The fire art of Indian matchbooks

At Grass we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about things that set other things on fire, among the most fascinating of which are the largely handmade wooden matches of Southern India. 

According to Warren Dotz’s Light of India: A Conflagration of Indian Matchbox Art, Japanese immigrants brought matchmaking to Calcutta around 1910, where locals picked up the craft. As match production grew so did demand, and imports from Sweden and Japan threatened local industry. 

Calcutta’s matchmakers couldn’t keep pace with big business from foreign companies. So the country’s match craft migrated South to Tamil Nadu, where a small group of families built empires on cheap labor and abundant raw materials. This tight-knit group, known as the “The Match Kings,” still makes most of the country’s matches, but Sweden maintains a solid hold on mass production in WIMCO (The Western India Match Company), a subsidiary of the aptly appointed Swedish Match Company. 

In the early days, importers dressed up their matches with detailed illustrations and bold colors meant to attract the Indian consumer. The Swedes set the standard for design, but Indian artists made it their own, adding traditional imagery and lettering to these tiny canvases. The images range from stoic busts of Indian gods to brightly colored household objects. The result is a commercial medium rich with references to ancient tradition, a tiny sign of the constant push and pull between western capitalism and eastern philosophy.