How Indian hip-hop found its flow

In late 2024, Mumbai/Pune rapper Shreyas Sagvekar received a call from a French friend, who was visiting Dubai. The friend had gone out clubbing the night before and heard a track playing over the PA with rap verses that sounded suspiciously like Marathi. Intrigued, the friend phoned Sagvekar. Since he was a veteran of the Maharashtra rap scene, maybe he knew what the song was?

The track in question turned out to be Taambdi Chaamdi (“brown skin” in Marathi), Sagvekar’s collaboration with producer and Marathi-house pioneer Kratex. Released in May 2024, the song’s unique blend of Marathi rap verses, Indian folk samples and rib-tickling bass made it an unlikely global club hit.

DJs in Europe, the US and West Asia added it to their sets, the song’s iconic “lakalakalakalaka” hook ringing out at clubs in Berlin and Amsterdam. Dutch dance music label Spinnin’ Records picked it up, releasing a music video starring, among others, Marathi influencer Manish Shetye grooving to the tune in an iridescent polychromatic suit (YouTube view count: 53 million). Indian-American producer KSHMR remixed the track, and even played it during his set in 2025 at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival, one of the world’s largest dance music events.

“We knew the song would do well because we’d been performing it at our shows and we could see that people were really into it,” says Sagvekar. “But we had no idea how far it would travel. It was played in Berlin, London, Australia. Pretty much everywhere.”

Taambdi Chaamdi’s global success was no fluke but a sign that Indian hip-hop is poised for a global breakout. That same year, Bengaluru-based rapper Hanumankind and Hyderabad producer Kalmi released the smash hit single Big Dawgs, which reached No.23 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and received shoutouts from some of global hip-hop’s biggest tastemakers (including a remix by A$AP Rocky). A year later, the rapper was making history at Coachella, collaborating with the likes of Denzel Curry and Maxo Kream, and having his Big Dawgs dance moves show up as an emote in the massively popular online video game Fortnite. Delhi’s Seedhe Maut are another act making waves internationally—after playing a short UK tour last year, including a performance at Glastonbury, they’re preparing to embark on a three-month world tour in April, with dates spread across Europe, the US and Australia.

You can also point to Delhi rapper Kr$na representing India on the cross-border cut Asian State Of Mind, alongside some of the biggest rappers from Japan, South Korea, China and Cambodia. Or the fact that, according to music analytics company Chartmasters, four Indian rappers—Sidhu Moosewala, Yo Yo Honey Singh, Badshah and Karan Aujla—rank among the top 20 most followed hip-hop artists on Spotify. Or just look at the number of international labels making their way to India—Def Jam, Mass Appeal, Empire, Atlantic Records—hoping to snap up the next Bad Bunny. “I believe hip-hop has the potential to become the second great music movement in India after film music,” says Devraj Sanyal, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group for India and South Asia (which owns the Indian imprint of iconic US rap label Def Jam). “Many of the biggest breakout global songs from India today are coming from hip-hop, which already signals where the future is heading. The wave is already here—and I believe it will only grow stronger in India and on the global stage.”

THE EARLY YEARS

This moment has been a long time coming. Hip-hop first made its way to the Indian shores in the 1990s, making its presence felt in the Indian soundscape through the novelty-rap of Baba Sehgal and Devang Patel, and Suresh Peters’ tongue-twisting verse on A.R. Rahman’s Pettai Rap. These early efforts ranged from parody to pastiche, with little connection to hip-hop culture beyond the rhythmic spoken-word delivery.

But far away from tinsel town’s fumbling attempts at cultural appropriation, a newly online cohort of teens and pre-teens was busy listening to the latest tunes by Eminem and 50 Cent, watching b-boys pop and lock on the streets of New York, and finding inspiration in hip-hop’s origin story as a way for the disaffected and disenfranchised to make their voices heard.

