Rap music: India
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The status in 2017
Sonam Joshi, Rap goes regional & real, December 13, 2017: The Times of India
Indian hip-hop is no longer just about women, alcohol and fast cars. From Punjabi to Tamil, rappers are making music about life on the margins
A bulky stereo plays ’90s Bollywood songs in Prabh Deep’s unnumbered house in Tilak Nagar. It is an unlikely choice of music for a rapper known for his hard-hitting songs about a childhood spent on the mean streets of a west Delhi locality largely inhabited by 1984 anti-Sikh riot victims. “My music comes from my experiences on these streets. Whenever I have writer’s block, I just hang around outside,” the 23-year-old says.
He raps about young friends caught in the vortex of drug addiction, violence and crime. These songs are in contrast to the sexist, hedonistic lyricsPunjabi rap is associated with. ‘Suno’, a video from hisdebut album Class-Sikh, follows a schoolboy who gets involved in peddling drugs in the area.
Prabh Deep belongs to a growing tribe of independent rappers writing and singing about their world, often in their own language and dialect. Mumbai’s Divine and Naezy have been the biggest success stories of India’s homegrown hip-hop movement so far, but there are numerous others waiting for their turn. Socially and politically aware, they are inspired by real stories, and engage with local issues and everyday experiences.
In this, it is far removed from the more well-known genre of commercial Bollywood party rap. Gabriel Dattarayen, a sociologist from London’s Goldsmiths University who is writing a book about Delhi’s underground hip-hop culture, explains this shift. “While hip-hop emerged from the ground up in the US as a black cultural practice linked to experiences of urban dispossession and racism, hip-hop in India, until the last five years, has been the domain of wealthy youth who were able to access and emulate American and British black popular culture,” he says. “It’s only since the emergence of the internet and smartphones that hip-hop has been able to circulate more broadly. An indie hip hop scene in India is the result of this.”
Prabh Deep discovered hip-hop in school, through a breakdancing group in nearby Vikaspuri. “In my galli, peoplewould go tostudy and get a job. Normal life. As a b-boy, when I started going to jams and met people from different countries, I gottoknow a wholedifferent world. It changed my perspective on life.”
After its release in October, Class-Sikh reached number 2 on the iTunes India album chart. “Gully rap has made it on its own, without Bollywood,” Prabh Deep says. “We did something different from the crowd.”
Singing in local languages has helped regional rappers find more listeners. “Hip-hop is aboutstorytelling,” says MoJoshi, co-founder of the indie label Azadi Records. “If you’re telling a story from a slum in Kurla or in Tilak Nagar, rapping in a local language lets youuse the slang and metaphors that you can’t translate in English. It has a much deeper impact.”
Besides PrabhDeep, there is Mumbai’s MC Todfod who raps in Gujarati and MC Mawali in Marathi; Bengaluru’s Gubbi and MC Bijju in Kannada; Srinagar’s MC Kash and Shayan Nabi; Kerala’s StreetAcademicsin Malayalam and Tamil; Tripura’s Zwing Lee in Kokborok; Big Deal in Odia; Madurai Souljour in Tamil; and Shillong’s Khasi Bloodz in Khasi.
In November, a viral music video ‘Suede Gully’ broughtfour rappers from four corners of India together. Robin Arulsingh of Madurai Souljour, who feature in the video, says: “Nobody listened to hip-hop in Madurai back in 2008. We incoporated local slang, themes and taglines which helped us get attention.”
Yet their appeal isn’t just limited to people who know the language, says Karthik Sundar ‘Gubbi’, who crowdfunded a song called ‘Naadamaya’, dedicated to Bengaluru last year. “If a Spanish song like Despacito gets played across the world, then clearly it is being accepted. WithIndia being sodiverse, people are nowlistening to musicin different languages.”
Others like Tripura’s Borkung Hrangkhawl rap in English to find more listeners, yet focus on personal experiences of discrimination faced by people from the northeast, as well as tribal rights and drug abuse. “I have faced racism, been attacked and asked if I am from some other country in Delhi because I looked different. My music is a way to bridge the gap between the northeast and rest of India,” says Hrangkhawl.
