CALL ME QUEEN!

Grammy-nominated Indian-American rapper Raja Kumari describes her music as a sonic bridge between the east and the west

- ANJULY MATHAI

The first song of Svetha Yellapragada Rao, known by her stage name Raja Kumari, came from her first heartbreak. She was 11 or 12 and had a crush on an Indian boy in California, where she grew up. He, however, liked the typical American blue-eyed blonde. “That was the first upset for me. He is supposed to like me, I thought. I am Jasmine to his Aladdin. He is not supposed to go after Cinderella. Cinderella has her own movie,” she says with a self-deprecating laugh. “My first music came from not feeling good enough or beautiful enough.” Still, she got over it because of a deep-rooted love for her culture, born of learning classical Indian dance from the age of seven. “I loved where I came from too deeply,” she says.

This translated into an innate confidence that suffuses her music, which she describes as a sonic bridge between the west and the east. “It is the way that I have translated my American and Indian experience and wanting to be included on both sides,” she says.