By the early 2000s, working-class kids in Mumbai’s Dharavi, Delhi’s Khirkhi Junction and Bengaluru’s public parks were gathering for dance battles and street cyphers. Rappers and beatboxers followed. They coalesced into different crews and collectives, built networks on now defunct social networking site Orkut, and began recording songs on their phones or laptops and uploading them to YouTube long before the mainstream knew what to do with them.

“A lot of the music before this, especially outside of Bollywood, was aimed at a certain class, and not really everyone in a city or a community,” says Uday Kapur, South Asia territory manager for American record label, distributor and publisher EMPIRE, and co-founder of the independent rap label Azadi Records (which he’s no longer involved with). “You had to have some level of privilege to be able to become a musician. But with hip-hop, the internet made it much more accessible to become an artist or a producer. You didn’t need to buy instruments or hire a jam room, or even need a microphone. Just a phone or an iPad would do.”

The early music was often derivative—American accents, borrowed gangsta tropes—but the anger was real. For many artists, hip-hop articulated frustrations that Indian pop ignored: class resentment, police profiling, the daily grind of neighbourhood life.

“We can’t connect to Arijit Singh’s love songs, because that’s not our life,” one Dharavi rapper told me in 2018. “Our lives are all about the daily hustle, hanging out on the street.”

At a time when Bollywood was still infatuated with aspirational excess and NRI fantasy, the Punjabi party-rap of Yo Yo Honey Singh and Badshah—with its machismo and materialism—found easy acceptance. The grittier, street-rooted underground scene did not. They had to force their way into the mainstream, which they did in style, and on their own terms.

Mumbai rappers Divine and Naezy dropped the borrowed accents and turned inward, rapping in street-inflected Hindi about their own neighbourhoods. Their 2015 track Mere Gully Mein became an unlikely summer anthem, making the hip-hop underground impossible to ignore. Once Zoya Akhtar announced that she was making a film about their story (2019’s Gully Boy), the floodgates opened.

It was a proper feeding frenzy—major music companies like Sony, Universal and Zee Music signed any rapper they could find to their roster, eager to jump on the bandwagon. Brands rushed to collaborate with Indian rappers, and even political parties were putting out campaign songs in rap verse. In 2019, MTV launched a rap reality show called MTV Hustle, bringing Indian hip-hop into Indian living rooms (even if it was a sanitised and commercialised version of the real thing) and spawning plenty of imitators.

Independent labels started popping up too—Azadi, Raftaar and Ankit Khanna’s Kalamkaar, Emiway Bantai’s Bantai Records—and were soon joined by international ones. American rapper and entrepreneur Nas’ Mass Appeal label came to India in 2019, Def Jam in 2022, Empire and Atlantic Records (in a partnership with Indian digital publication and agency Homegrown) in 2025. Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music also bet big on Indian rap, creating genre-specific playlists, putting Indian artists on global rap playlists, and providing an easy way for artists outside the major label ecosystem to distribute their music.

By the time Hanumankind caught the world’s attention with Big Dawgs—10 years after Mere Gully Mein—rap music was firmly entrenched in the Indian cultural mainstream, and increasingly becoming one of the country’s major cultural exports. According to Spotify, rap is one of the four most streamed genres in India, with Gen Z forming 70% of its audience. Three of the five Indian songs most streamed outside of India are rap tracks, and four of the ten most exported artists are rappers (the others are playback singers, and Diljit Dosanjh). Rap91, Spotify’s flagship Indian hip-hop playlist, now ranks among the 10 most followed hip-hop playlists in the world.

“I think everyone—all the labels and brands investing in Indian hip-hop—is salivating over the numbers,” says Mo Joshi, co-founder and CEO at Azadi Records. “If you look at both smartphone penetration and streaming numbers, we’re already quite big and there’s so much headroom. Only about 25% of India’s smartphone numbers are on a streaming platform. There’s so much potential for growth.”

THE GOLDEN ERA?

As Indian hip-hop enters its second decade in the mainstream, its roots are spreading far deeper and wider than before. The dominance of Punjabi and Hindi hip-hop—and of rappers from the big metropolitan cities—is increasingly being challenged by rappers putting out music in their local tongues, as smaller scenes bloom in cities and towns all over the country.

“We’re now seeing regional scenes create their own “mini superstars”, from Haryana’s Dhanda Nyoliwala—signed to us—to (Marathi rapper) Sambata in Maharashtra,” says Sanyal. “In the south, (we have) Malayalam tracks like Kalyani by Arjn, Ronn, Kds and Fifty4 entering both hip-hop and mainstream charts as high up as No.17 in the Spotify top 200.”

In Srinagar, Ahmer and SOS are using hip-hop to breathe new life into the Kashmiri language. Dhanji, Siyaahi and Bhadrankar are putting Gujarati hip-hop on the map, while Malayali artists like Vedang, MC Couper, Dabzee and are doing massive numbers, both online and at their gigs. Shreyas Sagvekar, Yung DSA and 99side fly the Marathi rap flag, Pasha Bhai is busy making Dakhini great again, while Reble—the 24-year-old rapper from Shillong who is all over the Dhurandar soundtrack—is slowly incorporating Khasi verses into her English rap oeuvre. Arivu in Chennai, Dasagriva in Hyderabad, Kolkata’s Cizzy, the list goes on and on.

In a sense, this regional turn is just part of the process of indigenisation of hip-hop. If the shift from English to Hindi and Punjabi led to more authentic music and story-telling, then this is the logical next step.

“I think rapping in our mother tongue has brought us closer to who we really are, the places that we really live in,” says Sagvekar. “There are so many different stories to tell in India. Every 400 kilometres, your instrument changes, your language changes. And I find that really exciting. It turns out that the best way to set ourselves apart is to just be ourselves.”

“Everyone is starting to realise that going back to your roots is the ultimate peace, ultimate business, ultimate comfort,” adds Sanket Shikriwal, who rapped in Hindi for years before switching to his native Bhojpuri. His 2025 album Natya Alaapika, written almost entirely in Bhojpuri, was one of last year’s landmark records. “I have so many stories which I couldn’t tell in Hindi. Because Hindi as a language could not trigger those segments of my heart which are captured in Bhojpuri in my life.”

Regional rap has always been a thing—some of the earliest rap crews, such as Dopeadelicz, were multilingual. But in earlier years, there was a sense that rapping in a language other than Hindi would limit your audience and reach, restrict you to your own state or region (except for Punjabi, which has always managed to buck this conventional wisdom). That sentiment no longer rings true.

“In India, language is no longer a barrier—audiences are consuming Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali and Hindi hip-hop purely on beat, storytelling, performance, and visual identity,” says Sanyal. “We’re seeing young and emerging but madly talented artists like AksoManiac gain rapid mainstream attention because powerful visuals and compelling storytelling can cut across language and pull in mass audiences.”

“Reels have really changed the game,” adds DJ and producer Karan Kanchan, who has made beats for tracks by Divine, Raga and Ikka. “If a new trend comes out on a song or audio, which might be in any language, people will just hop on that trend. And in the process, they are actually getting to know more about other regional music too. When I’m DJing, I can see people know all these songs, even if it’s from a completely different part of the country. And they may not be able to sing the verses, but they’re definitely singing the hooks.”

The numbers back up his observations. Spotify reports that playlists like Haryanvi Hip-Hop and Malayalam Hip-Hop grew by 500% and 600%, respectively, in 2023. Last year, the platform’s annual Rap91 live event featured 31 artists rapping in over 10 languages—more than ever before.

