Ankur Tewari Has Been Writing India’s Feelings For Over Two Decades. He Is Only Just Getting Started With His Own.
Gully Boy. Coke Studio Bharat. SXSW. A Filmfare Award. And a solo album that was a decade in the making.
Ankur Tiwari. Finally, the headline act.
Most people know the songs without knowing the name.
Apna Time Aayega from Gully Boy. The Khalasi phenomenon from Coke Studio Bharat that spread far beyond India and won Bronze at Cannes Lions. The Made in Heaven soundtrack. Kho Gaye Hum Kahan on Netflix. The Archies. Two decades of Indian music that most people have heard without knowing exactly who was in the room when the words were being written.
Ankur Tewari was in that room. He has almost always been in that room.
Ankur Tewari was born in Brussels, Belgium on February 5, 1977, to Indian parents, and grew up moving between cultures in a way that gave him an ear for what sits underneath language. What a line of lyrics carries beyond its literal meaning. What a melody does to a word when it lands on the wrong beat in the right way. He started making music independently in 1998, long before independent Indian music had a name for itself or an infrastructure to support it. He simply started, because that was the only direction available.
His band Ankur and the Ghalat Family became one of the most loved acts in Indian indie music. The name alone says something about his approach. Ghalat, which translates loosely as wrong or mistaken, holds the kind of gentle self-awareness that runs through everything he makes. Music that does not take itself too seriously in the surface texture but is deeply serious in what it is trying to do underneath. Songs about cities and memory and the specific loneliness of being a person who feels things too much and does not always know what to do with that.
His work as a lyricist for film and television gave him visibility that his independent music career had always deserved but the industry was not always set up to give. Apna Time Aayega from Gully Boy won him the Filmfare Award for Best Lyricist in 2019 and introduced his writing to an enormous new audience. The song became an anthem. A rallying cry. Words that people reached for in the middle of genuinely difficult moments, which is the only measure of a lyric that actually matters.
And then Coke Studio Bharat happened. As Creative Architect of Season 1 and Season 2, he was not just a contributor. He was one of the people shaping what the entire project could be. The result was music that crossed every boundary the Indian industry tends to draw between genres and regions and generations. Khalasi, the track he produced featuring Aditya Gadhvi and Achint Thakkar, went global. Bronze at Cannes Lions. Played at venues and festivals outside India in a way that confirmed what many people had suspected for years about the reach of Indian music when it is treated with genuine ambition.
In 2024 he took his music to the stage at SXSW in Austin, performed at the South Asia Pre-Oscar ball at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles, and completed a six-city US tour. Indian independent music on stages that most Indian artists still dream about reaching.
His solo album Akela, his first full solo record in more than a decade, came next. The title is honest. Akela means alone. And the album is about exactly that, the specific quality of aloneness that is not the same as loneliness, the kind that comes from being a person who has spent years making space for other people’s feelings and is now finally making space for their own. It is the most personal thing he has released and the most direct. Everything else he has made has been in service of a story that belonged to someone else.
Akela belongs entirely to him.
Myfandom curated the official Ankur Tewari merch, available exclusively on the platform. Always Official. Only on MYFANDOM.
Own a piece of Two decades of Indian music.
Shop the official Ankur Tiwari Merch
