Lost in music - A mission to save songs of the Biate community

250 - The estimated number of languages lost in India in the past 50 years, according to Unesco.

- Hannah Ellis-Petersen

As he sat around a fire lit deep in the forests covering the hills of Dima Hasao in Assam, a shadow of sadness came into the eyes of Lallura Darnei. Now in his 70s, Darnei was one of the oldest members of the Biate community, an ancient hill tribe living in north-east India. The songs he sang around the flames, speaking of great floods and the birds that flap their wings at sunset, dated back so many generations the tribe said they were as old as time.

But, said Darnei, when he died these songs would probably die with him, and with it the history, the knowledge, and the culture of the Biate would be gone forever. The younger generation of the tribe had fallen in love with guitar music and K-pop and had not learned the traditional songs. He was the last of the Biate who knew how to play and make the siranda, the tribe’s traditional violin crafted from wood and the dried skin of an iguana.

Sitting across from Darnei as he shared his grief over his disappearing culture were two people who did not belong to the tribe. Piyush Goswami and Akshatha Shetty, a couple from Bengaluru, had stumbled upon the Biate in a long journey they were taking across India, documenting and living with marginalised and tribal communities and finding ways to bring them greater prosperity.