Konnichiwa, India: Can Hello Kitty assimilate into the subcontinent’s diverse art aesthetic?

The colonial bungalow on Delhi’s Barakhamba Road had been given a red-white-pink makeover: a giant plushie bow adorned one corner of the facade, while pink-red plushie apples and hearts dangled everywhere inside. The star of the show was a white feline figure wearing a red bow.

It was all very “kawaii” – an especially apt term for a Hello Kitty exhibit. The Japanese word means a combination of cute, tiny and adorable and has long been used in Japan to describe the iconic cat.

The exhibition by Indian fashion label Péro celebrated the fact that it had been 50 years since Hello Kitty made its first appearance – and was finally making its official entry into India. Featuring Péro’s designer clothing collection on life-size dolls and Hello Kitty-themed installations, the exhibition – which ran from October 19 to October 30 – quickly drew the attention of teenagers and young women.

Hello Kitty’s India foray, like the popularity of K Pop in in subcontinent, is a sign of strengthening cultural flows between Asian countries – and a shift away from west-to-east cultural flows that have long held sway over.

Around the world, Hello Kitty has taken on an artistic and creative life of her own: she has featured on all kinds of merchandise while artists, designers and fans have represented her creatively.

In India, Hello Kitty merchandise has also been around for quite some time but these were mostly available as cheap knockoffs through the informal market.

Is her official India entry the start of new journey into a diverse, vivid and often inexplicable artistic tradition and aesthetic?

The enthusiasm of the visitors to the Delhi exhibition was a window into the popularity of the Japanese cat in India. They swarmed around the venue, taking selfies and photographs to upload to Instagram: next to a pile of apples in the verandah where they could measure their height (Hello Kitty is five apples tall) and with a doll in designer clothes riding a bicycle or on huge plushy apples to sit on.

A room full of Hello Kitty plushies – for fans to literally immerse themselves in – was especially popular.

Hello Kitty made an unusual debut. Unlike most cartoon characters that make their debut as part of a comic or anime narrative, Hello Kitty first appeared in 1974 as a merchandise character on a vinyl coin purse, sitting between a bottle of milk and a goldfish bowl.

The simple white figure with a red bow had been created by designer Yuko Shimizu for the Japanese entertainment company Sanrio.

What explains the figure’s appeal to fans around the world? Shimzu has said that Hello Kitty does not have a mouth “so that people who look at her can project their own feelings onto her face... Kitty looks happy when people are happy. She looks sad when they are sad.”

Though India has had an ambivalent relationship with cats, felines have always registered their presence in art forms. The Indian Cat by art historian BN Goswamy brings together stories, paintings, poetry and proverbs on “the idea of the cat” in the subcontinent. According to him, although cats were associated with superstition and sometimes portrayed as cunning and manipulative, they were commonly represented as resting, gawking and prowling companions in Indian art.

From Mughal miniatures to the work of modern masters like Jamini Roy, cats could be seen as an integral part of life that most artists merely represented without making much of it.

In the era of the internet, however, cats have been the undisputed rulers of the cyberspace. According to computer scientist and futurist Jaron Lanier, cats “integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge.” This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why humans like them. They are fiercely independent and, almost always, a little out of reach.

The memes and reels we compulsively make as we pine for the attention and affection of cats slowly turn our social media accounts into little shrines of unrequited love.

As it turns out, Sanrio has specified that Hello Kitty is not a cat at all. Even though she has been designed with whiskers, a tail, pointed cat ears and is named Kitty, she is actually a girl living in London suburb. Shimizu has said that her creation was inspired by a white kitten from her childhood. She is named after Kitty from Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Would she have been so popular if she was named differently or didn’t look like a cat? Had Shimizu not been a cat lover, would there even have been a Hello Kitty? Whatever she is – a girl with cat-like features or a cat personified as a girl – she is an anthropomorphised cat.

Ambiguity aside, the figure has inspired artists and designers worldwide to blend Hello Kitty into their individual aesthetics and expressions.

In 2019, Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles celebrated Hello Kitty’s 45th birthday with a group show of over 100 artists. Artist David Connelly, known for his pop art sculptures made from recycled cardboard, created an art piece titled Kitty Cake Time using recycled cardboard Sanrio boxes, paper and acrylic.

In August, the Fanrio exhibit, organised by OhNami Gallery in Los Angeles, displayed fan art inspired by Sanrio characters. One of the artists, Joy Mercy, created a work inspired by Baroque subject and combined with her own signature anime and manga style featuring Virgin Mary holding Hello Kitty.

Art, advert integration in India

Last month’s Péro and Hello Kitty exhibition in Delhi could be seen as a clever art-driven advertising gambit, as Sanrio and Dream Theatre, its licensing agency, test the challenging Indian market.

Sanrio also launched an Instagram page specifically for Indian fans, and their first post depicts Hello Kitty with a lotus flower on her pink bow, saying namaste with folded hands. Their posts on Indian festivals – Ganesh Chaturthi, Onam, Dussehra, Diwali – portray Hello Kitty in various Indian costumes and backgrounds that match the occasion. Some posts depict her as a tourist exploring historical places in different Indian states.

But this shorthand approach to representation runs the risk of stereotyping the country’s diverse cultures and reducing complex cultural identities to their most visible elements.

Hello Kitty already exists in her ambiguous, minimal, kawaii aesthetic in India and she appeals well to the interested globalised audience here. In such representations, there is a possibility that some of her fans might feel left out of her world, which would be contrary to Hello Kitty’s catchphrase “You can never have too many friends!”

Hello Kitty will have to navigate this fraught territory and the limits of representation set by cultural sensitivities and vigilante censorship. Will Hello Kitty be able to integrate itself into the world of contemporary Indian art, design and lifestyle as cats have done effortlessly across the centuries?

All photographs by Andleeb Shadab.

Andleeb Shadab has studied Art History at the College of Art and the National Museum Institute in Delhi.