MAP Bengaluru unveils exhibition Ticket Tika Chaap

Within the bustling bazaars of 19th and early–20th century India, a distinct visual language took root in cloth shops, trading both British and Indian mill–made textiles. Accompanying each bolt of cloth were glossy, brightly coloured paper labels adorned with elaborate imagery. These labels, known variously as textile tickets, shippers’ tickets tika chaap and mark, served multiple crucial functions. Not only did they act as legally registered trademarks safeguarding against counterfeiting, but also functioned as advertisements cultivating brand recognition among buyers. The visual vocabulary of these textile labels would fundamentally shape the nascent fields of branding advertisement and commercial image–making.

Beyond their commercial purpose, these stunning chromolithographed labels were also appreciated as artworks. They were collected, repurposed and cherished within homes as decorative elements, even attaining the status of objects of worship.

In an attempt to showcase its huge collection of these labels, Museum of Art and Photography, Bengaluru, has recently unveiled the exhibition Ticket Tika Chaap. Meticulously examining the visual legacy of colonial–era advertisement through the lens of textile labels, the exhibition reveals how these objects influenced consumer behaviour while also reflecting the political, social and artistic transformations of the era. To understand the creative process behind putting this exhibition together, we talk to Shrey Maurya, who has curated the exhibition with Nathaniel Gaskell:

How did you curate the tickets featured in the exhibition?

MAP has a large collection of tickets and related ephemera — totalling 7,000 objects — and we’ve always wanted to bring this incredible collection to the public and examine them as historical artefacts that represent the world in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The curatorial process took around two years. We studied the objects and recorded the places and traders mentioned on the labels to get a sense of the global reach of the cotton goods trade. We read extensively on the history of these labels and popular print culture in India, as researched by scholars like Dr Jyotindra Jain, Dr Kajri Jain, Dr Arvind Rajagopal, Dr Sumathi Ramaswamy and others. We also examined the labels from the point of view of their imagery, grouping them into broad themes and then getting a sense of why such visuals were used and what responses they sought to provoke in a cloth buyer of the period.

Can you elaborate on the specific strategies employed by the manufacturers to tailor these images to resonate with local sensibilities and desires?

Religious images were very popular on textile labels, possibly because they were already familiar to buyers and — given the rise of popular print culture and religious lithographs from the late 19th century onwards — already a commercial success in the marketplace. Merchants also tried to tailor label designs, using, for instance, images of popular rulers as leading visuals for certain regional markets.

In some instances, the use of images reflecting Indian culture were also influenced by a distinctly colonial viewpoint. For instance, label designs featuring people of India may have been created because of a perception that such images were familiar to Indians, but the inspiration for such images was often found in colonial forms of visual documentation, like Company paintings or photographs of people and communities.

How did the concept of ‘brand loyalty’ manifest in the late 19th and early 20th century Indian markets through these tickets?

We have no detailed data that tells us how these tickets drove sales but from contemporary accounts, we understand that they were a crucial part of local commerce for merchant agencies, traders and mills. The central visual on a textile ticket became a kind of shorthand for a merchant agency, a mill or a trader’s brand. So, people could save a label or remember the visual and go and ask for that particular brand of fabric in a shop.

Some visuals on labels also carry the words chaap or tikat, reinforcing this idea of recall. Some scholars have suggested that the visual was an important bridge between merchant agencies, who were predominantly British, and an Indian market that was linguistically, culturally and geographically diverse. But the counterpoint to this idea is also the fact that the margins of labels often carried business names and other information in English as well as regional Indian languages. These reasons are also why trademarking designs became such an important practice within the trade, because the visual was a significant cue to identifying the goods of a particular business and was tied into the idea of brand perception and quality. At the same time, the sheer volume of the trade and trademarks meant that merchants and label printers drew on all sorts of sources of inspiration for these visuals.

Beyond their commercial purpose, these labels often became cherished collectibles and even devotional objects. Could you share some particularly compelling stories or examples of how these labels transcended their original function?

Art historian Ilay Cooper came across these labels during his research on the havelis of the Shekhawati region in Rajasthan, which are known for their colourful murals. Some of these havelis were commissioned by merchants or the families of merchants who were from the region but were active in the cloth trade in different parts of India. Cooper saw these labels either glued to the surfaces of rooms or sometimes framed and turned into objects of worship. In his study of popular Indian print culture, Dr. Jyotindra Jain also found that among some merchant families, mill labels and other curios — like European chromolithographs and figurines — were displayed in homes on festive occasions.

How do these tickets reflect the broader socio-political landscape of the time, and what insights can they provide into the dynamics of that era?

It’s important to acknowledge that the labels represent the nature of the Indo–British textile trade, chiefly the fact that British mills and merchant agencies dominated the Indian market, turning India from a global leader in cotton goods to the largest market for British mill–manufactured cottons.

Labels also represent the emergence and growth of India’s mechanised textile industry, from the late 19th century onwards. From a cultural perspective, the labels provide us with an insight on how rich the visual world of the time was. For instance, label designs adapted from illustrated European literature, popular Indian prints, photography, magazines, Indian miniature painting.

Considering the technological limitations of the time, what were the primary production techniques used to create these vibrant and detailed labels? What challenges did manufacturers face?

The labels were largely printed using the technique of chromolithography, which by the late 19th century was an immensely popular technique for creating mass-produced coloured prints. From this perspective, these labels have their own artistic merit, because they were complex works, created by teams of artists, lithographers and technicians, working together. We aren’t sure of challenges, simply because we find almost no records of the printing practices.

In what ways do you see these historical labels mirroring or foreshadowing contemporary advertising and visual culture in India?

I think the labels mirror contemporary advertising in the depiction of some universal themes, like fantasy, humour, depictions of beauty, desire, and aspiration and modernity, and the aim to tie these themes to the product. So, many label visuals tapped into the contemporary visual culture of the time and also responded to current events, which we see in topical advertising even today. The depictions of women — from romanticised domesticity to alluring sensuous imagery — echoes even today.

For contemporary Indian audiences, what do you hope they take away from this exhibition?

I hope people will walk away from the exhibition curious and excited to discover the histories of popular Indian art and advertising. These are historical objects, made in a different time, but I believe the more time people spend at the exhibition, taking in these labels and these designs, they will find several images that appeal to them. In its own way, our responses to such images tell us so much about what we enjoy, but it also emphasises how creative and inventive these labels were. They can be considered as objects of art on their own merit, and they tell us how crucial images and their meanings are in commerce.