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Textile label featuring Rambha

Unknown maker(s)19th century

Museum of Art & Photography

Museum of Art & Photography
Bangalore, India

A textile label with an illustration taken from Raja Ravi Varma's iconic compositions, that of the urvashi Rambha.

Textile trade labels, also referred to as ‘tickets’ and ‘tikas’ remain a less popularly known, though entirely fascinating, by-product of Indo-British trade and cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These trade labels formed an integral part of the publicity campaigns of both British and Indian mills of the period, and featured imagery that ranged from the mythological to the political. Customarily rectangular in format and marked by borders that usually carried the names of the mills or their agents, they were directly attached to cloth or pasted on the bales of cotton cloth being shipped. Every bale of yarn and cloth coming into India from England carried these labels or trademarks; and soon indigenous mills began to employ the same method of marketing their wares.

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  • Title: Textile label featuring Rambha
  • Creator: Unknown maker(s)
  • Date Created: 19th century
  • Location: England/Germany; India
  • Physical Dimensions: H. 12.6 cm, W. 9 cm; support H. 23.5 cm, W. 18.3 cm
  • Type: Textile Label
  • Rights: Courtesy of the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP)
  • Medium: Chromolithograph
  • Museum No.: POP.00428
  • Department: Popular Culture
Museum of Art & Photography

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