Imagine wandering through bustling 19th and early 20th-century bazaars, where shops overflow with British and Indian mill-made fabrics. Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile Trade at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru opens a visual corridor filled with the glorious hues of history, showcasing the stunning paper labels that adorned each bolt of cloth. These colourful labels—known as textile tickets, shippers’ tickets, tika, chaap, and marks—are not merely decorative; they tell a story. Each chromolithographed masterpiece carries intricate designs and a legally registered trademark.
The tickets, predominantly close to the size of postcards, range from 7 cm to 26 cm in height. Themes ranging from religious to mythological, local communities to depictions of women in traditional and modern roles course through the display. “There are images of women used to evoke desire and sensuality, and some labels also have humorous visuals, in ways that are familiar even in modern advertising,” says curator Nathaniel Gaskell. In all, there are 400 original tickets on display at the exhibition, curated by Gaskell and Shrey Maurya—founders of MAP Academy (an organisation that develops and provides open-access resources on the art and cultural histories of South Asia). “We have always wanted to do this incredible collection justice. The tikas were mass-produced, suffusing markets and homes. Yet they had faded from public memory,” Gaskell says.
The duo digitised the entire collection of 7,000 objects, reflecting the distinctive imagery that spoke of trade across merchants in 125 different cities across the world. “As we dived deeper into research, there were many revelations, in terms of how the artists and printers were borrowing, copying and adapting freely from other paintings, prints, illustrations and photographs of the time,” shares Maurya. For example, the similarity between the ticket and a folio from the Kanchana Chitra Ramayana (the Golden Illustrated Ramayana)—an illustrated manuscript of Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas created between 1796 and 1814 in Benaras—is uncanny. Also, some tickets seem to be directly copied from photographs of royals. Merchants and ticket designers used these images to appeal to markets where a ruler held a place in the local imagination.
The labels reference the world they existed in through visuals like the telephone, telegraph, an electric fan or the airplane, which were novelties at that time. The British king and queen seated in royal attire on a globe; Shiva and Parvati seated on Nandi, depictions of ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India), politically responsive icons including flags, maps, Swadeshi markers, images of leaders of the independence movement run through the collection. Here is art as a window into historical narratives.
