Anoushka Shankar: Creativity Is an Act of Hope

**Imran Amed** (0:04)
Hi, this is Imran Amed, founder and CEO of The Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BoF Podcast. It's Friday, June 12th. Anoushka Shankar has spent three decades building one of the most distinctive bodies of work in contemporary music. She has taken the sitar, an instrument rooted in centuries of North Indian classical tradition into completely new territory, blending the ancient Hindustani raga system with electronic, flamenco and Western orchestral influences.
I find Anoushka's music hauntingly beautiful. At a time when we're bombarded with wars and blooming AI risk and a constant churn of uncertainty, her music is a salve. It carries echoes of long road trips with my family, listening to her father, Ravi Shankar, play the sitar.
But this is not just nostalgia. All of Anoushka's music is rooted in her personal journey. At BoF VOICES 2025, she explained how she has written from joy and from pain and from outrage. But in each case, the impulse to release something into the world is inseparable from the belief that it will matter to someone. Every act of creation is an act of hope.

**Anoushka Shankar** (1:26)
Writing music is obviously a creative act. And I believe that any creative act is a hopeful act, because we wouldn't send anything out into the void if we didn't have a hope and belief that it was going to reach other people, that it was going to help other people by nature.

**Imran Amed** (1:41)
Anoushka spoke about how she found her way back to music after a prolonged creative numbness following the pandemic, and what the ancient discipline of improvisation has taught her about adapting to a world in constant upheaval. She also treated us to a beautiful rendition of my favourite song of hers, Reunion.
Here's Anoushka Shankar on the BoF Podcast.

**Anoushka Shankar** (2:07)
Hello everyone. I'm so happy to be here and speaking and playing with you today as part of this incredible event. This is about living your best life in session five. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about my experience with choosing hope and taking leaps of faith. I'm a musician, as Imran said, I've been touring for 30 years. I started when I was a baby and writing music for 20 years. Writing music is obviously a creative act and I believe that any creative act is a hopeful act because we wouldn't send anything out into the void if we didn't have a hope and belief that it was going to reach other people, that it was going to help other people. By nature, it is about hope.
I've written from a place of joy, I've written from pain, I've written from outrage about global events, but each of those times, there is some shred of hope that means it's going to make some kind of a difference to bother putting something out into the world.
In the last couple of years in particular, I've released a trilogy of albums that told a longer story over the three album cycle. We've been touring around the world and I think from the outside, it's looked like a particularly kind of empowered or creatively fertile time in my life because there's been so much output, there's been so much going on and there has. But it's really come on the back of a period that was very much the opposite of that. I was feeling really creatively numb for a long period and unable to write music. Coming out of the pandemic, I moved into a really difficult personal experience that went on for a really long time and it just made me feel smaller and smaller and more trapped in the experience. I kept thinking, I want to play music, I want to make music and I just wasn't able to. It was a strange and isolating experience for me because I've always been very vocal, I've always been very connected to people. I've always shared my stories with people without much of a filter, even in this public-private world we lived in.
I talked about addiction, I talked about coming into recovery a long time ago, when it felt important and helpful to do so. I spoke about having been sexually abused as a child for many years. I spoke about recent autoimmune conditions and neurodivergence, divorce, single parenting, women's health also, which I always think is something not talked about enough. I talked when it felt relevant about undiagnosed PCOS and having a lifetime of struggling with fibroids. I had like a juicy cantaloupe sized fibroid when I was in my early 20s that had to get taken out. And a few surgeries after that, I finally had a hysterectomy in my 30s. So I've talked about all of that. And I feel like I believe in talking. I believe in sharing and how it helps us. But this particular thing I was going through was very unusual for me, because it was actually about someone else. And it never really felt like it was my story to tell. It was someone I loved, who I've been sitting alongside for a long period while they're struggling. And I've been feeling helpless, and I've been feeling like I can't fix it for them, even though that's what I want to do more than anything in the world. But it doesn't feel like my story. So I'm speaking just obliquely about the fact that I was in a period of very, very numb and debilitating pain.