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

Tracing these labels back in time, Katuri realised that there were more pictures of boys than girls. “I have a picture of a boy posing with a cricket bat stuck in my head. He was on a label with the word ‘winner’ next to him. This kind of image sets certain standards in society,” she explains. Similarly, cricketers, farmers, and doctors on matchbox covers and labels are all male figures. And while both male and female Indian celebrities feature on matchboxes in equal measure, female actors are skimpily clad, while male actors are in suits and have a heroic vibe, says Katuri.