordan, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, Steffi Graf, Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt. Indian sporting greats — Prakash Padukone, Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev, Sachin Tendulkar, P.T. Usha and Neeraj Chopra — also find their place in his albums. Bollywood, too, has contributed its share, with names such as Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das.

But for Priyabrat, a signature becomes meaningful not because the person is famous, but because the photograph carries a story. Among all his possessions, he holds the responses from Mother Teresa and Neil Armstrong particularly close to his heart. One represented a global symbol of compassion; the other, the first human to set foot on the Moon. “With each autographed photograph, I feel like possessing a rare treasure, reading a slice of history,” he says. That perhaps explains why his collection feels less like celebrity memorabilia and more like a private museum of the people who shaped the world he grew up reading about.

The cruellest chapter in the story arrived in 1999. Odisha’s super cyclone devastated lives, homes and livelihoods, and Priyabrat’s collection suffered a devastating blow too. Nearly 1,500 pieces that he had painstakingly gathered over the years were lost or damaged. For a conventional collector, rebuilding such a collection might have seemed impossible; many of the photographs represented one-time opportunities, personalities who would never again be accessible in the same way, and correspondence that could not simply be recreated. Priyabrat, however, returned to his pen and began again. Slowly, the collection grew back to its present strength of more than 600 pieces.

His success rate, he admits, is tiny — less than one per cent. For every response that arrived, there were countless letters that disappeared into silence. But failure has never really discouraged him because, in his view, the attraction lies as much in the possibility as in the result. “Convincing a celebrity for an autographed photograph is really a tough job,” he says. Yet he continues to send his requests, patiently trusting the old machinery of India Post.

That persistence seems almost eccentric today. The world in which Priyabrat began writing has vanished. A person can now send a message to a celebrity in seconds, leave a comment on a social-media post or communicate through email without ever touching a sheet of paper. Priyabrat could easily have moved with the times. He chose not to. He still writes his letters by hand because he believes handwriting carries something digital communication cannot — the unmistakable presence of the person who wrote it.

And there are still absences in his collection that he regrets. He had hoped to receive autographed photographs from Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to travel into space, Kalpana Chawla, the celebrated astronaut of Indian origin, and legendary athlete Milkha Singh. He is also disappointed that repeated letters to President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have so far not produced the response he has been hoping for. Yet even these unanswered letters have not made him put away his pen. For a collector who has spent four decades waiting for replies, an unanswered letter is perhaps not an ending — it is simply a story without its final page.

Priyabrat now wants his private archive to become a public one. He dreams of an exhibition, and eventually a museum, where the photographs and handwritten correspondence can be preserved and shown to visitors, particularly young people who may have little understanding of the value of an old-fashioned letter or a genuine signed photograph. The idea requires an investment beyond his present means, but the dream remains alive.

Perhaps that is what makes Priyabrat’s story larger than his collection. He has spent almost forty years reaching across enormous distances without travelling very far himself. His letters have gone from a small village in Odisha to the desks and homes of people whose names are known around the world. Most never answered. A few did. Those few replies became treasures.

In an age when communication is measured in seconds, Priyabrat Biswal has chosen to measure it in patience. His collection is therefore not merely a record of famous people. It is a record of faith — the faith that a handwritten letter can still cross a great distance, find an unknown person on the other side, and sometimes, against all odds, come home carrying a piece of history.


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