Dreaming without subtitles

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.