The increasing diversity of Indian hip-hop isn’t just reflected in the languages used, but also in the breadth and depth of styles and sounds on offer. Where earlier you’d have a single sound dominating in a given city or region—gully rap in Mumbai, Delhi’s more lyrical rap style—artists no longer feel the need to be boxed in sonically. Whether you’re into drill, grime, trap, boom-bap, mumble, lo-fi hip-hop or experimental rap, chances are you’ll find an artist able to scratch that particular itch. Sometimes even the same artist will experiment with different sounds on different projects—Dhanji, for example, has put out music ranging from Blaxploitation-era funk to new wave trap.

“That offers a lot of options to the listener,” says Sameer Inamdar, a battle-rap veteran better known as Rapture, who also works in A&R (artists and repertoire) and artist development at Mumbai-based record label and entertainment company Gully Gang Entertainment. “Delhi hip-hop doesn’t have a specific sound, Bombay hip-hop doesn’t have a specific sound. And it’s great because then everybody gets to enjoy everything, because rappers everywhere are trying to do everything.”

Increasingly, even the more experimental artists have found both critical acclaim and devoted fans. Shikriwal, for example, layers his Bhojpuri rhymes over a blend of jazz, boom-bap and Indian folk instrumentation. Chaar Diwaari (real name: Garv Taneja) makes music that defies genre convention, moving between alt-rock guitar riffs, psychedelic textures, R&B vocal melodies and lo-fi hip-hop, all tied together by an idiosyncratic visual aesthetic. You’ve got producers like Sakre, Circle Tone and Parimal Shais pushing the boundaries of hip-hop beat-making, while projects like Shauharty’s Farookh and Farhan Khan’s Alif Laila are notable for their grand conceptual ambitions. Indian rap is no longer a single scene or ecosystem, but a constellation of overlapping scenes, all innovating in their own ways while staying rooted in the language, culture and sociopolitical realities of their home towns or regions.

“Earlier, it felt like people were trying to recreate the Western sound as faithfully as possible, and the idea of using our own local sounds and samples used to be taboo,” says Kochi-born, Bengaluru-based Shais, whose work stands out for its usage of south Indian instrumentation and samples. “I guess it’s just that artists are not scared to experiment anymore. And the audience also wants fresh sounds, they’re done with listening to the same trap beat over and over again.”

“It’s all because of the audience, because people are responding to these sounds,” agrees Shikriwal. “The audience is forcing the labels, the media and all these influencer pages to pay attention to newer, more experimental sounds.”

THE ROAD AHEAD

The mood within Indian hip-hop circles is optimistic, but it would be a mistake to think of the scene’s continued growth as an inevitability. There are still plenty of problems, challenges, and potential stumbling blocks. The live touring circuit has grown—particularly with festivals like Rolling Loud coming to India, and stand-alone gigs by international acts such as Post Malone and Travis Scott—but infrastructure remains a problem, both in terms of venues and the skill and experience required to put on a proper live show.

More worryingly, even as there are more and more mid-tier artists doing big streaming numbers, the jump to top-tier headliner level seems increasingly difficult. It’s still the same set of artists filling out arenas and dominating the festival headline slots, with the rest relegated to the undercard. Navjosh Singh, who heads A&R for Mass Appeal India, believes that part of the problem is the increasing fragmentation of the global music industry, thanks to the internet and algorithmic discovery. “An artist could be really big in your world, but I may not have heard about him or her ever,” he says. “But another problem is that artists don’t have the patience or the support to develop into proper stars. You can have a hit here or there, but can you actually sustain that success?

The spike in streaming and online engagement during the covid-19 pandemic meant many artists went viral, but virality is not the same as actual stardom. That requires real artist development. “If you’re not investing in artist development in terms of both time and money, then you are not going to build artists that can sustain a minimum of five to seven years of deep relevance,” says Singh. Anyone can have a hit song, given the right set of conditions, but few have what it takes to be a Divine or a Raftaar.

The amount of money that’s flowing into the hip-hop scene has also sharpened the tension between rap music as a commercial product and its self-image as a revolutionary cultural movement. This conflict is heightened by the fact that so few of the major music executives come from the hip-hop scene, or even from the same sociocultural milieu as most of the artists.

