The rapper from India topping global hip-hop charts

In a short while, Indian rapper Hanumankind has quickly risen as a standout within the nation’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. His monitor Large Dawgs not solely topped international charts but additionally briefly outpaced Kendrick Lamar’s diss monitor Not Like Us. The BBC explores the rapper’s meteoric rise to fame.

Within the video for Big Dawgs, 31-year-old Sooraj Cherukat, also referred to as Hanumankind, exudes boundless power.

Shot inside a maut ka kuan (nicely of demise) – a jaw-dropping present the place drivers carry out gravity-defying stunts inside an enormous wood barrel-like construction – he stomps across the pit as a gaggle of motorists zip previous him.

The track, a collaboration with producer Kalmi Reddy and director Bijoy Shetty, has earned over 132 million streams on Spotify and 83 million views on YouTube since its July launch, catapulting Cherukat to international fame.

On the surface, Cherukat’s music follows the hip-hop template of delivering hard-edged tales of road life by specific lyrics and uncooked prose.

However a better inspection reveals a rapper, who makes use of his music to straddle his distinct identities.

Born within the southern Indian state of Kerala, Cherukat spent his childhood crisscrossing the world – principally due to his father who works with a number one oil firm – and has lived in France, Nigeria, Egypt and Dubai.

However he spent his adolescence in Houston, Texas – and it was right here that his musical profession took form.

In contrast to the well-known East and West Coast rap rivalry within the US, Houston additionally has a particular hip-hop tradition that stands out in its personal proper.

In Houston’s hip-hop scene, cough syrup is the drug of selection. Its dizzying impact led to the creation of the “screwed-up” remix, the place tracks are slowed right down to mirror the syrup’s affect.

Cherukat has usually talked about how his music is an implicit nod to Texas hip-hop legends equivalent to DJ Screw, UGK, Large Bunny and Mission Pat, who he grew up listening to.

Though their affect is obvious in his rap, his fashion advanced additional after he returned to India in 2021 after dropping out of faculty.

He earned a enterprise diploma and labored at corporations like Goldman Sachs earlier than realising it wasn’t for him. That is when he determined to pursue rapping full-time, a ardour he had beforehand solely pursued on the aspect.

Very similar to his private life, Cherukat’s music additionally displays his effort to shed his cosmopolitan identification and reconnect together with his Indian roots.

His songs usually boldly discover the struggles of southern Indian road life, mixing hard-hitting vocal supply with catchy rhythms. Often, tabla beats and synthesisers complement his verses.

“We received points in our nation trigger there’s events at battle,” he sneers in a track known as Genghis, which was shot within the lanes of Bengaluru, the place he lives.

In Large Dawgs, Cherukat presents a substitute for the bling and opulence related to mainstream rap by ditching flashy vehicles and selecting to give attention to small metropolis stuntmen, who come from poor households and are a part of a dying art-form in India.

“These are the individuals which are the true risk-takers…These are the large canine, for actual,” he told Advanced web site.

However despite the fact that the combative power of his music has managed to show heads, he has acquired criticism too.

Some really feel his songs are much less impactful for Indian listeners. In contrast to many friends who rap in vernacular languages, Cherukat sings in English, which can restrict his resonance with non-English-speaking audiences.

Others criticise him for mimicking Western artists too carefully and adopting a tokenistic strategy to his Indian identification.

“His track solid Indians and South Asians as critical gamers within the Western rap scene which is nice,” stated Abid Haque, a PhD pupil in New Jersey.

“However he sounds an excessive amount of like an American rapper lifted out of context into the Indian scene. Whereas the Large Dawgs music video relied on an Indian aesthetic, the lyrics and music really feel divorced from an Indian actuality,” he added.

It is a duality that is, arguably, additionally present in Cherukat’s personal understanding of his work.

On one hand, returning to India has been a means of navigating his sense of belonging: “I believe it actually moulded me as somebody who by no means actually had a spot to name dwelling… and that form of formed the best way I understand music, individuals, and tradition,” he instructed Advanced.

However he additionally insists on viewing himself from a wider vantage: “I’m not an Indian rapper, however I’m a rapper from India,” he is stated in earlier interviews, explaining that he locations himself exterior of the nation’s thriving hip-hop scene.

The rapper has confronted a barrage of racist feedback on-line for his distinctive fashion. Some worldwide listeners wrestle to just accept that he’s from India as a result of he does not “look or sound” like their expectations. In the meantime, his Indian viewers pillories him for a similar causes, wishing he conformed extra to their picture of Indian identification.

However it’s this precise placelessness of his work that followers have come to like a lot.

To them, he’s a genre-hopping road poet who took the outdated hip hop traditions he grew up with and injected it with contemporary social commentary.

“He isn’t attempting to cater to an Indian viewers, which reveals in his music and he’s unapologetic about it,” stated Arnab Ghosh, a psychiatrist based mostly in Delhi who not too long ago found Hanumankind by Large Dawgs.

“After I hearken to his music it may be from anyplace on the earth. That kind of universality is interesting to me.”

Overcoming expectations of what a South Asian rapper can obtain and establishing himself on his personal phrases may be Cherukat’s best triumph – and problem.

As he as soon as stated: “You retain sure issues as your roots, but it surely’s as much as you to adapt to the surroundings and drift, so long as you don’t compromise on integrity.”