From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, mill cloth sold in Indian markets often carried a glossy, colourful paper label. called 'textile ticket, 'tika.' or 'chaap. As one of the earliest forms of print advertisements in India, these rich images brought multi-coloured, mass-produced visuals to a wide cross-section of customers. They stand at the confluence of the political, socio-cultural, commercial and artistic worlds of their time.
For the first time, this book and the exhibition it accompanies, bring together a selection of over 300 textile tickets, from one of the largest collections of tickets for the Indian market, at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, India.
This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, focuses on pictorial trademarks that were applied to British, and later, Indian mill-made textiles heading for the Indian market in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Printed in vibrant colours, using the relatively new technology of chromolithography, they represent the beginnings of what we now think of as branding and visual merchandising. Whilst playing an important, and often overlooked role in the history of commercial art, they also teach us a lot about the wider world during this time.
Textile 'tickets' were mostly printed in Manchester, the commercial heart of Lancashire's cotton textile industry, and the global centre of the cotton fabric trade during this period. At the height of the industry in 1913, Lancashire exported around 7 billion yards of fabrics globally, from fine muslins to sturdy sailcloth. The textile ticket industry linked the complex network of cotton mills, innovative machinery, merchants, agents and consumers with artists, lithographers and printing presses.
Manchester was home to hundreds of merchants from all over the world, as well as thousands of warehouses, some of which were situated around the evocatively named Bombay Street, Brazil Street and Venice Street. In these immense packing warehouses, such as Asia House and India House, cotton goods were prepared for export and. more importantly for our story, packed with pictorial tickets, which appear throughout the book.
With the waning of the textile industry in the mid to late 20th century, these warehouses were slowly abandoned-destined to become apartments for the emerging middle-classes of the city. In this transitional period, they offered affordable rent for artists and small creative industries. One such occupant in the 1980s was the artist and photographer. Adrian Wilson, whose studio was in Asia House, where he had befriended one of the last textile warehousemen who worked there. Knowing Adrian was an artist, this warehouseman gave him a bag of old trademark stamps that he had been asked to throw out (used for stamping textiles with pictorial marks alongside the stuck-on tickets) (see p. 20-21), and this led to the discovery later of the tickets themselves. So began a nearly four-decade-long commitment of research. preservation and advocacy of these objects.
Although in Britain there has been little interest in this material, in India over the last decade, scholars such as Dr Jyotindra Jain, Dr Sandria Freitag. Dr Arvind Rajagopal and Dr Sumathi Ramaswamy have been researching and writing about these labels, situating them in the broader context of India's popular art. These studies have also been aided by collectors such as Abhishek Poddar and Priya Paul, who have built up institutional collections, so that this material can be shared in the public domain. Having already collected over a thousand tickets (both British and Indian made), when Abhishek learnt about Adrian's collection, he acquired a part of it to complement the wider Indian popular art collection at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP).
Across this book and the exhibition, we present around 300 tickets from MAP's wider collection of over 7,000 labels and related ephemera. We don't know exactly how many tickets were designed and printed overall, but we do know from trademark office records that over a hundred thousand designs were put forward for registration by textile merchants. This sheer assortment allows textile tickets to become gateways to study diverse, yet overlapping, histories.
For art historians, textile tickets are a window into the visual culture of the 19th century and the wider image economy to which they belong. For postcolonial scholars. they are an entry point into discussing the exploitative imperial network with which the textile industry was so entwined from slavery that underpinned the raw cotton trade over most of the 19th century, to Britain's economic control of its colonies (especially India).
This complicated range of entry points into the material is what Shrey, Rachna and I find so interesting about this project, and it is this multiplicity of readings that we have attempted in our curatorial retelling of the stories these tickets contain. As we discovered during the process of curation and research, tickets also pose wide-ranging and difficult questions of how art is circulated, and the narratives and perceptions it carries for makers and viewers. The complexity is perhaps most succinctly captured in Dr Sumathi Ramaswamy's opening essay.
Quoting the anthropologist Liam Buckley, she says ""These works undoubtedly 'depict times that we no longer love but nevertheless 'remain loved objects themselves.""
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