BURNING BRIGHT

Sarod player Soumik Datta is using music to protest deforestation

WWhen British-Indian sarod player and fusion artist Soumik Datta was a toddler, he remembers seeing a Royal Bengal Tiger in the Sunderbans. Over the phone from London, he says, “When I confirmed this with my mum, she said, ‘Oh I can’t believe you remember this. You weren’t even one year old’. I remember it was a white kind of tiger.”

Along with trees, the tiger came to sybmolise larger ecological systems for Datta. It’s partly what inspired his new recently released EP Jangal. The five-track record sees a darker, denser turn from Datta. On the somewhat short but menacing song ‘Beast’, Datta plays the bamhum, a Naga bamboo flute he acquired while shooting a documentary film series called Tuning 2 You, for which he travelled to India’s remote regions to highlight their folk music traditions. “The bamhum was made by a Naga music maker. It was a gift from him. It’s always in my bag. It was a compositional tool for months and it like felt it was screaming to be in this album.”

While Datta is well aware of global and Indian environmental concerns, the Amazon fires earlier this year were a major catalyst that led him to complete Jangal. And yet, this is a protest record against deforestation without using any words. “Not all of us can be Greta Thunberg. I’m still happy there are people like that to champion these issues, but at the same time, there are other avenues that try and hit you closer to the heart with a more soulful, creative, artistic response to the same subject,” he says. ■

—Anurag Tagat