Thousands of companies manufactured matches worldwide and used a variety of fancy labels to make their brand stand out. The match boxes had unusual topics but some were much prettier than others. An elephant holds a lit match in his trunk. Hathi is the Hindi word for elephant. Hathi was also a fictional character created by Rudyard Kipling for the Mowgli stories collected in The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895). Hathi is a bull elephant.