The Private Canon: The Mind Meld of "Streets of Calcutta"

Sam Zaman (a.k.a. State of Bengal) and Ananda Shankar

This post is part of a series.
Among her many talents, film director Mira Nair has proven to be a great music curator—or at least, she's had the taste to hire good music supervisors and composers. To wit: I wore out the soundtracks of two of her best films, Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding, both of which featured a mix of original score cues and lovingly curated source music. The former introduced me to the lilting Central African pop of Papy Tex Group's "Kanda Ya Nini" as well as to the unofficial anthem of cosmopolitan modern India, Mukesh's "Mera joota hai japani" (its famous chorus translates as, "My shoes are Japanese, these trousers are English/The red cap on my head is Russian, but still my heart is Indian"), and the latter overflows with riches, from Mychael Danna's main theme "Baraat" (my ringtone for a while) to Sukhwinder Singh's sweeping "Aaj Mera Jee Kardaa (Today My Heart Desires)," from the '90s Bollywood earworm "Chunari Chunari" to the '70s Bollywood classic "Aaj Mausam Bada Beimann Hai."

My appetite whetted, I found myself in the "world music" stacks at Amoeba Records at some point in the early aughts looking for more—this was still a time when, while the Internet could help you gather information about music, it couldn't easily deliver your music unless you were Napster-proficient. So there I was, amid the Shankars and the Bollywood collections, and the urban tiger on the cover of Indestructible Asian Beats called out to me. I think I clocked that the use of "Asian" in this context marked this as a British collection, but I was not prepared for its meaty, beaty delights, which start at the needle drop with the Tala Quintet's infectiously tense "Na-Da"...

...and rollicks through essential hip-hop/bhangra/electronica mashups by Asian Dub Foundation, Juttla, Jolly Mukherjee, and Los Chicharrons before concluding with the coup de grace: a callback to a 1975 classic I have to imagine was included on this otherwise up-to-the-minute collection because its groovy meld of Western funk and Bengali folk was seen as a kind of inspiration for the genre- and culture-hopping DJ-based music elsewhere on the album.*

I'm speaking, of course, of Ananda Shankar's explosive "Streets of Calcutta." I think you need to hear it before we proceed further.

Maybe it's just me, but I find that blend of so-called East and West utterly captivating—the way the inky Moog synth and dirty funk guitars and clattery '60s drums are made to sound somehow Indian, and conversely the sitar and violin and flute and tabla are used like rock instruments. It's more than cross-pollination; to my ears it's a totally convincing musical mind meld. Listen for the break at 2:30, when Shankar's sitar plays a fast lick while the band stops—the man has clearly listened to Hendrix (with whom he jammed for a momentous, and tragically unrecorded, week) and the Who, the Yardbirds. The result has been dismissed by some as a kind of Indian Austin Powers, but I simply can't hear this surging musical fusion as kitsch, or at least not as mere kitsch.

I found plenty of that on his other records, which I then sought out voraciously: his covers of "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Light My Fire," for instance (from his eminently worthwhile debut record), or his whimsical takes on "Teddy Bear" or "Marie (His Latest Flame)" (for a 1978 collection called India Remembers Elvis). And there was arguably an element of shtick or gimmick to his lifelong East/West fusion project, as heartfelt as it seems to have been—for one thing, as a sitar player, he is not close to the same league as his famous uncle or even his talented cousin. Still, virtuosity comes in many dispensations, and as a bandleader, composer, and frontman, Shankar was clearly the real deal. "Streets of Calcutta" joins a clutch of must-have cuts from his catalogue. At the top are a few are groovy blues bangers in the vein of "Streets," like "Back Home"...

...and "Dancing Drums"...

And another two keepers are sweet, meditative jams, one in a distinctly Indian vein, "Vidai (Parting)"...

...and the other, "Mamata (Affection)," more in a Western pop mode...

I ended up miles away, in other words, from the film soundtracks of Mira Nair. But then, Indian music and cinema are so intertwined that they are very often excellent gateways, one to the other: I was later so taken with a song performed in full by an actor in Satyajit Ray's final film, Agantuk (The Stranger), that I recorded it off the rental video and still have the MP3. The singer? Mamata Shankar, Ananda's sister, after whom he presumably named the above song. (Her performance begins at 1:15:07 below.)

*My cursory research bears this out, and the album Shankar later made with State of Bengal, Walking On, is the inevitable meeting of these two eras.