Have you noticed our shipper’s ticket sticker on your recent package from us?
At seemakrish, we were inspired to create our own, ‘Shipper’s Ticket’.
Illustrated by Nikita Jain, it features the Monkey God, Hanuman, bringing our textiles across the ocean and the Golden Gate bridge! Hanuman is known as the God of success, prosperity, intelligence and good luck; bestower of happiness and remover of obstacles. Did he bring some good luck your way, along with your recent package of our textiles?!
What are Shipper’s Tickets?
Shipper’s tickets, are a by-product of the Indo- British cotton trade that occurred between the 18th and first half of the 20th century. All the bales of mill yarn and cloth coming into India from Great Britain were trademarked and labeled. The labels contained a massive explosion of visual culture. They comprised manufacturers’ and trading agencies’ product labels and trademarks, calendars and advertisements. They had a powerful impact on Indian social and aesthetic values and religious practices, generating modern aspirations and popular nationalist sentiment.
The labels were usually rectangular and marked by ornate margins on all four sides, with the main image in the middle, which depicted Hindu mythological scenes or deities.
Elephants charmingly linking trunks amid palm trees; a beautiful, miniature-like scene from the Mahabharata; George III’s son the Duke of Cambridge, sitting quizzically in his chair with a decorative frame featuring English and Hindi; a hurricane lamp splendidly illustrating the delights of “Congo Red” – just a taste of the richly-colored imagery found on these 19th and early 20th-century “Shipper’s tickets”, produced to identify brand and cloth type for fabric woven in Manchester or Glasgow, and sold to the Indian market.
Designed in Britain using Indian imagery as inspiration and dispatched across the world, “Shipper’s Tickets” are a fascinating window into the global textile trade of that era, revealing all kinds of stories about visual culture and shared history in India, Britain, and the ways each culture saw the other.
