Sound travels faster than political diplomacy. This may not be a law of physics, but Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's music soaring high above partitions and borders, natural and man-made, proved precisely this. The word used most often to define his music is `fusion'.

But the fusion he wrought was not confined just to bringing the classical to pop music or crafting a jugalbandi for a piece of Western music. His fusion also helped break down barriers that two nations, united and disunited by a common history, had erected against each other.

Of course, it is not as if other great musicians in both India and Pakistan have not attempted to do the same thing. Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosale have their ardent fans in Karachi and Rawalpindi as do Ghulam Ali, Mehdi Hassan or Mallika Pukhraj in Patiala and Mumbai. But Nusrat, whether by an accident of history or by design, arrived at a moment when there was renewed popular interest in the qawwali, when a burgeoning film music industry was in anxious search for new musical ideas, and when satellite television helped fan a taste for the multicultural around the globe. It was no accident, that sangam between him and one of India's most facile lyricists Javed Akhtar.

Every attempt to dismantle fences or reinterpret the old in terms of the new invites instant approbation. Nusrat had more than his share of baiters. The criticism of those who dismissed his music as an aberration of a classical legacy was relatively benign. That of the ones who saw him as a political challenge, who could undermine a legacy of hate that they had so assiduously built over the years, was certainly not. ``Cultural dilution'', cried one lot. ``Cultural invasion'', cried the other. Nusrat died with Shiv Sena strongman Bal Thackeray's ban ringing in his ears. Thackeray had looked askance at the album that A.R. Rehman had produced, Vande Mataram, in which Nusrat had sung one track with the appropriate title, `Gurus of Peace'. In Pakistan, too, there were many who hated everything he stood for, but most of all the hand of friendship that he extended to Indians. Even in death, there were attempts in Pakistan to underplay his contributions to its musical heritage.

Nusrat is now beyond such petty recriminations. The question really is, what happens to his legacy of syncreticism that he seems to have imbibed from the sufism that had permeated his music. The biggest barrier that India and Pakistan face in their attempts to reach out and roll back the bitterness of the years, is the deep suspicion they have of each other. When the Pakistan Government announced that the country's highest honour, the Tamgha-e-Intiaz, was to be given to the doyen of Indian cinema, Dilip Kumar, it evoked a completely predictable response: hostility from some film-makers and politicians in Mumbai, anger from some film artistes in Lahore. Truly, it needs a blithe spirit like Nusrat was gifted with, to fly like a skylark and transcend such divides.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.