February 24, 2025
Matchbox Collecting
If you’ve walked more than 5 minutes with me in India you have probably seen me pause, usually mid sentence, and pick something up off the ground. A matchbox, from the dirty street. No shame. Over two months in Bengaluru, I’ve collected around forty of them. They’re everywhere. People use them, toss them, and forget about them. But I don’t.
I guess it started with history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, India got its matches from Sweden and Japan. The Swedes and Japanese were very good at making matches. They were also good businessmen who started printing Indian deities on the labels to sell more. By the 1920s, Sweden moved some production to India, which led to the birth of the Indian matchbox industry. Now the labels are something else entirely, bold, strange, wonderful. Lions and gods and motorcycles and politicians. All crammed onto a two-inch square of cardboard.
The first one I picked up was in Ramanagara, on our first trip out of Bengaluru. A box with a rooster, a rising sun, and Good Day written in triumphant little letters. It was lying in the dirt like it had something important to tell me. Since then I’ve been collecting matchboxes.
There are some stand out favorites. Cheetah Fight is exactly what it sounds like: a man with a sickle, fighting a cheetah. Pretty badass. Puppy is a dark blue box with a cartoon dog, happily running nowhere in particular. The designs are bold. Primary colors. Simple shapes. The kind of art that tells you everything you need to know in an instant. They are printed using CMYB lithography. Which is a printing process transferring layers of tiny ink dots onto paper in a specific pattern. If you look close enough, you can see the little blobs of color, standing there like tiny, well-behaved soldiers.
But matchboxes are also little time capsules. The dents, the scratches, the half-torn labels map where I’ve been, what I’ve seen. A tiny, battered record of my own life over the last few months that I’ve picked up off the ground.
While writing this blog and looking through my matchbox collection I thought about how other people had started collecting them for me too:
How Hargurleen reached into the backseat of my taxi at 1 a.m. to hand me a yellow box with the silhouette of an archer. We were both exhausted, waiting for our rides to the airport to catch an early flight to Delhi. But he still thought to pass it to me.
How Amaya spotted Babies, three white kittens on a baby blue background while I was trying to navigate us through an unplanned neighborhood.
How Kayla flipped over every matchbox on our roadside trek from the broken-down bus to the coffee shop, disappointed that almost all of them were the same green Indian Tiger design. But she checked anyway.
How Olive turned back, excited, to show me a pink Kangaroo box as we toured the coffee plantation.
How Hope pointed out what might be my favorite find—a Gemini matchbox, two little Two cartoon twins, standing on a globe, smug and eternal.
And many more. People hand me matchboxes all the time now. Point them out on dinner tables or store counters, and lift them from in front of the hostel or from between auto seats. Which, in a way, is the spirit of GCIL. A silly habit turns into something people watch out for. A little bit of care, was handed over like a matchbox in the dark.
So if you’ve ever seen me trip over my feet, and patiently waited as I turned around to pick up a matchbox, or better yet pointed out one that I missed, thank you.
By,
Inessa
