Anoushka Shankar: Pirelli Calendar 2027 Artist

“Music has always been one of the ways in which we can cut through boundaries between people. My experience [is] that when we play music, we are bypassing an intellectual process and we're connecting with people through an emotional or more visceral space and therefore connection can happen more easily and more universally”

Music has always been central to Anoushka Shankar's life. A singular, groundbreaking force on the global stage, the 13-time Grammy-nominated sitar virtuoso, composer, and producer grew up deeply immersed in music, performing live from the age of just thirteen. Over the three decades since, she has built an unparalleled career bringing her innovative vision to prestigious stages worldwide—reinventing and recontextualising the sitar as never before. A masterful collaborator, she has pushed creative boundaries not just through her solo albums, global tours and soundtracks, but also through groundbreaking work with legendary artists including Sting, Herbie Hancock, Gorillaz, Patti Smith, Arijit Singh and her half-sister Norah Jones.

“Someone might sit down to hear a sitar and think, ‘Oh, I don't know how to understand this’… that's the intellectual aspect. Whereas when you hear music and it touches you and makes you cry, or makes you feel like you want to move, that's when you cut through all those notions… that's when [we] realise that we're the same, we have the same experiences that we put in our art. And that connection is so essential for the world. What art does, and how it helps us connect rather than divide, is key - and more and more important”

London-born Shankar's heritage stretches across India, from the south on the side of her mother, who was “half from Kerala and half from Tamil Nadu”, to the north on her father's, who was from a Bengali family and had close ties to Kolkata. The food and languages of South India along with the Tamil lullabies that remind her of her grandmother form some of her earliest memories while she is also deeply connected to the “completely different language, food and literature” of her father's roots.

“And then, to make it even more confusing, the years that I lived in India, I lived in Delhi. So, my own personal experience of growing up in this country was in a very edgy capital city, very cosmopolitan, a lot of fashion, a lot of music. It was a time when things were opening up here and we were creating this really exciting scene together”

Now Shankar lives in London, but travels widely, performing around the world. She says she had “a bit of a squeal” when she was asked to be in the Pirelli Calendar - “It was a big surprise and a real thrill” - and was excited to be photographed by Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø, a friend and someone whose work she has long admired. A 30-year veteran of photoshoots, Shankar relished Sundsbø's positivity and the relaxed atmosphere on set, which enabled them to be “really playful with how we wanted to take the pictures”.

“I was able to really feel like myself, bring my own character and self to the shoot. I knew I wanted to do something a little different than I normally do, so in that sense it was as I hoped it would be. I feel really happy with what we've done. And I can't wait to see [the result]”

As for the 2027 Cal as a whole, she is hopeful it will capture the breadth and depth of India while reflecting “how edgy, how cool and how forward moving” the country is. And she is excited for the Cal's multiple perspectives, thanks to the unprecedented collaboration between Sundsbø and Indian photographer Avani Rai, who is bringing her own vision to ideas her late father, Raghu Rai, developed for the project.

“Having a Calendar focus on India, it does feel important that there is an Indian eye as part of that storytelling… Raghu Rai is a god to most photographers I know, and I'm moved to know that there will be something of his work that we'll get to see in this. That's very special”