India, March 2 -- From pretty to humorous and even bizarre, the textile tickets of the mid-19th to 20th centuries, also known as tika or chaap, make for interesting and intriguing art. You see a train being carried by a large pink fish, an elephant dancing to the tunes of a brass band and a dhoti-clad man sitting in a glass. About a hundred of these from the collection of Bengaluru's The Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) are displayed in an exhibition titled Ticket Tika Chaap at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum.

In the textile markets across India and England, then, these labels, of the size of a postcard, were pasted on the packed yardages of mill-made cloth. "These were not just beautiful trademarks but also among the earliest forms of...