Honey Singh is not hip hop

Roushan Illahi, 25, calls Kashmir, the place where he was born and raised, a dystopia. And yet, he says, it felt normal to him while he was growing up. In more ways than one, this overarching feeling of normalcy amid all the strife in the valley shapes Illahi’s thoughts and reflects in his work.

A tall, lean, postgraduate student with close-cropped hair, Illahi’s music is deeply political, and enmeshed in anti-establishment songwriting. His mode of protest: hip hop.

It’s time for the lockdown, brother do you hear?/brother do you care? when they bite and they tear/my flesh into pieces, my soul never ceases/to fiend for the sun and run where my streets is, he sings in Why We Rebels.

“I was born in 1990 and I grew up in Dalgate. It’s a part of Srinagar,” says Illahi, who goes by the stage name of MC Kash. “I was born at a time when the armed rebellion in Kashmir had just started. My growing up years were full of varying images—crackdowns, curfews, encounters, grenade attacks and funerals. I think funerals leave a mark. Curfews would stop us from going to school, so me and my brother used to play in a graveyard as there was no playground in the neighbourhood.”

Hip hop became his way of expressing himself. It just happened, he says, adding that there were no role models. “Hip hop in itself is a genre where you cannot fake it. Staying real and talking about your streets is like a pillar of hip hop,” says Illahi.

Hip hop as we know it today has its roots in New York’s South Bronx locality in the early 1970s. It was a time when the demography of South Bronx was in transition—from a dominant white population to a dominant black population.

Back then, hip hop was about having fun.

It was only in the late 1980s that it became the voice of the oppressed. New subgenres such as gangsta, political and conscious hip hop, which focused on the youth violence, unemployment and poverty, gained prominence. The idea was to turn rap into a call for action against inequality, racism, and atrocities, both political and social.

“Hip hop is primarily a tool, a voice of the oppressed, but it is not limited to that,” says Mandeep Sethi, 27, a California-born Sikh lyricist and film-maker, a hip hop emcee and a member of the Universal Zulu Nation—an international hip hop awareness group formed and headed by hip hop artiste Afrika Bambaataa. “It also provides you with a socio-political analysis of events around the world and a different perspective,” says Sethi, who goes by the stage name of Seti X.

The flexibility with the language and lyrics has also helped hip hop extend its reach beyond the US.

Sethi has seen the hip hop culture grow in India, spreading from Mumbai and Delhi to other parts of the country. “There has been tremendous growth in the last six-seven years,” he says. “But it is the emcee element that has witnessed almost revolutionary changes.

“The funny thing is that when I came to India, I saw emcees here rapping in English in a fake American accent,” remembers Sethi.

Now, many emcees write and sing in their own languages. Take, for instance, Swadesi Nation, a group of 11 emcees, DJs and graffiti artistes who rap in languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam and Bengali.

Aklesh Sutar, 21, one of the founding members of Swadesi Nation, raps in Marathi. His breakout song, Laaj Wat Te Kai, is a solo in protest against the 2012 Delhi bus gang rape. “The song tells the story of what happened on the night of 16 December and why India needs to change so it doesn’t happen again. It was also the first song I wrote in Marathi,” says Sutar, who goes by the stage name of MC Mawwali.

Unlike Illahi, Sutar grew up in a musically inclined, middle-class family in the Mumbai suburb of Andheri East. As a child, he used to take an active part in bhajan evenings with his parents and two elder sisters—a ritual that continues to this day. He started writing poetry in high school.

Just before his class X exams, he met some professional rappers and started following the underground hip hop scene. Fellow rappers encouraged him to keep writing in his own language.

After his class XII exams, Sutar did not formally study further.

The story of 18-year-old Dharmesh Parmar, an emcee from Swadesi Nation who raps in Gujarati, isn’t very different. Parmar grew up in the BDD Chawl Naigaon in Dadar, Mumbai, playing football and flute.

“Sometime in class X, I saw a documentary on the life of 50 Cent (the American rapper Curtis Jackson III). I also saw the movie Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ (a biopic starring 50 Cent). He sold drugs, was shot at multiple times and yet, he rose and made a life in hip hop. It inspired me a lot,” says Parmar, who goes by the stage name of MC Todfod. “I started exploring and learning as much as I could about hip hop. Google was my friend and YouTube my library.”

