I have often wondered about this phenomenon with the Hindu cards and orange backgrounds that should be red in tone.
As the owner of many prints of all nature from the late 1800's and early 1900's I have seen many items that one would assume should be identical but are run in slightly (sometimes severely) different colors.
Based on conversations with printmakers and personal research I have found that in print runs at the turn of the century printers would frequently use different inks from different dye lots.
This would occur if they ran out of a certain color during a sprint run or often when starting a new run.
It is my understanding that unlike today, with modern printing techniques, back in the day it wasn't always so important that all the prints of a run matched one another exactly.
So, in order to answer the question originally posed we need to determine if all Hindu back cards have the same color anomaly.
Let's concentrate on the red background portraits that are orange. Attached is a pick of an Elberfeld Hindu I own with a clearly orange background. We need to ask two questions to get started.
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1. Does anyone own a Hindu Elberfeld with a truly dark red background?
2. Does anyone own another Elberfeld Hindu with an orange background?
Should other board members have orange backed Hindu Elberfeld we can assume that all hindu Elberfelds are orange. If other members have a truly red Hindu Elberfeld we know that there are variations out there... Then it gets complicated...
But to get back to the original point, there is no reason to believe that all the colors on all the cards ever printed match, there is also no reason to believe that the print masters running the shops were concerned with all the cards being exactly the same... Remember the card was the throw away gift in the pack of cigarettes, not the main item being purchased.
Let's see some Elberfelds and hear some thoughts.