"I mix Indian instruments with Western instruments all the time"
About this Quote
Not a manifesto, more a matter-of-fact flex: Ray frames cultural hybridity as craft, not controversy. “All the time” is the tell. He’s not dabbling in fusion as a novelty; he’s describing a working method, the way a director reaches for whatever tool lands the scene. That casualness is a quiet rebuke to the purity police on both sides: the nationalist demand that “Indian” art sound unmistakably Indian, and the Western-curated expectation that non-Western artists arrive prepackaged as authentic, exotic, and legible.
Coming from Satyajit Ray, the line also sits inside a larger aesthetic argument his films make without speeches: modern Indian life is already mixed. Calcutta’s drawing rooms, radios, cinemas, books, and street sounds are porous to global influence, and Ray treats that permeability as reality rather than loss. The intent isn’t to “Westernize” Indian music or to sprinkle sitar over a Western score for flavor. It’s to build an emotional grammar that can move between worlds - a melodic phrase that carries local memory, a harmonic texture that signals modernity, an arrangement that can suggest class, aspiration, or dislocation in a single cue.
There’s subtext, too, about authorship. Ray composed and designed with the confidence of someone refusing the colonial division of labor: the West provides technique, the East supplies color. In his hands, the mix becomes sovereignty - not borrowed sophistication, but self-directed synthesis.
Coming from Satyajit Ray, the line also sits inside a larger aesthetic argument his films make without speeches: modern Indian life is already mixed. Calcutta’s drawing rooms, radios, cinemas, books, and street sounds are porous to global influence, and Ray treats that permeability as reality rather than loss. The intent isn’t to “Westernize” Indian music or to sprinkle sitar over a Western score for flavor. It’s to build an emotional grammar that can move between worlds - a melodic phrase that carries local memory, a harmonic texture that signals modernity, an arrangement that can suggest class, aspiration, or dislocation in a single cue.
There’s subtext, too, about authorship. Ray composed and designed with the confidence of someone refusing the colonial division of labor: the West provides technique, the East supplies color. In his hands, the mix becomes sovereignty - not borrowed sophistication, but self-directed synthesis.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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