Ticket Tika Chaap: The Bold Labels of India’s Textile Trade

Imagine you are in a bustling, vibrant 19th-century Indian bazaar. You are browsing the fabrics on display but find your gaze drawn away from the cascades of cloth to a vivid paper label, shimmering atop a neatly folded stack of hand-woven khadi. The label catches your eye. It is bold, colourful, and bursting with a story. The label - known as a tikat, tika, or chaap - identifies the fabric you are yearning for, and you’re sold. Sold dreams, devotion, and desire.

Today, these tickets are centre stage in Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile Trade, on show at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru, until 2 November 2025. Glossy, jewel-toned, and no bigger than a postcard, these tickets are among the earliest forms of advertising in India. Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, millions were printed in Britain’s Manchester and India’s growing mill towns, then shipped with cloth to far-flung markets. At a time when Indian textiles had been overtaken by industrial production, these images offered colour in a world made grey by colonial capitalism.

Featuring everything from steamships to deities, kings to reclining women, each label was carefully crafted to resonate with local aesthetics and aspirations, adopting historical Indian art traditions like miniature painting and religious prints circulating in India as inspiration. As Shrey Maurya, who curated the show alongside Nathaniel Gaskell, explains, “Textile tickets mark the industrialisation of the textile production process and the growth of commodity culture. But they also reflect socio-economic changes like the emergence of new middle and elite classes that consumed these manufactured goods.” A ticket might show Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, to promise prosperity, or a rampant lion to evoke power and pride.

Designed using chromolithography and often ornately bordered with patterns and multilingual scripts, the labels spoke to a diverse audience, crafting a visual language of persuasion. This text typically included the name of the mill or merchant agency, the location of its main offices, and the cities where the cloth was distributed, or carried a slogan, reinforcing brand recognition and trust. 

Indian merchants remained very active in the trade, and Maurya says, “They communicated market trends to agents of British firms, provided information on how cloth ought to be cut or packaged, and may also have suggested textile ticket designs.” This collaboration, however, did not alter the asymmetry of colonial power - the visual codes still served the branding of imperial goods. Yet, they became cherished objects: collected, reused, even venerated. Some were kept in family homes, pasted into albums, or used in altars - part advertisement, part art, part aspiration.

Now, nearly 400 of these artefacts are on display alongside photographs, prints, and archival material, inviting visitors to look beyond the paper and into a larger story of trade, identity, empire, and artistry. Proof that even the smallest scraps of paper can carry the weight of history.

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Further Information:

Museum of Art & Photography (MAP)

@mapbangalore

Discover the accompanying book: 

Ticket Tika Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile Trade.

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Image Credits:

All images are credited to the collection at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP).