Desi hip-hop ecologies

REVANTIKA GUPTA

DESI hip-hop music, an aesthetic expression adopted from a ground breaking movement with roots in African-American culture in 1970s U.S., in the hands of subcontinental youth today, churns out novel, exciting and transgressive transcultural subjectivities. Lyrically multilingual, sonically multicultural, contextually belonging to both ‘imagined communities’ of the wide world and more precise local formations, it carves out refuges of liminal habitation. With its alternative ways of inhabiting identity and warring with ideas of representation, it negotiates notions of subjectivity. Neither productivist nor isolationist, in that often rap talks about the explicit in racist, classist and sexual, especially sexist, terms, it is not adherent to any moral order either. Emitting a sense of outlawness, anarchy, and at its most benign level, uselessness, it riddles the notion of belonging with the position of an always-already outsider. Yet, it holds a pulsating desire to be noticed, to be heard and to be seen.

The city and the artist are inevitably invariably in dialogue, and hip-hop burgeoning in subcontinental cities is reflective of this creative condition. Breakers parkour across the contours of the built environment, skateboarders defy set pedestrian and vehicular logic to lay nonsense to grid paths and make sense of the unaligned paths, and DJs play with inherited sound to reverberate in semi-public spaces new sensibilities. Graffiti writers indent the mould of the city by writing upon it, across it, against it, covering the city in tags that shout their presence to a being hitherto oblivious to their presence. This text deliberates on one element of hip-hop and its relationship to the city today. Cherry-picking moments from a few songs released over the past five years, it considers how desi rap recognizes and reveals the common alienation faced by us all, whilst holding a resounding clarion call to misbehave, and living in hypernationalist times, even to uncitizen ourselves.

In May 2019, while delivering the PEN America Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, Arundhati Roy proposed that ‘the place for literature is built by writers and readers.’ What may we make, then, of the places built by the intended addressees and audiences of various kinds of desi rap?

Some rap songs address the contemporary zeitgeist. In Chitta (2020), Delhi-based Prabhdeep addresses drugs and money-centred youth culture. Voiced in Punjabi, while the ‘you’ here – ‘Galle che peela, munh che neela, akha twadi laal’ (have gold on your necks, pills in your mouth, bloodshot eyes) and ‘karde job te marde roz’ (die daily at your dead-end jobs) – are busying yourself with modern consumerist worker-capitalist drudgery, the ‘I’ Prabhdeep himself in contrast – ‘Meri jebbaa ne hari, sone di ghadi, chitta karobaar’ (I have green in my pockets, a gold watch, a clean business) and ‘tussi bhadde tax, mai karke bhais, luta sarkaar’ (You pay tax to the government, I am street smart and rob the government) – flexes on his ingenuity in remaining ‘clean’, resourceful and critically aware when it comes to his time, money and relationship with institutions.

Some rap songs are addressed to more pointed ‘you’s. In the moving Warli Revolt (2019), the multilingual group Swadesi sing in a mix of Marathi and Hindi to levy the responsible actors with the catastrophic toll of destroying the Aarey forest in Mumbai and displacing its Adivasi dwellers in lieu of building a metro line. ‘Humme na pasand ye khota vikas; na hai tum jaise choron pe vishwas; Metro banane ukhado tum zhaad jab zhaad na bachenge kaise loge saans; Ghar mera jungle khula aakash; tum aye traas dene karne iska nash; Prakriti ka banao mazak yahi prakriti se bani manav jaat’ (We don’t like your ‘fake’ development, nor do we trust you thieves; To build a metro you are killing trees, when they are gone then how will you breathe?;The jungle and sky are my home, You come here, mess with us and destroy our home; Nature for man has lost its worth but she is the one who truly gave us birth).

While here Swadesi voice a strong indigenous critique of the state and the larger ‘progress’ discourse, elsewhere they address a public conscience with regard to Covid 19.

