Sawan Dutta at the launch of the Lady Chatterjee album in Music World on Friday. Picture by Pabitra Das

Je m’appelle Lady Chatterjee/

Je fais le chat toute la nuit/

Voulez-vous chat avec moi?

This simple invitation is set to reach French shores from Lady Chatterjee, a cross between the Bengali boudi and the buxom Bollywood item girl.

So long the animated beauty had been crooning in her mother-tongue, enticing listeners ? and viewers ? on the television screen as she zipped across a futuristic cityscape featuring fleeting monuments of Calcutta.

Says Sawan Dutta, who wrote the lyrics, composed the tunes and gave voice to the original version: “We wanted a sexy and soft language like Bengali to fit the character. While the guttural and boisterous German or Punjabi wouldn’t have done, French was a perfect fit.”

Atul Churamani, vice-president, entertainment sector, Saregama, has other reasons for going French with his property. “France is the home of world music. We also have a good distribution network there.” Lady Chatterjee is already online in French, proof of that being a gushing mail from a listener in Holland.

For the French version, Sawan has reworked the background with Indian sounds. The voice is of novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee’s half-French daughter Sarah. If there is a Lady Chatterjee, can her lover be far behind? With due apologies to D.H. Lawrence and his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in comes Shadyda, a rake wearing shades and chasing Chatterjee. Justine McCarthy, an American pianist based in Delhi, does his French lines.

Meanwhile, kids are going crazy over the animated avatar. “Five to 15-year-olds tell me the songs are so cool,” Dutta giggles. Makes sense, as the lyrics are all about chatting on the Net and SMSing.

The video for a second song has been made. “Lady Chatterjee makes a guest appearance in that,” says C.B. Arunkumar, her creator. Though the Hindi and English versions are ready, the company wants to see how far it can go with the Bengali version.

“We hope to break through the clutter of Bollywood songs that seem to be the only kind of music that radio and TV channels want to play these days,” Churamani says.

The 10-song album may have reached the stores, but the company is looking at the Net as its biggest market. “Five years ago, we had a Dil To Pagal Hai or a Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge selling one crore albums. Today’s superhits sell barely 20 lakh. Obviously, people are consuming the music elsewhere. The truth is MTV no longer dictates what we listen to. It’s iPod,” he adds.

Time will tell if Lady Chatterjee will sing her way to the bank ? the company also plans to take her into mobile gaming territory ? but in her own way she is already a path-breaker.