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MUSIC

Metaphors of travel and movements

SUMANA ROY

Amit Chaudhuri’s music album charts journeys to places, which exist as blue and brown dots on the child’s atlas.

Urban ballads: “This is not fusion” is all about movements.

“IT’S only natural that we belong to several places,” says Amit Chaudhuri in an essay in Small Orange Flags, “all of us, not only because of fashionable air travel and possibilities made open to the diaspora, bu t because of history”. “This is Not Fusion”, his music album, charts, without tracing maps, the journeys to these places, places which exist as blue and brown dots on the child’s atlas and places which one encounters, with a mixture of rapture and reserve, as sticky shadows, in the twilight of the self in a late afternoon dream.

Just as all his four novels begin and end with comings and goings, Chaudhuri’s music is full of metaphors of travel and the rhythms of movements, of the underground (‘Berlin’), of trucks (Trucker), of the dhunuri m an walking through the streets of old Bengal (‘Dotara’), the gradual movement of the day’s brightness into evening, a sound that can be sensed only in music, never recreated in any other art-form (‘All India Radio’), of the tired movement of refugees to foreign lands (‘Motz’) and then the movement of music itself, from one tradition to another, the sound of musical osmosis in the “The ‘Layla’ Riff to Todi”.

‘Dotara’ is a tri-logue between an artistic subculture (the twang of the dhunuri), a once provincial culture embalmed into a ‘classical’ tradition (the framework provided by Brindabani Sarang) and a metropoli tan discourse of recording ‘history’ and then arguing with it (“If you thought you could write its history/That was a delusion”). ‘Dotara’ travels a 180° without encountering signposts of ‘East’ or ‘West’, moves from “I know that it’s not fusion” to “But you said that this is not fusion”.

Here the movement from the “I” to “you” is not just the progression from private doubt to public acceptance, not merely creating and carrying an audience but a modernist’s tactful and self-conscious attestation of what I. A. Richards called, in a different context, the “music of ideas”.

‘All India Radio’ reveals Chaudhuri’s fondness for taking up a dialogue with his artistic forerunners by taking a text, usually a classic (“Portrait of an Artist”; “An Infatuation”). P. Heldon’s composition for the All India Radio theme, played and replayed, untiringly, to the rhythms of morning and evening, have, like life itself, been elevated to the status of a myth or at least a likeness of it. And in having become so inextricably bound to the throbbing in our ears, it has gradually become expressive of faith.

Chaudhuri’s reinvention of the “original” tune in the raga Marwa challenges that act of faith; as a modernist, his composition here works on the foundation of doubt and the peculiar degree of self-consciousness which this enforces requires the acknowledgement of its dual status where chance and the affirmation of choice are inextricably related but by no means consonant.

‘All India Radio’ is, however, not a re-visioning of the familiar and the iconic in the sense of A. R. Rahman’s populistic refashioning of the national song “Bande Mataram”.

It is not an approach from the outside, a re-mixing or a makeover; rather it is born by looking within. Chaudhuri’s rendition of this signature tune in the raga Marwa has the hint of the best of inventions which are actually discoveries, something that was already there, hidden, like gravity, waiting to be discovered.

And this the arranger does with such innovation, as in Jonathan Impett’s use of the trumpet, that the ellipses between Heldon’s composition and Chaudhuri’s seem ‘natural’ and thus, by extension of the metaphor, ‘original’.

All India Radio, situated in the zone between interpolation and intertextuality, is, to my ears, speaking to rather than a speaking back to one of the defining notes (literally) of the Indian nation.

‘Trucker’ is not, in spite of its name and theme, just a song of the road; the humour-laced ironical words (“Ok Tata Byebye, This is how we live and die”) is not the song of a man following the black fumes of the truck carrying these curses and wishes on its butt; rather the addition of the next line, “Bhali nazar …ujala” after “Buri nazar wale tera muh kala”, to create a couplet, creates a surplus, an alterna tive form of subjectivity in which an other collectivity and public life are imagined.

Chaudhuri’s sharp ear notes the octave from sa to sa in the hum after the doors of the U-bahn close and the train resumes its journey (“Berlin”). The warnings (“Einsteigen bit te” and “Zuruckbleiben bitte”), as foreign to the structure of the raga as the language in which it comes to the listener’s ears, create a drama, which is foreign to Indian classical music (“the absen ce of a dramatic narrative tradition in Indian music…. A raga is a raga – with a single predetermined mood and tonality,” wrote Satyajit Ray).

The German words are as foreign and at the same time as integral to the composition as “Datta Dayadhvam Damayata” and “Shantih Shantih Shantih” are to The Waste Land: they create spaces, wi thout drawing maps, of a fluid contemporary modernity; and just as Eliot had to look beyond the European tradition to find words which could convey his vision,

Chaudhuri looks beyond the mood and structure of his parent Hindustani Classical tradition to find something that could help him to make anew. “Things were made, then burned, then made again …” (‘Berlin’): this is Chaudhuri’s aesthetic, to break and make anew, in other words, being in process; thus the song ends with the American girl’s words, with no response from the man, leaving us with a termination, not an ending.

Chaudhuri’s fascination for the spoken word, the lilt of the colloquial, the poetry hidden in (mis)pronunciation is something his readers are familiar with (“The Writers: On constantly mishearing ‘rioting’ as ‘writing’ on the BBC”). In retaining the political emphases of the original in ‘Motz’, he, like the modernists, elevates the everyday to art.

It is easy to get fooled by the tone of this urban ballad, the intersection of the personal and the social that is the source of the genre; it is, to my ears, almost an inversion of Moral Education, a looking behind the mirror.

It seems as if Chaudhuri has stood on the threshold, watched the instructions given to the Bengali-school child in Moral Education and then entered the underground in Berlin to hear the voice of the refugee asking commuters to buy the Motz; the tones are similar, though uttered from different sides of the world.

Just as his doctoral dissertation on Lawrence offers us an insight into the aesthetic of his fictional work (Lawrence’s aesthetic of the patchwork and the bricolage model, for example), Chaudhuri’s critique of Arun Kolatkar provides us with the keywords of his aesthetic in “This is Not Fusion”. Here is Chaudhuri on Kolatkar’s song “I am a poor man from a poor land”:

“The first line is something Kolatkar read on a piece of paper of the sort that the semi-educated beggar in India used to hand out to people, often stating his profession and including a message in English, perhaps to keep some of his dignity intact.

In the foreground is Kolatkar’s scolding but very musical vocalizing; a spin-off on the beggar’s plea that becomes a demand to the consumer, the singer asking his listener to pay up for his “damn good song”.”

And here are the lyrics of Chaudhuri’s ‘Motz’:

Thank you for listening kindly/And sparing me a second …./Meanwhile do check your pocket/And please give me a euro.

“The genre,” says Chaudhuri about Kolatkar’s song, “is metropolitan and immediate and hybrid; inescapably but complicated ‘Indian’, without any of the sentimental assumptions of ‘world music’.” And then he says something that is not quite true: “It’s a style that hasn’t occurred before or since.”

This style reappears in “This is Not Fusion”.

The writer teaches English at Darjeeling Government College, Darjeeling. She is, at present, on research leave in Poland and Germany.

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