Mahamaari (2020) has reggae undertones which sonically ground sharp lyrics coalescing a critique of ruling class politics, capitalism, health-crime nexus, and corruption. Espousing a message
for solidarity in the face of quarantining times, it beckons people to ‘Ye mahamaari ke khilaaf, raho ek saath’ (Remain united in the face of this pandemic) and help the vulnerable in vulnerable times ‘Bahar nikalne ka shauk, toh gareeb aur jaanwar ka pet bhar’ (If you want to step out of the house during the pandemic, then do so to feed the poor and the animals). It contains a derision of the kind of behaviour being espoused by the state and propagated by media: ‘Par tu nikaalta naara, bartan bajaara, candle jalaara, aise tu virus ko aur failaara” (But instead you sing slogans, bang utensils, light candles, it is with such ignorant behaviour that you spread the virus – here referring to the pandemic but also the ‘virus’ of misinformation and neglect).

Other rap may even be addressing the divine. 100RBH’s solo song Beda Paar (2021) discusses the calamitic condition of modern-day living by spotlighting ecological crises, casteist violence and the mindless spectacle of reality TV programmes. This critique culminates in a powerful chorus ‘Kardo beda paar sabka Bhole baba, kardo beda paar sakba Aalah baba, kardo beda paar mere Sai baba, kardo beda paar mere Yeshu baba,’ and later ‘Karna sewa sikhao Guru Nanak baba, phirse haq dilado Ambedkar baba.’ ‘Beda paar’ is a common subcontinental idiom used in devotional singing to supplicate the divine for help in making the believer cross the seas of life to reach one’s destined shore. Here 100RBH asks the higher powers to show wisdom to the people who are acting in ways that contribute to societal collapse.

Converging spiritual and real-life revolutionary figures in the chorus – Shiva, Allah, Saibaba, Jesus, Guru Nanak and Ambedkar – the song brings together a pluri-religious transhistorical imaginary very much at attack in present-day India. 100RBH’s uniquely joyous and unpretentious cadence of singing is complimented by a background score inspired by Bheem geet and Qawwali.

Yet, increasingly, it is the new personification of the all-seeing entity, nations and their microcosmic cities, that have become some of the most compelling addressees of desi rap. In the song ‘The Break up (shikwa)’, musician, actor and filmmaker Riz Ahmed allegorizes his heartbreak vis-à-vis the colonial nation state as a second generation British-Pakistani. Analogizing being dumped by his toxic lover ‘Britney’, to his experiences of growing up in Great Britain, the song references a rich subcontinental Mughal past (‘I was a Mogul, had the bling and the girls, grit and the pearls’), racism experienced by people of colour in England (‘Beat me red and blue until I knew right was white and not brown’) and the on-going loss suffered in Kashmir today as a vestige of colonial history (‘See, my cashmere jumper’s still stained red, man’). This is the opening-track of his 2020 music album The Last Goodbye, where along with songs like ‘Toba Tek Singh’, and ‘Where You From’ Ahmed addresses issues of post-colonial identity, racism, Islamophobia and the very real condition of hurt, memory, belonging and unbelonging experienced by the displaced in the wake of the 1947 partitioning of the subcontinent.

In hip-hop music being produced in India more recently, the city becomes a moniker, subject and alternatively the addressee in songs that explore notions of identity, hope and desire. Emcees and rappers explore the underbelly of the beast that are megacities to articulate, through a unique combination of spoken word and sound, but also music videos that capture and self-represent, alternative experiences of the city. MC Stan’s eponymous producer tag ‘P-Town baby’ allows for novel associations to be formed with respect to the city of Pune and in his songs 100RBH brings attention to the Maharashtrian city of Amravati. In North India, Delhi as a subject of rap brings to surface a life made invisible by mass-consumed film, music and literature.

In the past few years, Delhi-based duo Seedhe Maut (comprising of artists Encore and Calm) have produced an impressive amount of music about their experiences of growing up in Delhi across the albums Bayaan (2018), N (2021) and most recently Nayaab (2022).

