Lives in a Matchbox

See a related Tasveer Ghar visual essay on Welcome posters by Patricia Uberoi, a scholar and avid collector of calendar art since the 1960s.

Fruits and vegetables are an essential part of everyday life and depicted liberally on matchbox labels. One sees colourful pictures of bananas, grapes, pears, mangoes, coconuts and cashew nuts, some of which are in fact grown in the regions where matchboxes are manufactured.

A typical matchbox label is a tiny space. Yet the artists have drawn wide panoramic scenes of nature and landscapes on them. Some depict sunrises, rainbows, hilly terrains, rivers or forests, some even show specific locations such as Kashmir’s Dal lake or Simla hills. 

Fish is a popular symbols in many cultures, depicted in colourful ways, including in printed visual culture. Matchbox labels carry attractive pictures of fish and other sea life forms.

Images of cute babies are used globally to decorate homes or personal items. Matchbox labels also use them, showing us the manner in which the artists borrowed liberally from such ubiquitous subjects of the worldwide visual culture of modernity.

Images of masculinity evoke a sense of power in popular visual culture. Portraits of heroes, famous male leaders, or men doing “manly” tasks such as hunting or fighting wild animals have been depicted on matchbox labels.

Pictures of attractive women are integral in South Asia’s popular visual culture, whether in advertisements, cinema or street posters. Matchbox labels not only depict well known women such as film stars, singers and goddesses, but also generic beautiful female faces.

Besides visuals, Indian matchbox labels feature texts in a variety of languages and attendant scripts—Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu—in addition to English. The names of the places, small industrial towns in many cases, also feature along with the manufacturer’s name.

Images of movie stars, and even an occasional movie poster, have been depicted on matchbox labels. These are not limited to icons only from the Bombay film industry. But given the south Indian location of many matchbox makers, they also feature movie stars from Tamil cinema.