![]() Baby iconography was popular too, with pictures of infants on labels. ![]() ![]() “Imageries like these give rise to discussions of a certain dominant right-wing sentiment being carried forward,” says Hemmady. For example, a common matchbox cover during the freedom struggle had ‘Bharat Mata’ imposed on an outline of India’s map. He even has one issued by the US Reward for Justice campaign (a counterterrorism rewards programme set up by the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service), with Saddam Hussain’s picture on the cover so that Iraqis could identify him when he was on the run.Īside from art and commemorations, matchbox collections tell the story of a country’s ideas: what it thinks about nationalism, for instance, or religion, gender, and ideologies. ![]() Meanwhile, Kashyap has a matchbox commemorating Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding, another from Air Force One, the official aircraft of the President of United States, and a third from George Bush’s Presidential Ball. The oldest matchboxes in his collection date back to the 1920s, while his label collection goes as far back as 1890. Hemmady’s collection is split into 10 to 12 themes, including trading merchants named on old labels, old Indian factories, religion and mythology, monuments, royalty, courtesans, advertising, films, the freedom struggle, and so on. This might be how symbols get carried forward,” explains Katuri. “They are such a common image that designers adopt them as an easy symbol for matchboxes. Tigers, elephants, lions and cockerels are the most popular choices for matchbox art, the first three because of mythology, the last because rural areas and certain sections of cities abound in roosters. And for another, they commemorate events that will eventually go down in history.Ĭertain themes run strongly in the art on the boxes, for example, animals. What’s so hot about matchboxes, though? Well, for one thing, they’re an expression of popular art. He now has 80,000 matchboxes, labels and covers from 108 different countries. In India, Katuri is one of many phillumenists, including Delhi-based Gautam Hemmady - who was bitten by the matchbox bug in early 2012 and now has 25,000 matchboxes, labels and covers - and Chennai-based Rohit Kashyap, who has been a collector for over 30 years, beginning from when he was in class 5. Though it isn’t as popular as philately (stamp collecting) and numismatics (coin or currency-collecting), phillumeny (matchbox collecting) is a legitimate hobby worldwide, complete with fanatics who will spend millions if they feel they need to add to their collection. Katuri’s collection is not as offbeat as you may think. All these matchboxes are now displayed on her Instagram account, of a nation Her sister even went so far as to risk an accident by leaping out of a car mid-ride to pick up a matchbox on a footpath, and her friends were given the side eye by a restaurant waiter for inquiring about matchboxes on the premises. Now the people she knows are just as keen as she is to add to her collection. Today, with 900+ matchboxes and labels in her collection, Katuri laughs when she remembers having to deny a cigarette habit. What else were they to think, considering her sudden passion for matchboxes? This had to mean more than simply the fact that her dissertation was about matchboxes as part of popular culture. Three years ago, when Delhi-based Shreya Katuri began taking her final year journalism dissertation seriously, her friends’ families believed she’d become a secret smoker.
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