He used to write in English till, one day, he met Sutar through a common friend. The meeting was inspirational, recalls Parmar.

Some days later, when he met the crew members from Swadesi, they suggested he rap in Gujarati, his mother tongue. “I actually laughed at that suggestion,” says Parmar.

The crew members made him watch Karmacy, a US-based band that raps in Gujarati. “In hip hop terms, I completely flipped after hearing Karmacy. I tore away the pages with my songs in English and wrote the first two lines of the song Su Che Karvanu,” says Parmar. Here are those lines: Su che karvanu khabar nathi mane duniya ma/Hoon mano rajo mari praja mari galiyon ma (I do not know what to do in this world/I am the king of my heart and my people are on the streets).

That cemented his place in the crew.

Commercial hip hop, the kind they portray in movies and popular culture, is as far from reality as it could be, says Parmar.

“People of this country don’t know rap. Rap, for them, is Honey Singh. Here we are, hanging from the Mumbai locals. Where do we have the time for char bottle vodka?”

Hip hop has always been loosely identified with just rapping or emceeing, the art of wordplay, or delivering rhyming words over a beat. But in the classic definition, rapping is one of five major elements of hip hop: deejaying, the dance to accompany the music (b-boying), graffiti art being other key elements, and general knowledge rounding it up. Over the years, beatboxing—the art of mimicking percussion sounds using one’s mouth, nose, lips, tongue and throat—and production have also become integral parts of the hip hop culture.

The thread that runs through all this is freedom of expression and rebellion.

The story of Preeti Tiwari, aka Shawty Pink, has many shades of rebellion, the boldest of them all being the fact that she is the only b-girl, standing a mere 4ft, 8 inches tall, in a crowd of more than a dozen boys comprising the BeastMode crew.

Tiwari, 24, was born to the eldest of five brothers living in a joint family in a 15-room house in Ulhasnagar, Thane.

After finishing class VI, she had to drop out of school in 2005 for the next three years due to financial troubles at home. “It was a major jolt for me,” Tiwari recalls.

Dancing came to the rescue, with Anup Sathe as the companion who stood by her through those difficult times.

Tiwari had met Sathe in 2002. He was a classmate of her sister who inspired her to take up hip hop. He also encouraged Tiwari to finish her studies, and helped her find a job at a telephone booth which paid ₹ 1,000 a month. She was 13 then. In 2008, she appeared for her class X exams.

That same year, Tiwari took up dancing seriously. Sathe was already a member of the Under Dog Kombat (UDK) crew, a dance group from Mumbai, and used to do paid gigs. Tiwari started tagging along and, in 2009, she got a break with the UDK. She left it in 2012 and joined BeastMode. “I was the only girl in the dancing crew there,” she says. The same year, she got a call from Imagica—a theme park that had opened near her home.

The money she earned as a performer at Imagica was good and she was able to help her parents renovate their home. Since October, however, after her contract with Imagica ended, she is back to living on her savings.

“Breaking helped me when no one else did. It stayed with me. And I want to stay with it. That stubbornness keeps me going. A day will come when I will represent India in international events,” says Tiwari.

Illahi’s concerns are more gritty.

His breakout song, I Protest (I protest/Against the things you’ve done/I protest/For a mother who lost her son/I protest/I’ll throw stones and never run), was written against the backdrop of widespread violence in the Kashmir valley in 2010, following demonstrations against alleged fake encounters and a massive crackdown. He rose to fame overnight and his studio was raided.

Illahi says he wants peace in Kashmir. “My music is for justice. I don’t really just want to rap about people dying. I want to rap about beautiful things. I want to make music which isn’t about funerals or people dying.”

Tiwari, Parmar, Sutar and Illahi are all part of an ongoing video series, Hip Hop Homeland by 101India.com, on the growth of hip hop in the country.

Sethi thinks that over time local issues have started dominating the hip hop scene in India. “Kash is among the first emcees in India to take a political line,” says Sethi. “In a way, it is perfect. Kash represents a generation of people who were born and raised in times of conflict and his lyrics represent the oppression.”