For today's Global Hit, we meet an up-and-coming personality in London's underground music scene. She goes by the name, Bishi nd she makes Indian-influenced club music. But Andrea Smardon reports that Bishi is as comfortable in a sequin bikini as she is in a traditional Indian sari.

Picture an Indian woman in her early twenties sitting on the floor, barefoot, holding a traditional sitar. Now imagine her full figure accentuated by a sheer silver dress, her hair done up about six inches high like a tropical bird, her eyes outlined in black, her lips glossed in pink.

BISHI: "I would describe myself as a mulit-media musician."

Bishi also sees herself as a cultural hybrid. She periodically goes to Mumbai to study classical sitar at the Ravi Shankar School of Music. She's a fan of English folk songs. She's also a DJ, partial to dance music, pop, and electronica.

Bishi's debut album is called Nights at the Circus. It's named after a novel by English author Angela Carter. The novel's protaganist is a girl who grows wing when she reaches puberty. Once considered deformed, she becomes a senstational aerialist in the circus.

BISHI: "The novel Nights at the Circus spoke to me very deeply because it involved a half-caste, hybrid performer who had firm roots in London, but her activities and all of her travels and adventures take place on a global scale, but she's very much rooted firm in the London underground."

Bishi is also rooted in London's underground scene. She's been a DJ since she was a teenager, and she's at the center of the city's alternative club culture. Pushing the boundaries of fashion, dance, music, and art. But her deepeset roots go back to her Bengali parents. Her mother is a professional, classical Indian singer. In Bishi's music, her dual identity comes up again and again.

This song is called Namaste. The word is an Indian greeting that literally means "I Bow to You."

BISHI: "It's more of a reflection on my cultural state of being an Indian girl, an Indian woman, but having been brought up in the UK and the ambiguity that goes with two states of mind. Geographically I was brought up quite close to the center of London away from the rest of the Indian community. I went to school with predominantly English kids. I felt out of place at school because I came from an Indian family, but then when I went to visit my Indian community, I felt out of place because they were in the suburbs and I was in the city. But it's not an all together a negative feeling, it's something I feel very positive in as well."

Her outsider status, she says, makes her feel free to express different sides of her personality without things clashing. That seems to be her approach to music as well. She throws together sitar, tabla drums, and electronic beats, merging her classical training with her DJ roots.

Bishi has gradually built a following in London and last fall she toured the US. She was surprised to discover that American audiences seemed even more excited about her than their European counterparts.

BISHI: "They were so warm and so enthusiastic. In America I think they just seemed to have hunger and they have a real energy and real enthusiasm that I haven't encountered in Europe or the UK."

Despite the hunger Bishi does not yet have a US release. For now, American fans will have to be satisfied with on-line downloads or an imported CD.

For the World, I'm Andrea Smardon.