Striking a Universal CHORD
AUTHOR-SINGER AMIT CHAUDHURI IS BACK WITH A NEW ALBUM AFTER 13 YEARS
RReaders probably know of Amit Chaudhuri as a writer par excellence, with eight novels, four non-fiction books, a poetry collection and a host of well-cited studies and essays to his credit. But the 60-year-old multihyphenate also has a sideline in music, dating all the way back to when he was a 17-year-old high school student writing and performing English songs on All India Radio. He trained in Indian classical singing under his mother Bijoya Chaudhuri and the late Pandit Govind Prasad Jaipurwale of the Kunwar Shyam gharana, releasing recordings of Indian classical and khayal.
In 2004, Chaudhuri embarked on an ambitious, long-running experiment in what he called ‘not fusion’—a project of finding serendipitous confluences and convergences between the classical and semi-classical music of his homeland and the jazz, pop and rock canons of the West. His first two albums under this rubric—This Is Not Fusion (2007) and Found Music (2010)—featured re-imagined renditions of classics like George Gershwin’s “Summertime”, The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” and Eric Clapton and Jim Gordon’s “Layla”, as Chaudhuri attempted to find the raga in the rock-and-roll backbeat.
“This project began with me hearing the riff to “Layla”in Raag Todi as I was singing Todi,” remembers Chaudhuri. “This was in 2004. I began to explore the idea of improvising on the raga via the riff, using certain common notes that made that possible. I have begun to call them transition notes— sounds shared by two systems and pieces of music that allow you to move from one piece to the other.”
After 13 years of relative silence, Chaudhuri returns to the project with his new album Across the Universe,
released on February 7. He had been performing the older songs—and writing new ones—in the meantime, but academic and writing commitments and the itinerant careers of his band members kept him away from the studio. In July 2022, a year after he took early retirement from the University of East Anglia, perhaps inspired by the research for his awardwinning music history-cum-memoir Finding the Raga—he
travelled to Norwich and re-assembled his English band for a couple of days in the studio.
“I knew I would be going to England, so I let the musicians I had performed with over there know that I wanted to record these
This eagerly anticipated psytrance festival held through the night on Vagator’s Dream Beach in Goa features artists like The Dog of Tears,
Daash, Elowins, Flipknot, Gismo, Psykovsky and Life Enjoyers Club. The foot-tapping fest will also see Kindzazda and Will O Wisp debut their Ota Okuma.
Sarvnik Kaur first thought of making Against the Tide, her intimate documentary about the struggles of Ganesh and Rakesh, two fishermen with diverging paths and beliefs, while she was shooting her first documentary A Ballad of Maladies (2016) in Kashmir. The year was 2015 and she had just heard about the proposed coastal road that was going to displace Mumbai’s Koli fishing community from their ancestral villages. Kaur remembered thinking about the overlaps in the story and her film, which tracked the anti-government resistance in the heavilymilitarised region.
“The displacement in Kashmir is in the name of nationalism. And with the Kolis, the displacement was about to be forged in the name of development,” Kaur tells me over a Zoom call. Her interest was piqued—more so because of her own family history of displacement. Like countless families during the Partition, Kaur’s grandparents had to uproot their lives in Pakistan and flee to India. The filmmaker grew up seeing her grandfather ache for a home he could no longer go back to. In many ways, the question of who gets to lay claim to land became the natural starting point for Kaur.
Eight years later, Kaur premiered Against the Tide at the 2023 edition of the Sundance
Film Festival—the third successive Indian documentary to do so.
Like its predecessors—
Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s Oscar-nominated Writing with Fire (2021) and Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated All That Breathes (2022)—Against the Tide also picked up a Sundance documentary award.
Armed with a conservational spirit and a melancholic eye, Kaur and cinematographer Ashok Meena craft a bleak portrait of the sea, contrasting the effects of climate change with the despair of people who depend on it for their livelihood and identities.
From the very beginning, Kaur was certain that she didn’t want to turn Against the Tide into an environmental thesis. “I wanted to do a film, which was going to be a series of conversations between two friends.” Kaur says. “It’s during this process that I sensed that whatever crises are happening at sea are also crises that are happening in their own lives.” Kaur ensured she captured that parallel through cinematographer Ashok Meena’s camerawork. When they were shooting at sea, the filmmaker strove to underline the “physical and meditative nature” of fishing with wide, roving shots. “I wanted to bring out the romance my characters had with the sea without romanticising their lives.” That is amply evident with the suffocation that the audience feels when Kaur charts the mounting financial and familial constraints that Ganesh and Rakesh navigate in terse blocking and over-the-shoulder close-ups.
With a European premiere now on the cards, Kaur describes the critical acclaim that Against the Tide garnered at its world premiere as an immensely fulfilling experience. An Oscar nomination might be a long shot down the road, but it’s natural to wonder whether the filmmaker feels pressured to match the footsteps of Ghosh, Thomas and Sen. Kaur is quick to reply, describing the momentum that her peers gathered as a privilege, not a burden. “At the moment, I’m brimming with curiosity. The film has brought me so far. Who is to say that someday it won’t bring me the moon?” ■