Recently I came across a highly popular TV show in which some people were competing to cook something. The competition was about making a dish with two separate flavours in one dish. In India we call it fusion and in Gurgaon where I live, there is a restaurant that specialises in such dishes. Some of these fused dishes are very good. Most are quite bad, certainly not worth the cost of the dish. But the experience of eating them is fun.
So I asked my wife, who is a retired professor of Korean Studies, how it would be to blend sambhar with noodle soup. You know, put sambhar powder instead of the one they supply. She gave me one of those looks which wives give their husbands. Scathing. Contemptuous. Searing. “Go and write for Rotary or something,” she hissed. But even though she dismissed me and my suggestion as completely asinine, I did try it out one day when she wasn’t at home. It tasted no worse than the original. In fact, I do wonder why we can’t mix, say, haka noodles with sambhar, instead of mixing it with rice or idlis or vadas. And when you think about it, the same can be done with all cuisines. Kulchay with the Ethiopian injera, dosas with the Mexican mole pablano, baked beans with biryani and so on. You get the point. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
And why stop with food? We also have fusion music. After all, there are only seven major notes and, in different musical systems, these are combined in different ways. But there is no unique way. The combination works or doesn’t work. To make fusion music popular, a global and pervasive soft drink brand promotes itself via fusion music. Mostly the result isn’t great but every once in a while, as with food, the musicians do pull off a very pleasing effect. It’s exactly like in food where the proportions of the ingredients determine its overall effect. Likewise in music, too, the proportions of rhythms and tunes determine whether it’s going to be a good or indifferent effort. Those in their seventies may recall that the first attempt at fusion music was by the sitar genius Ravi Shankar and the pop legends The Beatles. For some reason the song was called ‘Norwegian Wood’ and it featured the sitar prominently. It was a global hit and is still recognisable as a masterpiece of fusion music. Since then there have been scores of such songs. My favourites, however, are where opera singing and Indian classical raga singing are performed together. Separate but joined. Not everyone’s cup of tea, yes, but if you are a musician you will not care as long as the integrity of each stream is maintained. Two Tamil musicians do it wonderfully.
Fusion is also possible in writing, as Salman Rushdie showed in his very first bestseller, Midnight’s Children. It was simply a question of writing Hindi or Urdu sentences in fully integrated unitalicised script. The words were Hindi. The script was English. The thoughts and idioms were a combination of eastern and western. The effect was mesmerising. Other writers have tried it but Rushdie remains the maestro of fusion writing. He does it most naturally unlike the others whose efforts seem contrived.
Language, of course, has been fused together for aeons. I grew up in North India speaking a mixture of Hindi, English, Tamil, Punjabi and later on, even Bengali. My grandchildren live in a part of Europe where French is the main language. At home their parents have been teaching them Hindi and English and every now and then the kids speak in all three languages simultaneously. The effect is perplexing, annoying and comic in turns.