Today's Global Hit comes to us from Sri Lanka. That's where the musical duo Bathiya and Santhush have provoked controversy. They've ruffled feathers by adding back-beats and pop vocals to traditional Sri Lankan music. And it doesn't help that their music regular tops the charts. Anna Sussman recently caught up with them in the capital Colombo.

SANTHUSH: "We started experimenting with Sri Lankan pop music and trying to create a bridge between the Sri Lankan ethnic sounds and the pop western sounds, so we basically fused both sounds together and came out with a different flavor."

That new flavor didn't go over very well at first.

SANTHUSH: "The Sri Lankan music right from the start it was a very conservative industry, up to now, we were the people who kind of shaked the place and say hey man, young people rock. Right at the start they were saying that we were trying to destroy the culture and that we were not adhering to the norms."

Newspapers ran lengthy critiques of their music. Radio and TV stations aired debates on the deterioration of Sri Lankan heritage. But their sound struck a chord with young people. Bathiya and Santhush became a massive pop sensation despite the controversy.

SANTHUSH: "It was excellent actually, for us it was a good thing, we were confident that we were not doing anything wrong... the only different thing was our music had energy, people danced. So when the youngsters realized, hey man, they have got some energy, a whole lot of youngsters started following us. It was a revolution."

They say they're bringing ancient Sri Lankan music to the world stage by popularizing traditional Sri Lankan sounds with contemporary pop loops. And they're among the few Sri Lankan artists to sign with an international music label.

This song, Denna Denna, is inspired by ancient ceremonial folk songs used to drive demons from the home.

SANTHUSH: "Those sounds are maybe around 1,200 years old 1,600 years old and it has been coming through generations, but for some reason those sounds, the music hasn't come to the world. Not even to India. It has been lying inside Sri Lanka in like a treasure box, so we thought lets open it out and share it with the world."

Bathiya and Santhush say thier music builds bridges in Sri Lanka, by overlapping diverse sounds and languages. The duo sing in English, and Singhalese, broadening their audience to both an educated and poor Sri lankan fan base, and they produced a Hindi version of most their recent album for their Indian neighbors and they say they are learning to write songs in Tamil the language of Sri Lanka's ethnic minority. As civil war continues to escalate on the small island, Bathiya and Santhush say they feel an acute need to address the nation's bitter ethnic divide, with their music.

For the World, I'm Anna Sussman, Colombo, Sri Lanka.