Ticket Tika Chaap: Nathaniel Gaskell & Shrey Maurya

Ticket Tika Chaap

From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, mill cloth sold in Indian markets was often accompanied by vibrant paper labels known as textile tickets, tika, or chaap. These striking images—among the earliest forms of print advertising in India—introduced colourful, mass-produced visuals to a wide and diverse audience.

Ticket Tika Chaap brings together, for the first time, a curated selection of over 300 such textile tickets from one of the largest collections for the Indian market, housed at the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), Bengaluru. Spanning imagery from dancing elephants and beloved deities to steamships and everyday symbols, these labels reveal a fascinating intersection of politics, commerce, socio-cultural life, and artistic expression.

Published alongside the accompanying exhibition, the book explores how textile tickets—imported in their thousands on cotton manufactured in Britain and India—became carriers of desire, memory, and meaning, transforming the simple act of purchase into a visual and emotional experience.

Dimensions: 26.5 × 20 × 2 cm