In this latest album, ‘Rajdhani’, a colloquial Sanskrit word meaning capital city, becomes the title of a song where it is deployed in variegated ways to refer interchangeably to many Delhis. A Delhi of deplorable conditions where one is greeted by the sensorial imagery of ‘kachade ke pahad’ (mountains of garbage) and ‘badboo hai zehreeli plastic aur katte maas ki’ (stench of toxic plastic and butchered meat). An aural rerouting away from the iconic sites usually recalled in art made about Delhi, instead of the iconic India Gate, Qutub Minar or colossal commercial mall structures, the song calls to mind a landscape of Delhi dotted with landfills such as those at Ghazipur and Bhalswa. The rap intonated with affective disgust and angst is rendered atop a busy guttural music track to allude to an everyday reality of filth and extreme violence of living conditions that make Delhi one of the most hazardous cities to live in today.

Then in another instance, Delhi as political city is addressed: ‘Par tu ban chukki hai dharam aur raajneeti ki jageer; vahaan pe chalti ni mohabbat jaha pe chalti hai laathi; marte hindu marte musalmaan marti teri santaan hi; par terko pade ni fark tu khaati namak hai sarkari’ (But you have become the abode of religion and politics; instead of the dictates of love you follow the dictates of the baton – symbolizing power and coercion; Hindus die, Muslim die, all who die are your children only; but you don’t give a care since you toe the line of the government in power!). Here, Rajdhani is the contemporary city, overcome with hate and communal violence, a Delhi specifically spoken to in the aftermath of the 2020 CAA-NRC protests and North-East Delhi pogrom.

Then, underscored by the salacious tone of Encore’s singing, the song surreptiously becomes a site where ‘Rajdhani’ is now a girl being harassed on the streets: ‘Oye kahan jaari? Oye rajdhani oye Rajdhani!’ (Where are you off to? Oye Rajdhani oye Rajdhani!) Elsewhere in the song, the hypocrisy inherent to contemporaneous misogyny having a split domestic-public persona is deliberated on: ‘Ghar pe ma behen, aur zaban pe behen ki aur ma ki.’ (At home you live with your mothers and sisters, yet on the streets you speak sexually explicit curses about mothers and sisters).

The contemporary city meets the historical city in the lyric ‘dilli abhi dur nahi hai be’, seemingly a liberal imitation of the famous ‘hunooz dilli durust’ uttered by Nizamuddin Auliya (c. 1325) when remarking on the oncoming march by Ghyasuddin Tughlaq to Delhi. Simultaneously conjuring the many histories and subjectivities of Delhi past, this work fosters an imagination of cities within the city. One very much in line with recent cinematic tradition of exploring the non-visibalized made-hidden parts of Delhi explored in films like Kanu Behl’s Titli (2015), Prateek Vats’ Eeb Aalay Oo (2020), and most recently Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes (2022). Work that is conscious of an otherness and addresses systemic structures of labour, religious-identity, caste, class, and gender as they operate in the city.

The language and lyric in which people rap itself opens up new worlds. Amravati-based 100RBH raps in Varhadi- a local Marathi dialect, whereas Tilak Nagar based Prabhdeep takes Punjabi rap into a colloquial Delhi zone and Seedhe Maut deploy a Hindi that is respectful of its Urdu and Punjabi relations. We increasingly see the presence of words considered too profane for literature, poetry, film, news dailies and magazines find a home in new age desi rap. This profanity casually used in music subversively reflects an inhabited grammar witness to the everydayness of inner city life. Espousing a comical, groovy, fun style that coalesces old-school hip hop with scathing lyrics dripping with irony, Albela and Gold E’s music sheds light on precisely this notion of a city within the city, specially the West-Delhi locality of Nangloi.

Amidst what tonally is a song to groove to at a club, Gold E’s single ‘Atak Ladai’ (2021) remarks upon a sense of societal betrayal felt at the hands of various systemic injustices.

