‘Celebrating Our Tigers’: Can Music Make Us Feel Climate Loss?

“When you are doing projects of this nature, there is a canvas that is provided, and your idea is to kind of put your colours on that canvas, but you must keep the ethos of the painting alive,” says renouned renowned Indian sarod player Ayaan Ali Bangash.

This time, the canvas they paint is India’s wild tiger. Following a string of successful global collaborations with bands and artists like Gorillaz and Yungblud, sarod maestros Ayaan Ali Bangash and his brother, Amaan Ali Bangash and have released Celebrating Our Tigers, a musical journey through some of India’s most fragile tiger habitats: Corbett, Bandhavgarh, Sundarbans, Kaziranga, Kabini, Ranthambore, and Pench.

The album, created in association with WWF-India, which has named the duo its Goodwill Ambassadors, arrives at a moment when tiger numbers in our country are rising steadily, even as human–tiger conflicts continue to increase.

What made the world-renowned musicians take on a project like this one?

When Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash speak about Celebrating Our Tigers, they do not begin with studio anecdotes, but instead they talk about forests, their family and wildlife.