Reported By:
| Edited By: |Source: |Updated: Nov 19, 2013, 11:17 PM IST
Madhu Jain
It is one of those tiny restaurants that only the Parisians — the real gourmands amongst them that is-frequent. In search of food that has not gone straight from the freezer to the oven, with dishes that have been lovingly created by a chef, and don’t cost the earth. Called Papilles (taste buds) it is located a hop, skip and a jump from the magnificent Luxembourg Gardens in the Latin Quarter.
After a week of hard work gathering material for a project my hosts (culinary detectives, both) felt I deserved a Parisian holiday. Hence the trendy Rive Gauche French restaurant. But we are in for a surpise. The menu du jour is lentil soup, followed by veal curry and Madras rice. There was a bigger surprise to come.
There are hundreds of bottles of wine stacked along the wall, from which the customers are meant to select what they want to drink. My olfactory skills being rather embryonic when it comes to wine I search for the prettiest bottle, and stop short when I come across one with the name Gama-Sutra. There it is, written on a pale grey label: Gama Sutra. Vin de 2005. Pays de Loire-et-Cher.
Well, this is not a case of the French getting their spelling wrong. Nor are they referring to a new version of the Kama Sutra. The vigniers are simply punning. Gamay, as the waiter explains, is a variety of grape often used to make wine.
“ They have put the two words together to make it catchy, to be clever”. India and things Indian are decidedly in vogue with the French.
You could almost say that India is in the air in Paris. Switch on the radio and you are likely to hear a Bollywood number. The Musee Guimet — it specialises in Asian art — often screens Indian films (including those with Shah Rukh Khan) to packed halls. And mind you the audience is largely comprised of goras, with a sprinkling of desis.
Just two days earlier a French museum curator visiting my friends was so excited about an Indian music video called ‘Goli Maar’ on You Tube that we ended up seeing it half a dozen times.
There is something quite unreal about watching the long-legged Telegu super star Chiranjivi do an incredibly, laughably kitschy version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller while sitting in the heart of Paris, breaking baguette with a group of French friends.
It wasn’t too long ago that the only Indian cinema the French were familiar with were the films of Satyajit Ray and Guru Dutt. The mild attack of Bollywood mania began most probably after the immensely successful retrospective of Indian cinema at the Pompidou centre (Beaubourg) in Paris during the spring of 2003.
Titled Vous Avez Dit ‘Bollywood’ !, this package of fifty films curated by Nadine Tarbouriech, a specialist of Indian cinema, went far beyond Hindi cinema : it went back into its early days and looked at films from many regions of the country.
Ironically, the title (the exclamational point is intentional) was supposed to be a bit of a gauntlet. As Tarbouriech puts it: “You want Bollywood. Well, I will show you much more.
“Yet, it was Bollywood that captured the imagination in France, and continues to do so. The recently concluded three month long extravaganza Bombay, Maximum City held in the northern city of Lille was an ode to city of Mumbai. Indian and international artists and photographers gave their impressions of this megacity. But, unsurprisingly, it was the images of Bollywood that dominated. It was undiluted kitsch most of the way.
Perhaps the French are looking for the exotic that lies beyond National Geographic, and this side of Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Or, to escape into somebody else’s fantasy. However, the interest in things Indian is more than kitsch-deep. One can hear rumblings of a India Chalo call.
Some of the young look East to India for a brighter future, like the twenty year old bright-eyed son of a friend who plans to open a chain of French bakeries there. Within a span of a week I have met a middle-aged couple who wants to set up a school for media, a man who wants to buy a second home in Goa or Kochi, and a woman who wants to be a personal stylist for the very rich in India.
Even French publishers are getting excited about books from India-beyond the maharajas and poverty. Almost 55,000 copies of Tarun Tejpal’s debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire have been sold, and the book is going to be out in paperback soon. No doubt India is now tres cool-psychedelia without the drugs. So, let’s say cheers with Gama-Sutra.
