How Textile Labels Became Miniature Works Of Art in Colonial India
The Ticket Tika Chaap exhibition showcased 400 artisitically designed paper labels for textile and clothing products from March to June this year
The world of advertising has always had an outsized influence on art and artistic trends around the globe. René Magritte, Andy Warhol and Dr. Seuss all worked in advertising before creating their respective signature works. Artistic schools like the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and 30s emphasized the harmonious co-existence of individual artistic vision alongside the tenets of industrial design and production.
In the Indian context, one of the earliest examples of advertising trademarks being deployed on a large scale was the ‘ticket,’ ‘tika’ or ‘chaap’—vibrantly coloured paper labels used for cloth and fabric-based products, manufactured in Britain’s Manchester and mill towns in India. The exhibition Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile Trade, co-curated by Shrey Maurya and Nathaniel Gaskell, collects almost 400 of these artefacts in conjunction with photographs and other archival material. The exhibition opened in Bengaluru in March 2025 and was on display at Mumbai’s Bhau Daji Lad Museum till 7 June 2026.
The images printed on these labels were often a result of consul-tation between British manufacturers and their Indian merchant partners. As a result, you see both stereotypical &lsqu...
The world of advertising has always had an outsized influence on art and artistic trends around the globe. René Magritte, Andy Warhol and Dr. Seuss all worked in advertising before creating their respective signature works. Artistic schools like the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and 30s emphasized the harmonious co-existence of individual artistic vision alongside the tenets of industrial design and production.
In the Indian context, one of the earliest examples of advertising trademarks being deployed on a large scale was the ‘ticket,’ ‘tika’ or ‘chaap’—vibrantly coloured paper labels used for cloth and fabric-based products, manufactured in Britain’s Manchester and mill towns in India. The exhibition Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile Trade, co-curated by Shrey Maurya and Nathaniel Gaskell, collects almost 400 of these artefacts in conjunction with photographs and other archival material. The exhibition opened in Bengaluru in March 2025 and was on display at Mumbai’s Bhau Daji Lad Museum till 7 June 2026.
The images printed on these labels were often a result of consul-tation between British manufacturers and their Indian merchant partners. As a result, you see both stereotypical ‘exotic India’ imagery (like a royal procession with a queen riding on an elephant) and pictures that depicted British-influenced aspirational activities (see the image of the saree-clad young woman reclining outdoors, calling out to birds) that projected wealth and leisure among affluent Indians.
There were also callbacks to popular Indian epics like the Ramayana—see the ticket where brown-skinned labourers are carrying goods on their backs, literally from Britain to India. on the world map. The image instantly evokes the episode of Rama’s monkey army crossing the ocean in the Ramayana. In this way, the interests of art and commerce, nationalism and modernity were bridged by these ‘tickets’.
This exhibition provides us with a fascinating window into the commercial ties between colonial India and England. But more importantly, it shows us just how influential mass-printing technologies would become in the near future, shaping both commercial and aesthetic tastes.
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