Groceries, Books, & Emotional Baggage: The Distinctly Indian Origins Of The Tote Bag

You have coffee stains on it? Great! The messier, the better.

Is it filled to the brim with contemporary literary texts, three lip balms, and your emotional support water bottle? Perfect!

What am I talking about? A tote bag, of course.

A tote bag has become a symbol of effortless chicness and an integral part of the ‘media-literate-watches-three-shows-simultaneously-and-reads-Arundhati-Roy' their whole identity. From Blossoms in Bengaluru to Faqir Chand in Delhi, with their customised tote bags, and from carrying the preamble of the Constitution to any other mantra that says, ‘Be calm and drink some water,’ tote bags have become symbols of our identity — or rather, of how we want our identities to be perceived.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I too have subscribed to this. I am a proud owner of multiple tote bags, each reflecting different parts of my identity.

But it’s not like the tote bag is a new phenomenon — it has existed in India for centuries.

‘Potlis,’ found throughout the country in countless iterations, were made of fabrics such as satin, silk, or velvet and embellished in different ways —from Bhopal’s beads to Kutch’s fine embroidery. These bags were, and still are, symbols of opulence, carried at weddings and other celebrations. The closest Indian counterpart of the tote bag, however, is the ‘jhola’—a simple cotton or canvas bag used for centuries by the common man to carry vegetables, groceries, and everything else in between. Cheap, sturdy, endlessly reusable, and often printed with slogans or political symbols, the jhola wasn’t just practical — it carried ideologies along with vegetables.

Today, a lot of brands are taking this humble, old-school piece of cloth and modernising it — making it more in vogue. For example, The Manjappai Collective has reimagined the manjappai — a turmeric-dyed cotton bag used by everyone in Tamil Nadu — by giving it a vibrant identity. With kolam designs (a South Indian form of rangoli art) adorning these bright yellow bags in red, the collective is preserving the manjappai not just as a utilitarian object, but as a marker of history and culture.

Similarly, brands like Tamarind Chutney have released lines of ‘feminist’ totes with cheeky taglines like, “Girls just wanna have fun-damental human rights.” Delhi-based brand Lovebirds, on the other hand, makes their totes by up-cycling waste fabrics to manage excess material — keeping the tote’s sustainable ethos alive.

The magic of the tote bag is its ability to transform. It can be a grocery store bag, a work-laptop bag, an afternoon-in-the-park bag, or, if you’re like me, a portable trash can for receipts and wrappers I swore I would get to two weeks ago. The tote hasn’t disappeared from our media, or our lives, for centuries now — and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s somewhat comforting to know that even though almost everything around us changes in the blink of an eye, some things stay the same. So, regardless of the intense shoulder pains I get from lugging my almost Mary-Poppins-esque companion, I will continue to wear my tote with pride.

Who knew that a one-yard-long piece of simple cotton could mean so much to so many people, in so many different ways?

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