A listener's first encounter with Amit Chaudhuri's new album This Is not Fusion is mediated through its cover. An imagined hybrid animal is sculpted in dokra, a metallic alloy; a saffron-clothed figure's gender is left undefined; 'Berlin' and 'Calcutta' appear side by side; a tanpura is on the front, a guitar on the back. This music is "not part of two different worlds," Chaudhuri declares in the liner notes, "but a common inheritance … inlaid into different parts of a single self, a single memory." Perhaps aware of having already declared, in the album's title, what his music is not, Chaudhuri later sings: "This music has no land/ This music has no name/ Don't know where it began/ Don't know from where it came."
Chaudhuri is no sentimentalist, and This Is not Fusion contains no nostalgia for that romantic notion of a time before 'East' and 'West' hardened into specific lineages. The 45-year-old writer, who was born in Calcutta and grew up in Bombay, has instead created an anthem for people (maybe even generations) who, when they sleep, dream without subtitles in any language. The saffron-clothed figure on the cover holds a special meaning: Chaudhuri, in an earlier essay, "Thoughts in a Temple", had said that saffron "is the colour not of belonging, or fitting in, but of exile, of the marginal man". By extension, Not Fusion becomes the music of the exile. But this is a self-imposed exile, an exile from the oppressiveness of the 'East versus West' traditions.
What is 'fusion' music? And why is Chaudhuri so reluctant to take up its surname? "In East-West fusion as we know it here," Chaudhuri explained in a recent article in the Times of India, "the Indian representative is commonly a classical performer, and the bearer of an ancient tradition; the Western representative, often a jazz musician, a well-known type of modern, the exhausted romantic who's had enough of modernity, and must renovate himself through contact with immemorial cultures." He continued: "One of the more problematic features of fusion is its wide-eyed transcendence, not only of nationality but of locality, with the old ideal of the 'universal human being' reworked into the cunning, grasping innocence of our globalised world."
Within compositions that are branded as 'fusion', there is a piece of proto-fusion music, one that demands a particular conformity from its practitioners. Such proto pieces are not the classic pieces that one might expect. Rather, in the rarefied world of subcontinental fusion music, we generally find a deliberate synthesis of two heterogeneous forms of music – jazz and Carnatic, for instance, or Western classical and Hindostani classical. Such a situation creates a platform where there is no dialogue. Two people, two systems, speak in their native tongues, as though speaking in sign language, comprehensible only to their practitioners. This exclusionist practice succeeds because of the listener's lack of education and exposure, which partakes in and helps to accentuate the closed nature of such fusion work. This is obvious: there is no school, no gharana, of fusion music.