Earlier this year, Orlando-based band Ghost Peppers released its debut album, “No Borders”, an official entry in the Best Global Music Album category of the Grammy Awards. The band – professors Amrita Ghosh, Kevin Meehan and James Campbell, and guitarists Kevin Felker and Eddy Jo Martinez – might seem like a rather unconventional collaboration. Three of its members are academics from a university in Florida who merge South Asian musical styles and traditions with Americana music, and Martinez is a school counsellor who joined the trio to record their first album.But fluidity and experimentation are precisely what brought them together in an era of both political polarisation and a growing urge among many people to remain “politically correct”. The song ‘Court of Love Reggae Raga’, a Hindustani classical bandish in Raag Bhairav, taught to band member Dr Amrita Ghosh by her music teacher, has been separately entered under the Best Global Music Performance category.“It is surreal,” said Meehan, Professor of English at the University of Central Florida. “We composed this album with a close to zero budget. We recorded the songs in the Orlando Public Library,” he said.The band’s first album, No Borders.For Ghost Peppers, the recognition they seek is less about awards than the journey of an unconventional project that began among university colleagues and evolved into a multilingual, cross-cultural musical collaboration. The name of the band itself evokes something distinctive, and is drawn from the indigenous chillies found in northeastern India, the bhut jolokiya, often cited as one of the world’s spiciest chillies.But the music produced by the band goes beyond the region, with rhythms, genres and languages bleeding into one another. Ghosh joined the University of Central Florida in 2022. She, with fellow professor of English literature, Meehan, launched the band in 2023. Professor James Campbell, percussunist and drummer, joined them too.Their different backgrounds, musically and culturally, did not obstruct. Instead, it became their forte and gave the band purpose: transcending imposed boundaries, whether national, generic, rhythmic or any other kind.Ghosh is of Bengali descent and her music carries a deep imprint of Rabindra Sangeet and Bengali poetry. She has also been trained in music. “From the time I turned 18, I was taught by Guru Mushtaq Ali, from Hapur, Uttar Pradesh, which is very close to Delhi,” she said.‘Court of Love’ is bandish merged with reggae and Americana songwriting. He taught me the song via Zoom over months,” she said in an interview with The Wire.“Dr Ghosh introduced me to the intriguing world of South Asian music through the works of Tagore, and it became my rite of passage into the region. Now I am also learning Bengali to become a better Ghost Pepper [laughs],” says Meehan, joking about whether the differences in musical backgrounds hindered their musical flow together.Campbell says, “Music is music, and we try to leap over scepticism.”While some might find a band comprising academics and professors of literature bonding over music rather surprising, Ghost Peppers does not seem to view both strands in isolation. Their scholarship intersects with the art they create. Both are political and derived from society.“My doctoral work was on the Partition. Being from Bengal and South Asia, we have a very different understanding of rupture and divisions,” said Ghosh, who holds a PhD in Postcolonial Literature and Theory, with a specialisation in Partition Literature.“I firmly believe that all art is political, and that it can never be apolitical,” said Ghosh.“All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art,” Campbell said, echoing George Orwell on how ideas of art evolve while remaining political.The band doesn’t shy away from using its music to transmit a bigger idea about the world. As the name “No Borders” suggests, it questions the divisions created or hardened by political borders.“We collaborated with the renowned Pakistani artist-writer Usman T. Malik, who co-wrote and sang ‘Qatra Qatra’ with us. The song is a testimony of solidarity and oneness for the two nations of India and Pakistan,” Ghosh said.The song is an effort to reconnect musical traditions that predate the political borders of today. The music video uses powerful imagery of that partition. The album itself is a reflection on migration, memory and collective humanity, in which music becomes a space to engage with political realities rather than trying to escape from them.“Neither of us lives in India or Pakistan; therefore, music becomes this third space of healing from the rupture created by the partition,” she said.The band collaborated with Pakistani singer Sana Illahe for ‘Ek Dhaaga’, which Ghosh describes as a homage to syncretism, shared histories and humanity between India and Pakistan.By combining Urdu, Bengali, Hindi and English with Hindustani classical, Tagore, Americana, rock, reggae and jazz, Ghost Peppers attempts to reconnect musical and cultural traditions that predate the modern political border.Yet the album’s “No Borders” extends beyond India and Pakistan, to linguistic, cultural, ideological, gendered and other forms of division. Their first single, ‘Azaadi/Liberation’, named bilingually in the spirit of transcending borders, grew out of a mutual interest in border politics as well as the cultural resistance to “border hysteria” in South Asia and globally. Thus it explicitly examined the restrictions imposed by borders.‘Azaadi/Liberation’ is a concoction of rock intensity, distorted guitars and Hindustani folk influences. In this way, songs with political meaning become a part of Ghost Peppers’ philosophy, in which music can become a means of unification and liberation.Although they create music about making borders seamless, the process itself was far from it. There were multiple retakes while recording ‘Qatra Qatra’, for instance, with the differences in their musical backgrounds sometimes presenting a challenge. Ghosh’s grounding in Hindustani classical music has meant that her approach to rhythm differs from her bandmates’, requiring them to work through different understandings of taal and timing.Each of the musicians draws from markedly different musical influences as well. For Ghosh, Tagore’s music and thought are a lasting influence, alongside the music of the 1970s Kolkata band Moheener Ghoraguli, Lata Mangeshkar and Pakistani singer Nazia Hassan.Meehan, a multi-instrumentalist, pointed to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, while Campbell said he could “go on and on about drummers who have inspired me”. He mentioned a few, including Max Weinberg, the longtime drummer of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.The musicians’ influences span continents and generations, from Tagore to Americana and everything in between, and in this interplay music finds a new sound.Saras Anand was an intern at The Wire.