Performed in an absurdly brilliant irreverent style, it speaks to a compounded frustration: toward the politics behind communal riots- ‘Khameinkha ke pange hain aur khameinkha ke dange, masuumon ko maaron aur bolo Har Har Gange’ (Pointlessly we are getting into squabbles and pointlessly there are riots, kill the innocents and then sing a holy hindu chant to river Ganga ‘Har har Gange’); toward corruption – ‘Chunaav aa gaye hain sasti daaru nahi aayi’ (Elections have come yet the political party peddlers who buy votes by giving away cheap alcohol haven’t come) and ‘sasta hoga nasha phir kyun mehengi hai davai?’ (The addictions are cheap but why are the cures expensive?); toward a chilling criminality of public misinformation – ‘Tambaku gutka khane waalon ko maut nahi aayi, Cancer hone wali baatein pehle ni batayi’ (Those who smoked and ate tobacco haven’t died as yet, why didn’t they tell us about the dangerous possibility of Cancer before?); and toward the devastating reality of poverty today – ‘Bhukha so gaya gareeb neend nahi aayi’ (The poor went to bed hungry, but couldn’t fall sleep).

Gold E’s frequent collaborator Albela espouses a similar sardonic approach to social realities, albeit with a pronounced self-effacing attitude. The song Gadbad (2019) has a catchy hook ‘Subkuch gadbad, gadbad sabkuch, sabkuch gadbad gadbad,’ which is the phrase ‘Everything’s a mess’ repeated in palindromic temper, quickly and repeatedly. This refrain is interspersed with reflections about lower middle class life and experiencing an endless cycle of problems. In the song Tepar (2019), Albela makes dry observations of his surroundings that amount civic amenities to opportune sites of defecation ‘Bijli ke liye thodi, apne mutne ke liye khambe aye’ (the electric poles were not set up for electricity but of course for us to piss on) and ‘Basti wali patri bas banni hai hagne ko’ (the train tracks next to the slum have one only use, to be the site for taking shits).

These songs are peppered with visceral references to the city, such as in the sound of trains part of the musical backdrop and the music videos which are shot in situ in neighbourhoods of Delhi. In between the comically-laced utterances of grievances, there are some startling moments which arrest the listener and snap them out of an almost mindless euphoric grooving. In Albela’s Kaan pe 2 (2020) come lines that transpose an urban reality to a larger national calamity of indifference and politics of distraction: ‘Sadak par bikhari mar gaye baas nahi ayi? Desh ki waat lag gayi koi bhagwan bhejo’ (There are beggars lying dead on the streets, did you not notice the stench? The country has gone for a toss, someone send the Gods for help!). Yet, the songs almost always hold a message for solidarity ‘Raam aur allah ek hi honge agar saath mein raho’ (Raam and Allah are the same if we stay united).

Outside of the echelons of newspapers, political speeches, academia, and drawing room conversations, such scathing critique of the city politics of inequality performed in the rhythmic meter of a hip-hop song is unsettling. It unsettles the positioning of such critique. It is not just limited to circuits of protest grounds or the twitter verse, but presents an opportunity to enter one’s body. In the night club, in your headphones, on a speaker somewhere sitting amongst friends. It unsettles our vocabulary of frustration, which doesn’t have to be limited to a certain kind of embodiment, it can warrant you to dance. Dance along with your friends, dance with strangers in protest.

In that hip-hop is not just a form of expression but rather a lifestyle, it insists upon a coming into dialogue with each
other in order to say something. Dance cyphers, rap battles, graffiti runs, jams,
DJ parties, are all relational, contextual, moments of dialogue. Living in exceptionally isolating times, hip-hop, being an inherently collective form, gestures for us to come together. While speaking to a sense of otherization, desi hip-hop music points us to how we differently perceive, imagine and possibly may survive the today we live in. It stirs us toward a collective re-capturing and re-inhabiting of the many cities of belonging we live in.