Some time back, I mixed into celebrations of a rapper, Saurabh (100RBH) from Amravati (Maharashtra), who had rapped alongside Sid Sriram in Nagraj Manjule’s Hindi debut Jhund. On the surface level, what felt like just another break-out celebration story– had profound layers of meanings assigned to it.
The celebration had begun at the Ambedkar statue located in the heart of Amravati city. As it reached Rahul Nagar– it had soon turned into an energetic procession joined by almost 200 people, made up of the myriad people that make up a community.
He thanked ‘Basti ke aajjis, aajjas, kaku kaka, bhai, behen, aur dost log’ (grannies, grandpas, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and friends of the basti) on his Instagram the next day. Through the length of the procession, bheem-geete (songs sung by Dalits in reverence to Ambedkar and other anti-caste icons) had occupied the momentum; thus, what otherwise would be a one-off event had dug deeper into the history, present, and perhaps the future of Ambedkarite politics.
The celebratory stories often do not transcend the materialistic realms; they are limiting in that sense. But here, it had turned into a moment of public joy for people across castes, religions, and age groups. In Sociology and Urban Studies theories, bastis are located on the outskirts of a city, town, or village – always occupied by marginalised communities and working-class families of several religions.
Socially and geographically, they remain ‘others’, i.e., not being part of what is considered mainstream. And yet, when someone breaks out in the mainstream or popular culture – it becomes a milestone, a moment of pride for the community as well as that whole basti.
Through such breakthroughs in mainstream culture, one individual’s efforts can make the community feel represented, heard, or just acknowledged as they are.
The History Of Hip-hop: From The Black Ghettos To The Discos Of India
The above-told story of Saurabh, his basti, and people is a story of culture, movement, politics, and music. This is also a story of hip-hop in India, its influence, rise, politics, identity creation, and assertion looked at from the anti-caste lens.
And as much as it is a story of all those things, it is also a story of me, in ways that helped me find myself through hip-hop and brought me closer to affirming my identity, by being just a listener.
The hip-hop journey in India is interesting, at times inspiring, but mostly disappointing if you compare it with its genealogy in Africa and then black America.
In Africa, local political conditions, human rights activism, and anti-imperial advocacy by youth sowed the seeds for hip-hop. As it came to America in the 70s, the young black generation was struggling to find a mode of expression; in their effort to bring people together, they tried to experiment with pre-existing genres like Blues, Soul, R&B, and through ‘beats’ and pieces- hip-hop came to be a driving force as it is today.
In India, it came followed by monumental changes. India was undergoing a liberalisation phase in the early 1990s, which led to churning of the cultural boom. Indian hip-hop, as it came to be, was taken up at first by the desi-NRIs abroad who would sample bhangra and likes with the quintessential reggae. Eventually, it spread out in the clubs but took the shape of Indipop instead, making the likes of Jay Sean, Rishi Rich, Panjabi MC, and Bombay Rockers household names within the Indian local and diaspora communities.
The Indian generation first witnessed hip-hop through TV screens and live shows in clubs of select Indian metropolitan cities. Safe to say, it was emulating the popular international disco-rap model rather than focusing on its origins, which came from the expression and assertion of the black artists.
In these phases of adapting hip-hop in India, it had lost its soul somewhere— i.e., the essence of struggle, rights, assertion, dissent was taken over by pop music, glamour, market forces, etc. The dissociation of Indian hip-hop from politics and identity was apparent. From its inception in India in the 90s, it would take hip-hop more than a whole decade to explore social and political matters that lay at its heart.
Now, after more than two decades of hip-hop in India, the current political urgency and the work of underground rappers have birthed a new life into it— hip-hop is finally coming to be associated with a socially conscious and political art form.
However, the story of Dalit-Bahujan rappers is an interesting arc within the Indian hip-hop subculture.
The Politics Of Representation In Pop Culture And Beyond
The image portrayed through music, media, arts, culture, literature, and cinema often becomes the norm or representative of that particular group that becomes the only lens to see them.
In the popular imagination, Dalit, Bahujans, Adivasis, Muslims, and other minorities have been the victims of this stereotyping gaze. When one thinks of a Dalit, it is the image of either a poor, dirty victim who is crying for help or depriving the oppressor castes of their meritorious opportunities by way of reservation.
These stereotypes often ensure the lack of rightful representation- as essential humans, pushing them further into marginalisation. But what if this representation was challenged, and presented with creative imagination?
I remember talking with a famous rapper (who wishes to be unnamed), asking how caste discourse found a ‘mic’ in popular culture. He attributes it to so many things like education and awareness among youth,
“One of the more important milieus has been the wave of University protests started by Dalit Bahujan students from 2016 onwards, following the institutional murders of Dr Rohith Vemula, Dr Payal Tadavi, Dr Anitha, and many such cases of violence, harassment, and discrimination against Dalit Bahujans across the country,” he says. This has led to a new wave of assertion by Dalit Bahujans in the country.
This period onwards marked the resurgence in anti-caste art, movies, music, and activism. It is perhaps the coming together of forces like; cultural politics, discourse around identity production, democratising social media access, and technological literacy that helped enable a new level of access for the anti-caste artists.
With the changing cultural and political shift, Indian anti-caste rappers have taken into the musical scene of hip-hop while trying to make it their own, becoming the rightful heirs of hip-hop.
The Hip-Hop ‘Blues’
Sumeet Samos sings in one of his raps;
You might hate me, denigrate me, label and rate me,
But I am the child of counter-culture, you can never break me
Jai Bhim on our heads, Blue flags on our hands
Nobody can stop us now, we are in the game
Historically, the songs of Dalit Bahujan’s lives have always been far from the mainstream and popular culture; though there is a long long way before it gets the right attention, it has never been at the critical juncture where it is now.
It is the work of rappers like— Saurabh, rapping in Hindi and Varhadi, who unearths the life in casteist society; Vipin Tatad, rapping in Marathi and Hindi; Sumeet, rapping of educational institutes and caste-based discrimination; Arivu, rapping the human rights, identity, and indigenous culture; The Casteless Collective that rap of the taboo that caste system is and how it still pervades the Indian whole; Swadesi that deal with the range of issues; Rekoil Chafe rapping in English; Vedan with word in Malayalam; Dule Rocker rapping about life and labour conditions in rural Odisha. All these artists carry the best and worst of their worlds and represent their life on a canvas of hip-hop and rap music.
In this context, the young generation took to hip-hop, mainly, the anti-caste rappers from the community. This new wave of the young generation did not wait for things to change; they asserted and challenged the Savarna-Brahminical hegemony of Indian society. Their contribution is important because not only did they challenge the existing hip-hop, but they also made it their own – a hip-hop counterculture.
This is the first part of the three-part series on ‘how anti-caste rap and hip hop contribute to reclaiming mainstream cultural spaces for oppressed caste communities‘ as a part of the Justicemakers’ Writer’s Training Program, run in partnership with Agami and Ashoka’s Law For All Initiative. The second and third parts can be found here and here.