It’s a cool afternoon in Kurla West and Naved Shaikh is giving a tour of his khatri (hardcore) neighbourhood. Standing outside the Madina Hotel, opposite the narrow entrance to the gali where he grew up, Naved points out a man on a motorcycle. “Thats Maila Munna ” he says of a hard looking man with a deep scar running down one cheek. “We call him that because it is rumoured he does not bathe. He was a local gangster. This area was his turf when I was growing up. He used to train his rams here to head butt wooden boards ahead of fighting them in competitions,” says Naved. Besides playing host to Maila Munna’s competition grade rams, a former playground where a school now stands, used to also be a site of many a turf battle between local gangsters. Those from the lower income group housing project, with their Azamgarhi roots and those from Naved’s chawl, among the original settlers of Kurla’s swamps, come from Gulbarg, Amravati and Vidarbh. “This is a bad neighbourhood but it isn’t as bad as some of the other colonies in Kurla. No mafia. Mostly drugs and extortion. Its become better since 2006. You see those middle income group buildings? Until a few years back we used to regularly extort protection money from those guys. Now we just ask for favours.”
Coming of age in the gullies of Kurla, with no interest in school and with the absent supervision of a father (who earns the family bread in Dubai), Naved freely found trouble, managing once to get locked up in a police station for several hours. If things had continued that way, its not too difficult to tell which path the gullies of Kurla would have put Naved on. But as things turned out, thanks in part to an iPad gifted by his father as a means to Skype-call, Naved discovered a path that a gully in Kurla hadn’t led to before. It was a stage at this year’s Pune leg of the Bacardi NH7 Weekender festival, facing a crowd of over 20,000 music lovers. If you were there, you know him as the rapper Naezy.
A new rhythm beats along the central line of Mumbai’s lifeblood where the local trains snake their way through the poor neighbourhoods in Matunga, Dharavi, Kurla, Sion and Andheri East. Out of these neighbourhoods, through the medium of rap music (and more generally hip hop culture) contemporary Indian youth expression, might be gaining a new working class voice that is, at its most hopeful - original, authentic and promising in its reach.
What’s in a language
On January of 2014, a 22 year old rapper from Kurla, uploaded a music video on Youtube that was a significant inflection point in the unfolding story of hip hop in India. The self published, DIY music video, called Aafat by the rapper Naezy, went viral online in a way and on a scale, that had not happened before in indie rap.
Naezy spits his rhymes in Mumbai’s street-hindi which is not new. But what he did in Aafat was to find a ‘flow’ - a rhyming scheme and form of delivering the words - that was powerful, cool and made rapping in Hindi work in a way that, by many, hadn’t been seen before. Adding to his technical accomplishment was also the fact of what he was saying; in breathless rhymes, he was claiming his identity, as a product of a Kurla slum, at once satirizing his hood and taking pride in its streets.
Naezy is not a standalone. He followed Aafat with Meri Gully Mein - with fellow Mumbai rapper Vivian Fernandes aka Divine. Like Naved, Vivian comes from a background that was rooted in the street life of Mumbai’s chawls. The song, a hip hop homage to growing up in the gullies, makes a very conscious point to use Mumbai’s tapori dialect. Naezy and Divine have been picked up by Only Much Louder (OML) and Sony respectively, and are soon becoming the more visible, successful faces of the rap scene. But they are both products of a wider culture agglomerating around bhasha rap in the slums and chawls. Take for instance the rap crew Swadesi drawing its members variously from Sion, Andheri East and Dadar. The five member crew raps in Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil and Bengali. Or the Dharavi based Slum Gods and Dopeadelicz, dropping rhymes in Tamil, Malyalam and street Hindi. Most of these rappers began with doggerel verses in English trying to imitate American rappers they admired, but since then have come home to their own languages.
Tony Sebastien a.k.a. Stony Psyko of Dopeadelicz says, “I speak Tamil at home, when I go outside I speak Hindi. When I am caught by the cops, I speak Marathi. When I go to school, I speak English. We mix up languages in our rap. ” He likens it to a mix of flavours in a word soup from Mangalore to Mumbai.
Aklesh Sutar aka Mawali, the marathi rapper from Swadesi says, “ we got the kind of love and reception in our mother tongue that we didn’t in English. Now i have people in my area coming up to me and saying, this happened to me. Rap about it. India has so many languages. There is a state under each one. And because of the internet, you can be sitting here rhyming in bengali and finding your audience in Kolkata. It doesn’t matter where you are.” When Tony started rapping in Tamil, he found his audience online from Chennai to Malaysia via Canada. “I didn’t go places, but my music travelled,” he says.
Naved who began rapping by copying lyrics of Lil Wayne and Sean Paul in his notebook says, “My crew (Schizophrenicz) discovered that there was something about rapping in our own language. The stuff inside, that we were trying to get out, flowed more easily. When we rapped in English, people would be like, ‘I don’t understand what he is saying but look how fast he can talk English.’ With Hindi, they started getting it. It somehow became more authentic. ”
Keeping it Real
In being a music form that is largely composed of a rhythmic delivery of words, rap has a strong multidimensional relationship with language. Its aesthetics for instance, is not restricted solely to the lyrical metaphors being supplied in the rap, but also the phonetics of the language it is being delivered in. French rap and Malayalam rap, gets its sound not just from the individual rapper’s flow, but also from sounds the language makes available.
