The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai in collaboration with the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru and Impart are thrilled to present the exhibition ‘Ticket Tika Chaap’. Bringing these intricate and evocative textile tickets into focus, it explores them as both commercial tools and cultural artefacts—objects that shaped consumer behaviour while also capturing the political, social, and artistic shifts of their time.

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the vibrant, teeming bazaars of 19th and early-20th century India, a new visual language emerged in the cloth shops that had increasingly begun selling British and Indian mill-made cloth.

Glossy, brightly coloured paper labels, bearing elaborate images accompanied each bolt of cloth that arrived from Britain. These labels had many names — textile ticket, shippers’ ticket, tika, chaap, and mark. Each of these stunning chromolithographed labels served a myriad of purposes. They were legally registered trademarks, offering protection against counterfeiting; and advertisements generating brand recognition amongst buyers. The visual language of these textile labels would go on to define the very foundations of branding, advertisement and commercial image-making of that period. As artworks in their own right, these tickets were also collected, repurposed, and treasured in homes as decorative elements or even objects of worship.