Bata Tennis

The Bata Tennis is a low lace-up shoe of white cotton canvas on a moulded rubber sole. Its upper is cut plainly, with a short row of small eyelets and white cotton laces, and the toe is capped in ribbed white rubber. A thin coloured line runs round the foxing where the canvas meets the sole. The shape is long and narrow, set by a last that Bata says it has used since the 1930s.

The shoe was introduced in 1936, according to Bata, for physical education classes in Indian schools. It was made at the company's factory outside Kolkata, part of an industrial town that the Czech firm built around its works and named Batanagar. Bata had come to India only four years earlier, in a market then supplied largely by Japanese imports, and a cheap, washable canvas shoe suited both the climate and the school timetable.

The Tennis became, in effect, part of the uniform. Generations of Indian children wore it for games and physical training through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when tennis shoes and school shoes were, for most families, the same pair. The Tennisman figure, a stylised player at full stretch, was as familiar in Singapore playgrounds as in Indian ones. Charles Pignal, a great-grandson of the founder, said in 2014 that the shoe's elongated shape came from a last designed to fit feet across many regions.

That year, for its 120th anniversary, Bata sold the Tennis in the boutiques of Paris, London and New York, in new colours and at many times its Indian price, and it was presented there as a rediscovery. In India it had never needed one. The white shoe is still stocked as school wear, an object made for the school games period that has outlasted the empire in which it was first sold, still at a price a dealer quotes in a few hundred rupees.