India, Dec. 7 -- A very different kind of noise is set to echo through the canopy of Aarey forest, long described as Mumbai's "green lung", music meant not just to entertain, but to defend the forest itself.

For the first time in its history, the forest will host a full-fledged open-air music festival this December. And organisers hope the event will shift how the city imagines both itself and its last remaining forests.

The Aarey Music Festival, they told HT, is an attempt to challenge Mumbai's familiar self-image as a purely metropolitan sprawl. It also seeks to reframe Aarey not as a perennial flashpoint, but as a living cultural landscape, home to adivasi communities, Tamil-speaking families whose grandparents arrived as labourers i...