India 1882 - 'M' Bar Cancel

I recently bought a large lot of old Indian stamps in the hope of finding interesting cancels and overprints but was sorely disappointed. Most cancels were either illegible or very partial.

Anyway, this stamp (half anna, 1882) was one of the few in which the major portion of the cancel was present. I'm wondering what 'M' stands for - Madras?

Yes, this was the Madras Postal Circle. Most of the Postal Circle identifying letters are quite obvious:
C = Calcutta/Bengal
B = Bombay
M = Madras
A = Allahabad/Northwest Provinces
L = Lahore/Punjab
N = Nagpur/Central Provinces
K = Karachi/Sind
R = Rangoon/Burma
O = Lucknow/Oudh
J = Ajmer/Rajputana
T = Travelling PO - Allahabad
D = Dinapore/Bihar
E = Dacca/East Bengal
S = Shillong/Assam
I = Indore/Central India

You also find this type of cancellation as a square, with the Circle letter alone, or with one or two numbers to indicate the main and sub-office within the Circle. So, for example, M-1-1 would be a local post office in Madras City, and M-89 is Mahé and M-111 is Pondicherry (both French India, and worth looking out for).

An afterthought: I have this WWII cover from India to Palestine, which I bought originally for the nice Hyderabad cinderella on the back:





but it does show a use of the then ancient Bombay B-1 cancel. I've no idea why - perhaps it was resurrected to fulfill some censorship role.

The only place name cancels I have - besides obvious places like Bombay, Delhi and Srinigar - were the following:

Suntikoppa
Kalain
Nasirabad
a place name that starts 'Ran' and could be Rangoon
and a place whose name starts 'Tranq ...'

Do you know if any of those are of interest to people who collect Indian cancels?

Tranq... can only be Tranquebar. It was once a Danish possession, and a full strike would be of moderate interest. Rangoon is pretty common on all but the very earliest Indian stamps; the others aren't of any obvious interest, AFAIK.

I was afraid of that! I bought about 500 stamps and 99% of the cancels were smudged and utterly illegible.

Out of that lot, I also only got about two overprints.

I can only assume I got the leftovers from someone else who was also after interesting cancels and overprints.

I'm afraid that, after all this time, the chances of finding a large, unpicked-over accumulation are pretty slim. Indian postmarks have been a subject of interest for many years, although even the rarer ones have rarely fetched seriously high prices off-cover.

I'd be happy to find just one that would cover the cost of the lot!

I should add that there were some interesting shade varieties - although sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a faded stamp (too much tropical sun?) and a paler variety.

Here's three shades of a stamp that, according to Gibbons, only comes as blue or ultramarine:

I don't know this issue well enough to comment authoritatively, but I suspect the first copy has faded. Of course, just about all the low values were printed in huge numbers. 3 Annas paid the registration rate, so it saw heavy use.