Textile label produced for Graham Co., Manchester, titled Shantanu and the Ferry-Girl

A textile produced for Graham Co., Manchester, titled Shantanu and the Ferry-Girl. This illustration is taken from Ravi Varma's rendition of Shantanu and Matsyagandha.

King Shantanu is captivated by Satyavati or Matsyagandha and wants to marry her, the episode which sets the stage for the epic Mahabharata. Satyavati, brought up by a fish chieftain, agrees to marry Shantanu on the condition that their children would inherit the throne, rather than his heir Devavrata. Shantanu doesn't agree to it initially but after his son, Devavrata takes a vow of bachelorhood and agrees to the conditions, Shantanu marries her and fathers two children -- Chitrangada and Vichitravirya.

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.