India’s hip-hop scene

When we think of great or popular art and cultural exports that become ubiquitous, images of stardom, wealth and even profligacy often come to mind, but that is seldom where the artistic desire or impulse starts.

The road to artistic fame and fortune is almost never a smooth one, be it in film, music, literature, dance, theatre or the visual arts. Those who travel it tend to emerge from difficult places in the emotional, personal and/or socio-economic spheres, and their creations arise out of a desire to express themselves creatively and their unique experiences.

It may not be a deliberate act of defiance or one of resistance to the status quo, but by squeezing out a space for their innovation, individuals can produce original, transformative art that taps into unrecognised human need, like a key finding a lock.

It would be worth a wager that the poorest citizens of the US remain African Americans, stigmatised on American soil for being what Donald Trump might call “losers” for having allowed themselves to be enslaved, and detested for embodying both the world’s bad conscience over slavery and the Africans’ defiant resilience in proving their humanity.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, music erupted from within the bosom of those downtrodden black people and communities, be it jazz, soul, rock and everything in between and since. Surprisingly, their music has become the US’s most influential cultural product and its most successful cultural export.

Even folk and country music, which originated in the Appalachian mountains and is associated with a white immigrant underclass, is based on a West African instrument that became the banjo. It is little wonder that last year Beyoncé decided to claim a top spot in the genre, producing her album Cowboy Carter and becoming the first black female artist to have a US country No 1 hit and top the Billboard Hot 100 with a country song. She may not be as revered internationally as Michael Jackson once was, but she and many other black US musicians are the vehicle for US contemporary musical exports.

Take hip-hop music, the genre created by down-and-out black kids in the urban US. It is one of the biggest influencers of youth culture internationally – but would you have imagined that it would get rooted in the slums of Mumbai, when India has such strong cultural and musical traditions of its own?

The current India edition of GQ, the trendy international male style magazine published by Condé Nast, features the stars of the Indian hip-hop revolution, which, as in the US, has gone from “the gully” to global success and is reshaping India’s soundscape.

According to GQ, hip-hop has been bubbling away in India and some of its proponents are now on world tours, in music festivals and featuring among Spotify’s Top 10 most-followed hip-hop artists in the world.

How and why such a phenomenon exists is worth recounting.

Many of us remember the box office and Oscars success of Danny Boyle’s rags-to-riches film Slum Dog Millionaire, which was set among the poor, homeless, orphans, slum dwellers, criminals and middle-class mob of Mumbai.

In real-life 1990s Mumbai, hip-hop was quietly creeping in via MTV and bootlegged cassette tapes. Soon, young Indians, copying their African-American counterparts, had breakdancing competitions on Mumbai street corners, and working-class rappers spat out their subversive rhymes in Hindi, Tamil and Marathi.

Then in the early 2010s, through links to the lively UK-Asian underground scene, the genre gained momentum until, in 2015, a “gritty Mumbaiyya-laced rap” by Naezy and Divine brought Indian hip-hop into the mainstream. Their song Mere Gully Mein was a surprise hit. Interestingly, they did not copy Eminem and Jay-Z (Beyonce’s billionaire husband); they “were instead adapting rap music’s central ethos – of street poetry and storytelling – to Indian realities.”

Marginalised youths recorded on laptops and in bedrooms, sharing searingly different songs via cheap smartphones and YouTube until they broke out and even the “Bollywood-obsessed music industry” had to pay them attention.

GQ reports that the streaming platforms are in competition to build their Indian rap playlists and independent and big specialist international record labels have set up shop in India because the market is expected to grow exponentially; after all, India has a large, growing young population, plus a vast existing local market with its many languages and the long international reach of the Indian diaspora.

It’s hard to fathom that once-underground African-American ghetto music culture could reshape India’s ancient socio-political culture, but evidence exists that a linguistic revolution and one of ideas is also taking place. Hip-hop is giving voice to India’s unseen and unheard. Audiences are tuning into many different local languages, to songs about politics and dissent, “hyper-masculinity, transphobia and casteism.”

Rappers are mixing in indigenous styles, too, creating unique Indian hip-hop variations. The prediction is that Indian hip-hop in English will soon be world smash hits.