Last summer, New Delhi rapper and producer Kinari found herself the target of a drive-by cancellation. Her single Animal—a licentious, riotous challenge to the performative masculinity of Delhi hip-hop—had just gone viral, capping a breakout year where she won the Toto Funds The Arts music, dropped a critically acclaimed debut album, and became a sudden media darling.
Then, suddenly, shots rang out on the Gram. Trans rights activist Rie Raut put up a reel accusing Kinari of, among other things, appropriating hijra and Dalit cultural identity, despite allegedly coming from a privileged Tamil Brahmin background. The trans woman rapper had never explicitly claimed to be Dalit, but her presence at Ambedkar events and her invocation of Jai Bhim were apparent proof of her perfidy.
Kinari never addressed the accusations publicly, but she denied them categorically in private. There was no follow-up, no real investigation or presenting of receipts. The whole thing kind of fizzled out, leaving behind a vague aftertaste of suspicion and disrepute. Just another case of hip-hop’s love for performative role-play (Eazy E did not, in fact, use a loaded shotgun to land a “sucka” on the L.A. Times frontpage) butting heads with its dogma of authenticity.
Kinari, though, retreated into the shadows. She stopped doing interviews. She took down most of her back catalogue, including breakout album Kattar Kinnar, from streaming platforms. After spending some time licking her wounds and honing her rage, she’s back with her sophomore full-length Pehchaan, appearing battle-scarred, weary, but still defiant.
The 15-track LP offers no apology or explanation. The controversy and its aftermath is only addressed in the abstract—in the bitter bite of her invective against haters, the paranoid miasma that suffuses its soundscapes and the bone-deep lassitude that underpins her rhymes about being a sex toy and an object of hate. It hovers somewhere deep in the background, just one of the many demons and dangers that lurk in the shadows of Dilli-17—her city, her muse, her heaven and hell.
Kinari’s Delhi does not consist of the palatial bungalows and sprawling gardens of Lutyens, nor the gleaming skyscrapers and corporate dystopia of Aerocity. No, this is her shaitaan sheher, the dark, feral undercity with its shadow economy of vice, money and violence. It’s where unclaimed corpses lie rotting in the gutter, and a friend is just someone who hasn’t stabbed you in the back yet.
“Soch faila hawa me gande/ Dilli me kon b ny saaf (Dirty thoughts spread in the air/ Nobody’s clean in Delhi),” she raps over a galloping parai drum rhythm on Nari, and you can feel the grime in her voice. The minor key melodies and blown-out bass of Patthar soundtrack verses full of tragic braggadocio. It’s a winking nod—both endorsement and self-aware exposé—to the emotional emptiness of hip-hop’s aspirational materialism. The bars about Gucci blazers and foreign tours sound triumphant on paper, but it’s just a form of psychic self-defence—a designer-label shroud to cover the hole that a hard life has left in her soul.
Dilli opens with an interpolation of Manna Dey’s Laga Chunari Mein Daag before giving way to baleful synths and sepulchral percussion that lurches along like a late-night mugger. Kinari raps about a city where truth bends its knee to money, where public righteousness is always a cover for hidden moral rot. There are potshots at politicians, police and upper-caste rappers who become ideologues for religious fundamentalism.
By the time you get to the second half of the album, the relentless focus on emotional numbness and paranoid loneliness does get a little exhausting. The side-piece self-loathing of Sex Toy falls flat, and the self-aggrandising Fake is saved only by a Molotov cocktail of a guest verse by DL-91 trapper OG Lucifer.
But even when Kinari’s skills on the mic occasionally falter, her work behind the studio desk is impeccable. She is one of the Delhi scene’s most talented producers, able to conjure up whole landscapes with the most minimal of material—a synth topline here, a sparse drum beat there, a snippet of a sample. And Pehchaan showcases her at her most inventive.
Pyaar takes the synth-progression from Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and blows it up to anthemic proportions, building into a proper IDM/breakbeat freakout. Mard draws on the sinister ambience of Skream-era dubstep and turns the urgency up to 11. And then there’s the 18-minute long outro, called Kinari Type Beat, which traces a cinematic, maximalist journey through sitar drone, art-pop atmospherics, baile funk grooves and Nashik dhol crescendos—the perfect soundtrack for a desi David Lynch film.
For all its bravado, Pehchaan doesn’t really triumphantly declare who Kinari is. Instead, it documents an artist whose sense of identity is under siege, and one who refuses to fit into the simplistic binaries that her haters want to impose on her. It’s an unflinching account of the trauma, heartbreak and disillusionment that have shaped her, and the emotional and moral costs of trying to stay true to her fractured, complicated self. “Jitna b kara mai nafrat khud se (Just how much I hated myself ),” she says. “Utna hi seekha mai pyaar (That’s how much I learned love).”
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.