These Mumbai rappers have been driven to their mother-tongues, by the quest for authenticity and connection. But in pioneering rap in their own tongues, they are also compelled to be original; contributing to the music form by expanding its oeuvre to include entirely new soundscapes.
But why is this happening in the chawls? Why is it happening now?
“Because of accessibility to Youtube. Improved speed, cheaper technology and those cheap data packs. Smartphones became cheaper and Youtube properly entered the chawl,” says Encore, aka, Ankur Johar. Ankur runs Voice Of Tha People - a DIY podcast on Indian indie rap. “Hip Hop in India is the direct product of the Internet. India’s hip hop community has been sustained over the internet, through Orkut, Facebook and websites like VOTP. We weren’t meeting in clubs to do rap battles and see each other perform. We were listening to and learning from each other online.” Youtube has been in India now for over a decade, but it was only after 2011 that a critical class barrier to its accessibility was broken.
Around the time Naved was getting into trouble, he was also getting into rap thanks to an iPad at home. With his own rhymes developing in his notebook, talent met opportunity one night. Frustrated with his life and needing to vent, Naezy wrote down his anger in a rhyme that encapsulated his life. He then recorded it on his iPad, programmed a backing track on it and the next day, went out and shot a music video. This became Aafat and it has changed his life.
The Internet and smartphone opened up a wider cultural world for these boys. But to find it, they had to be looking for it in the first place. “In Honey Singh and Baadshah ’s videos you see a club full of beautiful women. Have they gone to a real club in India? 20 girls maybe for every 80 boys. I come from a place where it is tough to survive. We want to sing about whats real,” says Vivian. Aklesh gives the example of the Honey Singh hit chaar botal vodka (Four bottles of Vodka), “people don’t have money for four bottles of vodka in a day where I live. How can I rap about money when I don’t have any? We rap about people’s real lifestyles and they connect with that.” The drive is an old artistic one. To express one’s experience of life. But in this case, it is also the need to be made visible in a cultural world where their stories are absent. “The commercial stuff is about being rich. Even the poor have to show their poverty. Their experience they have to tell. But nobody willing to listen,” says Tony.
These boys challenge the presumed truism that the only thing that works entertainment-wise in India, are escapist fantasies. The drive to create for them may have originally come from the usual sources - fun, brotherhood, the hunt for cool and a way to stand out and get noticed. But in subsequently developing an earnest interest in the craft, they have traversed the path known to music lovers everywhere. They went back in time to the roots of the music and discovered the valence of a whole culture; keeping it real. There is a reason that none of them refer to the music as rap music. They call it hip hop. The reference here is to the larger sub-culture within which it falls. Within hip hop comes not just rap, but also other forms of self expression from music to dance to visual art, and ultimately, for these boys, a philosophy.
“A rapper album will quite often have more words than the whole discography of artists singing in other forms. You can’t keep talking without staying honest. The mainstream guys all want them now because they see money in the kind of rap they are doing, but they don’t realise that these guys are putting their whole lives into it,” says Ankur.
Dharmesh Parmar a.k.a. Tod Fod of Swadesi says, “Hip means knowledge. Hop means movement. Hip Hop is the movement of knowledge. We are a community of about 40 odd friends from my area. Whatever one knows, we teach other. Right now our manager is teaching us mixed martial arts.”
Abhishek Dhusia aka Ace from Mumbai’s Finest, the original Mumbai rap crew, is the statesman of the underground rap scene in the city. The 28 year old was doing it back in 2006. “Lots of kids beginning to get into it because they see money now. I think its very important to ask yourself why you rap. For girls? money? fans? How long can you do that all your life? We stayed underground to stay true to our art. We were doing this when people would laugh at us. But since we’ve kept at it, its become difficult to dismiss us. And thats paved the way for others. There must be about a thousand rappers in Mumbai today.”
Cyrus Oshidar, former Creative and Content Head with MTV and VH1, has just finished making Homeland Hip Hop - an online series that tells the story of India’s grassroots hip hop movement. He says, “The future of this country is connection. Music is the best way to do that because it makes our stories cool. These guys have a clear voice that others will latch on to. We are finally breaking out of Bollywood’s romance nonsense. Their message will resonate and that is precisely the power of music.”
A few months back, Naved’s friend from the chawl was standing at a traffic signal, when a big BMW pulled up beside him. The young person in the car, rolled down the window and the rapper’s friend looked up in surprise. Pumping through the high end bass subwoofers was a song everyone in his chawl knew. The ‘elite public’ was listening to Meri Gully Mein . That, in Kurla is called a ‘ ek number feeling .’
Know your Bambaiya slang
Ade Chale - Madness
Khoti - Fake
Bantai - Homeboy
Pateli - Boasting
Hatela - Psychotic
Dhathing - Mischief
