Book Review: Light of India
A Conflagration of Indian Matchbox Art
Tanya A. Brown

What do a one-eyed electric fan, cigarette-smoking monkeys and a goddess with a necklace of human skulls have in common? Each has been rendered as a striking miniature work of art on an Indian matchbox cover.

Although the heyday of matches in the U.S. is long past, driven out by the ubiquitous flicking of Bics, at one time they were a very common sight. Matchbooks were an advertising medium, frequently given out for free to promote restaurants, hotels and other businesses. By contrast, Indian matchboxes are a more purely artistic medium, and in Light of India pop culture historian Warren Dotz catalogs the beautiful, interesting and just plain weird illustrations found there. Physically the size of a DVD, the paperback comes with a slipcover reminiscent of the matchboxes it displays, including a rough "striker strip" along the spine.

Matches are extremely important in India, where they're used to light fires for purposes including cooking, lighting and tobacco smoking. Match making is quite literally a cottage industry, with a huge number of more-or-less identical products available on the market. Matchbox art is thus important for brand differentiation, to give manufacturers a marketing edge over competitors.

A very close parallel can be found in the form of early 20th century U.S. fruit crate labels. These colorful images were glued on the ends of wood crates to identify their contents, origin and the packer's name. Over time, they became fanciful, eye-catching and innately artistic, helping to differentiate between a sea of virtually identical products and becoming an important part of marketing produce and generating business for growers. Like fruit crate labels, Indian match art often has little to do with the product itself, but Dotz identifies recurring themes ranging from mythology to transportation.

Prior to World War I, most matches were imported into India, primarily from Sweden and Japan. Thus, the labels were initially drawn by European artists and included themes which were meant to appeal to the local market. Naturally, that led to some unintentionally humorous labels. In discussing a series of Austrian labels, Dotz comments "although the subject matter is strictly Indian, there is one character with a blond beard who looks suspiciously like an Austrian gentleman strolling through a Viennese wood with the Danube in the background!"

Later, when many manufacturers set up shop in southern India, labels began to appear that were designed by Indian artists who included themes and motifs of local interest.

A flip through Light of India reads like a quick cultural history of the second most populous country on the planet. Beautiful sari-clad young women smile from one chapter, while India's military and political leaders are featured in others. (Where would cigarette smokers be without the image of that famous non-smoker, Mahatma Gandhi, smiling up from their matchboxes?) Blue-tinged or multi-limbed gods dance and posture in one series of pictures, while cattle regally gaze at us from another. Local wildlife also have a special place in the Indian pantheon of matchboxes, with tigers making an especially toothy, ferocious showing.

As one would expect from the country which brought us the Ramayana and Bollywood, the images are often fanciful and sometimes downright alarming. For example, why is blue-skinned Kali wearing a necklace of skulls and why is she sticking her tongue out at us? Why is a dwarf balancing "on the back of a crocodile that is being rowed like a boat"? Why does an electric fan have a single human eye at its center? As Dotz is careful to tell us, "some labels ... simply defy logical explanation" and "perhaps the words 'logical' and 'explanation' have no place in this diminutive, colorful world inhabited by blue gods, purple crocodiles and smoking monkeys".

Indian matchboxes are still an active, vibrant medium with new examples being created today. No doubt twenty years from now we will see matchboxes which catalog India's exploits on the moon and in Information Technology. In the meantime, though, pop culture and graphic design aficionados will appreciate the bite-sized pieces of graphic design showcased in Light of India.

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