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Shailabh Rawat

Shailabh Rawat was born in 1958 in the state of Uttarakhand, in India. He lives and works in Delhi.

Since their first appearance in 1988, Shailabh Rawat has been providing the Photo Fictions featuring in the monthly Madhur Kathayen ("Beautiful Stories"), the first popular magazine in India to publish erotic photographic comic strips. Initially in black and white with a Hindi text, they moved to colour in the 1990s and have been appearing in an English-language version in Crime & Detective magazine since 1992. Madhur Kathayen has a print run of 100,000, and since each copy is read by some twenty people, it has an estimated readership of two million. This, however, isn't the kind of reading material you take home in India: you buy it at the station before catching your train, and on arrival you sell it to a news vendor who then puts it on his secondhand rack.
Initially Shailabh Rawat did the whole thing himself – writing, storyboard, directing, photos, layout, etc. – but now he has a team that turns out five or six episodes of Photo Fictions, working nonstop for a week in studios in Delhi and Bombay.
Taking his inspiration from news items, Shailabh Rawat uses stories to illustrate social issues. While these stories usually resort to the commercially viable – sex, alcohol and money – they also raise such other, recurring questions as adultery, lies, blackmail, revenge, humiliation, prostitution and murder. Taking care never to go too far, Photo Fictions has not once had the least problem with the censors. The only episode ever to have caused any controversy was one dealing with a male homosexual relationship, in 1994.
Reminiscent of the Bollywood aesthetic, Photo Fictions displays a close fit with popular Indian photography; it could even be described as better attuned to the local culture than the work of recognised artists whose output has been markedly Westernised by contact with the international market.  It draws directly on Indian popular culture in its handling of events which are at once local and universal, common and taboo, and highly revelatory of a society unafraid of paradox: a society that must constantly cope with profound inner contradictions if it is to continue its progress towards democracy.