“We need more people who understand the culture to step in and get involved on the business side,” says Inamdar. “Or when outsiders are trying to come in, they need to understand the culture first. Hip-hop is more than just PPTs and numbers.”

Pasha Bhai is even sharper in his critique, arguing that commercialisation and the lack of influential taste-makers with a real understanding of hip-hop’s origins have neutered the scene’s potential as a tool for social and political change.

“Who runs these labels?” he asks. “Where do they come from? What are their surnames? Why would someone with a surname like that sign someone like me, or Vijay DK—who actively raps about Ambedkarite issues?”

As hip-hop becomes increasingly profitable, and increasingly beholden to capital, its biggest names are also becoming more risk-averse. And as it becomes more widely known, its anti-establishment ethos—as well as its focus on the grimier, seedier aspects of life in India—makes it a target for conservative, reactionary forces.

In recent years, we’ve seen concerts by MC Stan, Seedhe Maut, Shubh and others interrupted or cancelled by right-wing groups. Dhandha Nyoliwala has had his songs banned by the Haryana government in 2025 for promoting “gun culture and violence”, while in Maharashtra, rapper Raj Mungase faced defamation charges in 2023 for a song that allegedly criticised deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde.

“Freedom of speech doesn’t really exist here,” says New Delhi rapper Gaurav Sain (aka OG Lucifer). “If you say something that’s for the good of the country, even then you get called anti-national. And if you oppose something wrong that’s happening in the country, then you can’t speak at all. Even if you say that the roads in my colony are broken and full of potholes, and I ask “yeh leader kaisa hai?” Then I’ll be called anti-national.”

“If something like the (Dhandha Nyoliwala censorship) happened in the West, the whole hip-hop community comes together and says you can’t do this,” says Pasha Bhai. “But here it happened and nobody batted an eye. You cannot have the control to decide what art can and cannot say, I think that’s a big threat to the future of Indian hip-hop.”

And then, of course, there’s that perennial issue—the lack of representation of women or LGBTQ+ artists. There are a few artists that have broken through this glass ceiling—Reble, Kinari, Agsy, the Wild Wild Women collective. But they are the exception that proves the rule, and they have to work doubly hard to prove that they have a right to be there, that they’re more than just tokens. “We don’t get booked for gigs at all, especially in Mumbai,” says Wild Wild Women member Ashwini Hirenath (aka Krantinaari). “We often get told that girls don’t listen to hip-hop and the men won’t relate to you, so why should we give you a slot? But how do you know that if you won’t let us perform and let the audience figure out if they like us or not?”

And that’s not even counting the misogyny, which is often in-your-face. “The Indian rap audience is very sexist,” says Inamdar. “And male Indian rappers are to blame. The way they set the tone, the way they set narratives, breeds these kinds of fans who become hostile and toxic towards women rappers or female artists in general. And women have been screaming about this sexism forever. It’s time for the men to take a stand.”

Despite all these potential minefields, the outlook for Indian hip-hop remains quite bullish. Domestically it is poised to become the biggest genre outside of the film music space, only challenged by the burgeoning Hindi pop scene. There’s optimism about its potential for a sustained global crossover, though opinions are divided on whether that will come via more English rap a la Hanumankind, or something that looks more like K-pop, a global sound that remains firmly rooted in Indian languages and traditions. “I believe Indian hip-hop will take its place as part of the global hip-hop scene, because we have a lot to say and a lot of stories to tell,” says Sagvekar.

Sain, belonging to the first generation of Indian rappers who have come of age in a post-Gully Boy world, is much more ambitious, even brash. “I might be a little arrogant,” he says, “but I think the Indian market is so big that it can beat the entire world market by itself. We’ll make our artists so big that they’re the ones headlining festivals all over the world.”

Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.