Celebrating 50 years of hip-hop: Check out original voices from across young India

Independent artists are rapping in Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Hindi and more. Their focus: caste, politics, climate, sexuality, identity.

Across India, musicians are using hip-hop to say, “This is us”; “Stop and reconsider”; “Join our cause”. In the US, the original home of this subculture, rap started out subversive, then went mainstream and softened its edges, periodically finding its way back to savagery. Here, the trajectory has been the opposite.

Early adopters such as Baba Sehgal in the 1990s sang rhythmic but predictable verse about love and heartbreak. Yo Yo Honey Singh in the early 2010s, and more recently

Rappers Mahi from Maharashtra and Sumeet Samos from Odisha.

In Odisha, Sumeet Samos, a Dalit, grew up knowing discrimination but not having a word for it. He would acquire a vocabulary for what he experienced, as a student activist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. And he would put some of those words to music amid the anger and grief that followed the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in 2016.

His biggest hit so far has been the 2018 song Ladai Seekh Le (Learn To Fight). Released on the storytelling platform Qweed Media’s YouTube channel, it has had over 41,000 views so far.

Samos, 29, has a sense of rhythm that can be traced back through a long line of Dom Baja performers, a community of traditional drummers who perform at important events in Odisha, the music often accompanied by satirical monologues on contemporary issues. “The satire and the poetry of that stayed with me. Once I went to the university, I was able to use it, but very differently,” he says. His songs include Caste 101 (released on YouTube in August 2020, with about 12,000 views):

We build your houses

We till your lands

We produce your foods

We the artisans,

It’s our sweat and blood, so here you stand

Don’t teach us merit, you good for nothing clans

Uh, caste 101

Samos has performed at university festivals, community conventions and at shows in France, in collaboration with the artist collective French Radio Live. He has a Master’s degree in Modern South Asian Studies from Oxford University. “My music helped me to raise funds for my education at Oxford,” he says. A crowdfunding campaign on Milap raised over ₹37 lakh, through 1,500 supporters.

He now plans to pursue a PhD in social anthropology and is compiling and editing an anthology of essays on caste, politics and culture. “After that, I definitely hope to make more music. I want to go back to my hometown, work with the Dom Baja artists, and write songs that pertain to my region,” he says.

This is us

In Mumbai, Saniya Mistry aka Saniya MQ, 17, came to rap via poetry. Verse is the world she escaped into, and dreamed in, growing up in the Shivaji Nagar slum. The daughter of an autorickshaw driver and an embroidery worker, she made her TV debut on the reality talent show Hunarbaaz on Colors TV, last year. A year before that, she released one of her biggest productions, Bahot Dheet (Very Audacious):

Thikana dhundta tha rehne jiska parivaar

Nayi jagah per rehne lage the woh log chaar

Lakdi ki neev daali keechad ki zameen par

Usi zameen aer hai aaj bhi ghar barkarar

(The family would look for a place in which to stay,

They started in a new place, the four of them together

Drove a wooden frame into a ground of dirt

And it became a foundation, a place they still call home)

The video is shot against the backdrop of tarpaulin-covered hutments in Shivaji Nagar. “As a female rapper, it feels good to be able to inspire girls around me,” Saniya MQ says. “Hip-hop started with the idea of expression, of spreading awareness, and accepting that yes, we have problems, but we’re gonna make it through.”