MUMBAI: From pretty to humorous and even bizarre, the textile tickets of the mid-19th to 20th centuries, also known as tika or chaap, make for interesting and intriguing art. You see a train being carried by a large pink fish, an elephant dancing to the tunes of a brass band and a dhoti-clad man sitting in a glass. About a hundred of these from the collection of Bengaluru’s The Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) are displayed in an exhibition titled Ticket Tika Chaap at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum.
In the textile markets across India and England, then, these labels, of the size of a postcard, were pasted on the packed yardages of mill-made cloth. “These were not just beautiful trademarks but also among the earliest forms of advertisements,” says Tasneem Mehta, the director of BDL. They tell stories of global trade, culture, technology and life in textile markets around the world, including India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, China and Britain.
After importing raw cotton from these markets, the textile mills in the UK would produce millions of yards of textiles and export them back to these centres. Merchant agencies purchased and packaged this cloth for sale and distribution across the Indian subcontinent, Africa and Latin America, informs Shrey Maurya, the co-curator of the exhibition along with MAP’s co-founder Nathaniel Gaskell. “Because of the diversity in the market, merchant agencies and mills sought to protect their goods and their brand name against counterfeiting. Textile tickets were a means of doing this,” she adds.
As the number of trademarks grew, merchants had to come up with unique designs for their businesses, says Maurya. So, the designers sought inspiration from Indian miniature paintings, photographs of monuments, mythological stories, Western art, the natural world, domestic life and more to create the trademark designs.
Among some prominent design studios making tickets in India were Calcutta Art Studio, Chore Bagan Art Studio, Chitrashala Press and the Raja Ravi Varma Press. It was also not uncommon for merchants to send printers in England or Europe images or popular prints from India. Indian merchants and traders also communicated market trends to agents of British firms and provided information on how cloth ought to be cut or packaged for specific markets in India.
Merchants chose religious motifs to associate auspiciousness and familiarity with brands. Labels depicting gods were sometimes framed and worshipped in Indian homes. One ticket in the exhibition shows Shiva and Parvati seated on Nandi, a near identical copy of an image first produced by the Chore Bagan Art Studio.
Another ticket portrays the British king and queen in royal attire, atop a globe, sitting over the Indian subcontinent. Important textile hubs and ports — Karachi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras are distinctly marked on the map.
Merchants also used familiar symbols of the Empire, such as Britannia, the crown and the monarchs. “These icons visibly linked the cloth to Britain’s sovereignty, power and perceived superiority, creating an association with quality in the buyer’s mind,” says Maurya.
Some labels glorified the Industrial Revolution. They showed mills, labourers, factories and shops. In one such a seller is seen surrounded by yards of cloth in his shop, and a few of them bear textile labels.
The one with the women in nine-yard saris holding lanterns is an adaptation of American painter Maxfield Parrish’s 1908 painting The Lantern Bearers, currently at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. It reflects how mass-printing technologies transformed the way people accessed images around the world. Technological advances and growing literacy created a publishing boom in Britain, Europe and North America, bringing illustrated books and media to a wider audience than ever before.
“Tickets also showed the new spaces and roles women could occupy, in a period when this shifting of boundaries provoked intense social debate in Britain and India,” says Maurya. In the expansive world of textile tickets, modernity was manifested through depictions of inventions, industry and people, reflecting the radical changes in the world at the time.
Mumbai too is placed in several of the tickets. Once a political and industrial hub of the British Empire, the city’s port connected India to global cotton circuits. Its mill districts, especially Girangaon, shaped its working-class history. Markets such as Mangaldas Market and Borah Bazaar appear on the labels too. Many tickets carry the word ‘Bombay,’ testifying to the city’s prominence as both production centre and distribution hub, adds Maurya.
The exhibition at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum continues until June 7Timing: 10.30 am to 6 pmEntry: ₹20