Indian Hip-Hop's Revolution

From gully to global success, homegrown rap artists are going mainstream, reshaping the nation's soundscape.

- By BHANUJ KAPPAL

A DECADE AGO, filmmaker Sachin Pillai and I spent two weeks in Mumbai's Dharavi area, hanging out with a bunch of working-class kids with big dreams. We filmed b-boys pulling off ankle-breaking dance moves in a ramshackle community hall, tucked away in a cramped, sun-starved back alley. We watched rappers take the stage at local Ganesh mandals, spitting and performing rhymes in Hindi, Marathi and Tamil to a crowd of bemused onlookers. We even met a graffiti artist who loved to tag local police chowkis with his chosen moniker: Ganjaman.

Indian hip-hop—the real thing, not Bollywood's bastardised knockoff—was still in its infancy then, just a blip on the cultural horizon. But this motley crew of high school kids and college dropouts was already talking of world domination. Seated behind the foreman's table on the sixth floor of an under-construction high-rise on Dharavi's outskirts, smoking spliff after spliff, the members of Dopeadelicz rap crew waxed eloquent about their plans. “We're going to make this scene as big as the Bronx or Compton. It's going to be massive.”

At the time, those words seemed like little more than bluster. Today, it reads like prophecy. This April, Hanumankind—whose 2024 single “Big Dawgs” became a global hit, peaking at #23 on the Billboard charts—made history by becoming the first Indian rapper to perform at Coachella. A week later, Fortnite dropped an emote mirroring a dance move from the “Big Dawgs” music video. It was surreal: an independent rapper from Bengaluru, suddenly everywhere—from America’s biggest music festival to the world’s most-played video game.

“It’s a win for the entire culture,” says Navjosh Singh, who heads A&R for the Indian imprint of global rap powerhouse label Mass Appeal. “It put the global spotlight on the hip-hop culture that’s been bubbling away in India.”