I had to leave my hostel because there were no rooms available. My hostel was in Indiranagar, which I’d grown fond of. There are lots of restaurants, shops, and supermarkets in the area. The new hotel was in another part of town, perhaps closer to the centre.
After checking into my new hotel, I went to Cubbon Park. This is where people in Bangalore go to relax and enjoy green space.
Nearby was the Museum of Art and Photography. There are four floors, each with a different exhibition.
Most fascinating for me was the exhibition on textile labels.
If you had been in a bustling Indian bazaar around 1900 looking to buy cloth, you would have seen these textile labels. Also known as tickets, tikats, tikas or chaaps, these were glossy multicoloured paper labels. They were stuck on nearly every length of cloth.
Textile labels were typically pasted on the front of a folded fabric. They appeared alongside other stamped marks. These marks bore details such as names of the distributing merchant or export agency. They included the manufacturer, pattern number, and yardage. Dye quality and fabric type were also specified.
Here are two examples:
These labelled textiles were sold all over the world. Whereas the early labels were about Britain, manufacturers realised their brand and advertising potential. Buyers would know from the label the quality and value of the cloth.
The Industrial Revolution led to the large-scale mechanisation of textile production in mills. This shift allowed Britain to produce and export millions of yards of cloth. These exports reached markets around the world, especially British colonies.
As Britain’s textile industry expanded, companies wanted to protect and differentiate their cotton in foreign markets. The solution was to create unique designs for labels and trademark them. These were called “cotton marks” under the Trade Marks Regulation Act 1875.
These labels became incredibly valuable to “Cottonopolis”, Britain’s textile trade. As a result, a specialised industry for designing and printing labels emerged in Manchester, a major textile producer.
Originally, the labels were simple designs. Gradually, they became more sophisticated, drawing on contemporary culture (British and foreign). Cartoons, photos, paintings and other imagery were used for inspiration.
The labels used humour. For example, this shows elephants’ trunks being used as telegraph poles. The term “trunk call” was the former name for long-distance phone calls. The caption at the bottom reads, “THE TRUNK WIRE SYSTEM”.
These two labels mirror each other. A woman dancing with elephants playing instruments and an elephant dancing with men playing instruments.
Printers created labels from designs made by in-house artists, and from sketches and prints sent from overseas. In these five photos, you can see the painting or drawing that inspired the label:
The printers made stock designs available to merchants. Chromolithography, a popular mass-printing technique of the time, allowed printers to produce colourful labels in the thousands. Artists and lithographers break down a multicoloured image into layers of colours. A plate is painted with a single colour and then the plate is stamped on the labels. By repeating this process, a picture is built up, layer upon layer, one colour at a time.
The Empire’s most valuable colony, India, was also its largest textile market. Mills and merchants sought different ways to appeal to the buyer and sell their product. They used familiar imagery on tickets, especially of the Empire and its symbols and historical motifs, such as Britannia, the globe, the crown, and contemporary images of monarchs. These icons visibly linked the cloth to Britain’s sovereignty, power, and perceived superiority. This created an association with quality in the buyer’s mind.
These photos show how the labels adjusted to cater for local tastes. The first three are very British and the last (bottom right) depicts Indian life:
And these show the sheer variety of labels. The two on the right were stuck on textiles headed for other (non-Indian) markets.
I spent quite a while in the label exhibition. Then, I spoke to two tour guides, who explained the history of these labels.
On another floor was a small exhibition on the way woman are represented in art in India.
Finally, on yet another floor, there were these fascinating tissue sculptures:
