Heard of phillumeny? Meet India’s matchbox collectors

The hobby of collecting matchboxes is called phillumeny, and is not half as popular as stamp and coin collecting. Three collectors tell us why it should be!

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. 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.

Shreya Katuri, a phillumenist, has picked up matchboxes from all over the country, including Delhi, Agra, Hyderabad and Jaipur

Phillumenist Gautam Hemmady has a collection of more than 25,000 matchboxes, labels and covers, which include icons of the freedom struggle like Mahatma Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose