Need Help Identifying Some Early Bhopal Stamps

I have been going through an old Bhopal collection, bought on E-bay about 10 years ago, assimilating it into my Indian States album, I have identified about 35 stamps to my satisfaction, but these few I question:






Tentatively, I identified these two as Scott # 10, 1/2 anna red, perforated, from 1879-80. Anytime I find the rarer stamps I am skeptical of my identification of them, but to find 2 in one collection seems unlikely at best. However, both of them are torn and repaired with old stamp hinges, so maybe this identification is believable.



These 3 are on laid paper and seem to be Scott #22, the 1/2 anna in black from 1884, imperforate. All 3 have subtle design differences. The first one has a dash under the "JA". The other two do not, they look similar to each other, but the middle one is taller and narrower than the last one. I know that each stamp in the sheet was hand-drawn on the lithograph stone, so there is a great deal of variation, and every stamp in a sheet is different, but are these all from the same sheet? ...and have the same catalog number?



I do not have a Stanley Gibbons catalog, which would probably be very helpful here. These all seem to be Scott # 25. They are on wove paper and seem to be the 1/4 anna in grayish green, imperforate, from 1886. There are at least 2 shades here. Each of them has a backward "N" in NAWAB. Are these all Scott 25 or something else. Are any of these (or the previous stamps) later reprints?

Please help me confirm the identities of these if you can. Thanks!

~Glenn

To my eyes, the 2 stamps cannot both be the same Scott number. They have numerous obvious differences in the design.

So either they are 2 different Scott numbers, two fakes from two different forging attempts, or 1 real, 1 fake.

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The amazing thing about the early Bhopal stamps is that they were hand-drawn individually on the litho stone. So a sheet of 20 stamps had 20 different images, nominally the same, but with many small differences, like missing letters, misspellings, slightly different Urdu characters, etc. Look at the sheet of 20 Bhopal stamps here to see what I mean:

https://goscf.com/t/7685&whichpage=2

But even taking the incredible variation in designs on any sheet into account, there were multiple printings, reprints and even forgeries made. Once you know how they were printed, it becomes a lot easier to figure out which stamp is which.

I know, it seems like a nightmare area to study,
but I love a good challenge!

~Glenn

Great stamps!

Sorry, I don't know Scott numbers, and you really should get SG for these. For plating, the definitive reference is a long-running series from 1978 to 1987 in India Post, the journal of the India Study Circle

First two red- brown stamps are SG 13, and are positions 32 and 14 in the sheet of 32.

The first black stamp is SG 52, position 14 in the sheet of 32.

The next two black stamps are reprints of the quarter-anna SG 61, in black instead of green. These are positions 3 and 13 from the sheet of 32. They really do differ in size that much!

The green stamps are all SG 54, which comes in shades of green and are positions 16, 31 and 8 in the sheet of 32.

Thank you, Peter!

I really appreciate the help in identifying these stamps. I have now added them into my album with the S.G. numbers and position in sheet noted below each stamp.

I am going to look around for an older, used edition of The S.G. catalog. They don't seem to be very common in this country, but the information in them would be very useful to me.

Thanks again, Peter!

~Glenn