The quintessentially middle-class 1990s Fiat — or the poor man’s ambassador — waits ready for a holiday, with a pile of luggage taller than the car itself strapped to its roof. A middle-aged wedding guest is caught in the glare of the camera, right when he’s opened his mouth wide for the gulab jamun. A girl sits surrounded by plates of every conceivable Indian food, cooked lovingly by a mother who also wants her to lose weight.
The mood is evident in every page illustrated by fresh visual art graduate Priyadarshini S Jain, and the colours are for you to fill in. Her book of 22 illustrations is the latest in a growing market of adult colouring books, an increasingly popular tool of choice for stress relief and therapy.
The book — Jain’s professional first — began taking shape when she was a student, as her final graduation assignment at Stella Maris College. “I just went looking for adult colouring books, and realised that there was nothing that depicted India,” she recalls, saying that she found plenty of free-style illustrations, and that the few drawings that showed people, had Japanese influences. She had found a void to fill, and the creative scope of it was glaring.
“I’ve just explored India through my book: brides, grooms, ceremonies, quirky things that happen,” she says, flipping through the pages. There are chaiwalas and chaatwalas , trucks and autos, portrait-like caricatures and slice-of-life moments. Cheeky catchphrases, like the wedding photographer’s “Eeeshmile please,” add to the mood, and Jain has retained the same style in the book title, This Is India Only .
True to her training, Jain has kept the book rich not only in subject matter, but also in artistic form. Different schools of art have found their way into each page, mingling with each other and adding to the bustling chaos. There is Madhubani art, Pattachitra, Gond, Pichwai, Warli, Kalamkari and more.
The exchange of garlands among a bride and groom, for instance, is a moment etched in Madhubani, surrounded by a smattering of wedding decorations in Warli.
Talent and content is not all that matters when it comes to publishing a book, however. Jain approached a couple of publishing houses with her product, and though they liked what she had to offer, they cited costs that startled her. “I would have had to pay ₹1.5 lakh for publishing and distribution,” says the new graduate. “So I decided to self-publish it. There are independent websites online, where all I had to do was enrol and pay them a percentage of my sales as commission.”
That seemed a good enough platform for her to start with. Though some of the websites had technical glitches and can’t be used to order, it didn’t cost her anything to try, and she has sold around 60 copies within two months of publishing the book. “One of the websites where it’s doing well is Love This Stuff India. The exhibition that our college arranged for our final projects also helped me garner some sales,” says Jain, who has found that such physical sales work better for her.
Jain is still trying to find a good publisher, hoping easier distribution would make it feasible to drop the cost of the book itself.
For now, her book has been picked up by Hindustan Trading Company, Royapettah, and is thus displayed for sale at the same place where she first found her creative niche.
