Amid a clamour of heavy machines that churn out box casings, grind chemicals and dip wooden splints into potassium chlorate, 58-year-old Panchavarnam sits on the factory floor immersed in the final task of matchbox making: fixing labels. She is working faster than I can keep pace, dipping her forefinger into a lump of tapioca paste, dabbing it on the back of a label, pressing it down on the wooden box with her thumb and consigning it to a rapidly rising stash of boxes on a metal tray. By the end of her shift, she would have labelled 9,000 boxes—for ₹112—pasting on each a trademark symbol of one of Sivakasi’s oldest matchbox producers, the Ayya Nadar Group. This particular label is an illustrated ottagam or camel—the pink animal set against a yellow sky, orange sand dunes and silhouetted palm trees.
Some 500 kilometres away, in Bengaluru, a slightly battered Camel matchbox finds place in British visual artist Matt Lee’s growing collection that includes labels as gloriously arbitrary as Jamesbond (featuring a German Shephard), Baby (with some photoshopped lipstick), a nameless one with a photo of Juhi Chawla, and Windows (with a Microsoft logo). Further afield in New Delhi, the label is part of phillumenist Gautam Hemmady’s 15,000-strong collection that includes one of Subhas Chandra Bose from circa 1930, and a series redrawn from Raja Ravi Varma’s oil paintings and oleographs that Sweden exported to India in the 1920s.
“An individual matchbox may not have very much insight to offer,” says Hemmady. “But when I put them together they tell a story. They are little cataloguers of history, snapshots of what is happening at any point in time, whether it was the freedom struggle, or the release of a Rajini movie, you find it on a matchbox.”
Dying embers
But one of the country’s oldest and biggest hubs of matchbox manufacturers, Sivakasi city in southern Tamil Nadu, is now on a sharp decline. “There has been absolutely no growth in demand,” says G. Athipathy, one of the partners of the Ayya Nadar Group, which was the first to establish matchbox factories here in 1921. “Our total production has remained static at 1.3 lakh bundles (600 matchboxes in a bundle) a month for an entire decade.”
The popular Rose label.
Matchboxes, little auxiliaries to our lives that have endlessly fascinated collectors and chroniclers of pop art, have been fast replaced almost entirely by gas lighters, electric stoves and cigarette lighters. And some of Sivakasi’s biggest manufacturers are closing units, downsizing production, diversifying to other businesses, or exploring international markets. “A puja room is about the only place where you are going to find a matchbox,” says Athipathy who now runs packaging and textile businesses.
At the Pioneer Asia Group’s fully mechanised 25,000 sq. ft factory, a conveyor belt loops around assembling and filling cardboard cases pre-printed with their Chavi logo featuring a red key. This particular unit produces a whopping nine lakh matchboxes a day. But this is just 75% of the volume they produced last year, says the group General Manager, A. Ramesh Prabhu, who also attributes it to a drop in demand. The scenario plays out again at Sundaravel Match Industries that produces the ‘27’ brand. “We had 15 factories running in 2005, and we now have 12,” says owner Hariram Sundaravel, who is also president of the All India Chamber of Match Industries (AICMI).
At the entrance to the 100-year-old bungalow where AICMI has its office, the stone busts of the founders of Sivakasi’s matchbox industry, P. Ayya Nadar and A. Shanmughan Nadar, peer out through a glass case. The cousins learnt about matchbox making from Japanese manufacturers in Calcutta in the 1920s and established factories that produced strike-anywhere matches in Sivakasi, where cheap labour was abundant and the weather suitably dry. The town—known equally as a printing mecca for ‘god calendars’ and cinema posters, and most of all for its accident-prone firecracker industry—housed some 200 match-making units in 2011.
While there is no precise data on how many factories have closed, Sundaravel says that much of the production has shifted to Kovilpatti and Sattur near Sivakasi. And here, units from the unorganised sector are known to produce copious and—utterly creative—imitations of popular labels.
Now, a matchbox label may be the absolute last thing you’d imagine would inspire imitation. But copycat labels, as old as matchboxes themselves, have been as much a source of frustration for trademarked brands as they have been a source of endless fascination to collectors, with their sheer audacity and humour (intended or unintended).
Copycat art
If Wimco’s Aim, the country’s largest-selling match brand, becomes ATM, then its other popular label Ship becomes Super Shib, New Sihp and New Slip. In an introduction to his 2006 Match Book , which chronicles the changing iconography of match labels, Shahid Datawala talks about his quest to find the “ultimate variation” of New Ship imitations—New Shit. And one day, to his delight, while “walking down a street in Delhi, I found my dream label lying on the pavement. It felt like a sign from the heavens.”
An automatic match filling machine at a manufacturing unit in Sivakasi.
Hemmady, meanwhile, owns some 36 imitations of the Cheeta Fight brand alone. If the original depicts a dhoti-clad, sickle-wielding man tackling a cheetah, the imitations, which use an identical green-and-yellow colour scheme, include labels as creative as: Reeta Fight (featuring a woman, whip and leopard), Cat Food (leopard meets squirrel) and Circus Wala (tamer and lion). “Imitations are fascinating because they reflect what goes on in the industry: there are the brands with registered trademark labels and then there are the small fly-by-night people who piggyback on their success. And once you get hold of one imitation you are constantly on the lookout for more.”
It is interesting how so many histories intersect to produce a match label, says V. Geetha, the author of an essay in Match Book . “Labels play on association, on what is popular at the moment: freedom fighters during the Independence movement or a still from the movie Mother India in the 1950s; Nargis was perhaps replaced later with Hema Malini; and then there can be a solitary event like Skylab falling that inspires a Skylab label. "
In response to the dipping demand at home, Sivakasi’s manufacturers have begun exporting to Nigeria, Kenya, Belgium, Haiti and Ghana. Athipathy exports to Central America: the custom-ordered labels include a Rangoli brand for El Salvador and a Quetzal (a bird found in Mexico and southern U.S.) for Costa Rica. But exports too are becoming less lucrative, says Sundaravel. “Many of these countries, especially in Africa, have started manufacturing units themselves.”
Work after 60
A worker manually fills matchboxes at Graham Match Works factory in Sivakasi.
Meanwhile, the demographic of Sivakasi’s match factories is visibly changing. If they once employed hundreds of children, some as young as seven, to work in inhumane and hazardous conditions in ‘home-based’ units, today’s factories—especially the semi-mechanised units—are overwhelmingly populated with women, many of them elderly.
At Ayya Nadar’s semi-mechanised Graham Match Works factory, where Panchavarnam works, 95% of the workers are women, many over 60, who primarily do two tasks: paste labels and fill boxes with matches. “No one from the younger generation wants to come to the industry. The wages are low, mechanisation has taken over, and the work is mostly drudgery,” says M. Mahalakshmi, President of the Match and Fire Workers Union. Labour has shrunk to a tenth of its strength a decade ago, from about two lakhs people to 20,000. Equally, child labour has reduced by 80%, says Mahalakshmi. “But it has not disappeared; some children still work in home-based industries.”
At a semi-mechanised unit of the Pioneer group, I meet 65-year-old Annathai. She began working in the matchbox industry when she was “10 or 12,” she says, folding outer and inner box cases at home. She continued her work through her marriage, the birth of her children and grandchildren, and the death of her husband. “I know nothing else,” she says. I ask how much longer she will remain in the job, one so utterly monotonous. “ En kann moodura varaikkum” (till my eyes close) she says.
divya.gandhi@thehindu.co.in
