Christian Cailleaux’s Bollywooder

In the 19th century, many of those intrepid souls from the West who travelled to this country left behind invaluable visual records of this land that they found incredibly exotic and incomprehensible. They helped form perceptions of the Orient in the minds of Westerners, which even in these days of lightning-fast communication they have not been able to shake off.

Christian Christian Cailleaux is a 39-year-old French illustrator and comic strip artist, who came to India in December 2004 for a two-month residence. He has travelled extensively in Africa, but when he came to stay in India in December 2004, “I knew nothing about India; all I had was some half-baked ideas.”

He travelled from the north to the south and met artists to share his thoughts with them, for he was sure that a book would emerge from his experiences.

The result is 20 pages of script, some 10-odd paintings, a project for an illustrated book to be co-published in India and lastly, the birth of an Indian super-heroine: The Flying Saree. A portfolio of Cailleaux’s Indian works is being exhibited at Akar Prakar gallery till Wednesday.

These are straightforward illustrations with clean lines marked by a gentle humour. Cailleaux is no waspish cartoonist. His drawings are realistic and cover a wide range of Indian life, some stereotypical such as the dark shoeshine man, the dark man with a castemark on his forehead and the dark woman (shades of Shakira Caine) pouring water down her gullet. This act, by itself, must be quite a feat for Westerners.

Yes, humour there is, and it comes to the fore when he depicts the young lovers in a park looking around in case somebody caught them so close together, and the two young men wearing white shirts “waiting for love” on a scooter. Cailleaux is observant enough to notice the dominance of autorickshaws and Ambassadors on Indian streets. He makes brilliant use of the former vehicle in his “Flying Saree” drawings.

The sexy, dark heroine in the miniest of mini-saris (neither Saira Banu nor Jayalalitha ever wore their saris this high in their village belle incarnations) wears a flying pigtail, gloves and boots, a plunging neckline and high dudgeon. But newcomer that he is, Cailleaux got his “Bollywooder” wrong. He is actually a denizen of Kollywood, Tamil language filmdom.