The Label That Remembered

A few months ago, I walked through an exhibition that stayed with me for a long time.

Ticket, Tika, Chaap at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru ran through late 2025. I work in textiles, and it was the kind of show that left a mark.

What drew me in were the labels. Small, vivid, impossibly detailed, stuck once upon a time onto bolts of textiles and sent out into bazaars across India and the world. Walking through the exhibition, I realised that they were so much more than just identification tickets.

The Exhibition

Curated by Nathaniel Gaskell and Shrey Maurya and designed by Shruti Singh at the MAP Academy, Ticket, Tika, Chaap: The Art of the Trademark in the Indo-British Textile Trade brought together approximately 300-400 textile tickets from MAP's collection, alongside historical photographs, paintings, and printed ephemera. It moved through four sections: Cottonopolis examined the industrial and legal frameworks of textile production and trade; Legends, Beliefs, and Traditions explored the cultural and religious motifs on labels; Inspiration, Imitation, and Appropriation traced the interplay of artistic traditions; and Made in Britain for the World mapped the extraordinary global reach of these little pieces of paper.

An archive section featured folios and tickets from printers like Manchester-based B. Taylor & Co. — records documenting designs, approvals, client data, multiple sizes of the same design, blank labels for customisation, decorative bands, and stock albums from which merchants could choose. Seen together, it was a design system that predated everything we now call brand strategy.

These labels, known variously as tikats, tikas, or chaaps, arrived in India by the thousands, stuck on yards upon yards of cotton fabric manufactured in British and later Indian mills, and sold in Indian and global markets. They were, as MAP described them, perhaps the earliest forms of branding and advertising in India.

What the Labels Carried

What stayed with me was how densely these objects carried meaning. Their imagery ranged from dancing elephants and serene deities to reclining women in lush gardens and majestic steamships, divine figures, mythological scenes, regal portraits, and political symbols — all chosen with deliberate intent to resonate with local aesthetics and aspirations. They enticed customers, cultivated brand loyalty, and reinforced the perceived quality of cloth. For many buyers, they became cherished collectables, devotional objects, or emblems of personal taste. A label of Lakshmi or Ram told you something about who you were, or who you wanted to be.

By the 20th century, these tickets had absorbed India's political energies too. The exhibition included depictions of Bharat Mata, India as divine mother, alongside flags, maps, and images of nationalist leaders. Labels were used to promote Indian mill cloth in alignment with the ideals of the Swadeshi Movement. To buy the right cloth was, in a sense, to vote for independence.

All of this was rendered in chromolithography, a printing technique that brought brilliant, layered colour to paper and made these small rectangles look almost like paintings. Industrial in process, intimate in effect.

The curatorial team noted a recurring reaction from visitors, what they described as an aha moment: the realisation of how closely advertisements and popular art, both then and now, are tied to the cultural moods of their time. The appeal of modernity, the lure of the whimsical, the enduring power of beauty — these motifs still drive how things are sold today. The continuity is the thing that surprises you.

What It Means Now

I run a company called SatatKi that works with handloom weavers and natural dye practitioners across India. Walking through the exhibition left me with a direct line back to that work.

These tikats were, in their own time, a form of transparency. They told you something about origin, identity, and intent. The cloth wrapped in a label of Bharat Mata carried a position, a point of view, a story. The person who chose it was making a statement alongside a purchase.

The contemporary fashion industry's reckoning with sustainability is, in many ways, a reckoning with the same question. Who made this? Where did the cotton grow?

Certification systems, digital passports, QR codes, and traceability platforms have all emerged as answers. They are accurate instruments. But the textile ticket sits quietly in the archive, a reminder that traceability was once also a form of art — that origin could be carried in an image rather than a document, and that a buyer could understand it without being educated first.

That gap, between transparency that is accurate and transparency that is legible and beautiful, is the one the exhibition left me sitting with. The tikat worked because it fused information and image into something a buyer could hold and understand in a single glance. That is a problem the industry has not yet solved. And it is not an obscure one. The elements are already there: the maker's name, the place's imagery, the visual language of a tradition. What is missing is the will to treat the label as something worth making well.

That is what the tikats, at their best, were. And it is not a bad standard to return to.