The rapper from India topping international 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 Huge 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 Huge Dawgs, 31-year-old Sooraj Cherukat, also referred to as Hanumankind, exudes boundless power.

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

The tune, 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 via express lyrics and uncooked prose.

However a more in-depth 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 early life in Houston, Texas – and it was right here that his musical profession took form.

Not like 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 replicate the syrup’s affect.

Cherukat has typically talked about how his music is an implicit nod to Texas hip-hop legends resembling DJ Screw, UGK, Huge Bunny and Venture Pat, who he grew up listening to.

Though their affect is evident in his rap, his model advanced additional after he returned to India in 2021 after dropping out of school.

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 like his private life, Cherukat’s music additionally displays his effort to shed his cosmopolitan id and reconnect along with his Indian roots.

His songs typically 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 got issues in our nation cause there’s parties at war,” he sneers in a tune referred to as Genghis, which was shot within the lanes of Bengaluru, the place he lives.

In Huge Dawgs, Cherukat affords a substitute for the bling and opulence related to mainstream rap by ditching flashy automobiles 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 people that are the real risk-takers…Those are the big dogs, for real,” he advised Complicated web site.

However regardless 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. Not like 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 intently and adopting a tokenistic strategy to his Indian id.

“His song cast Indians and South Asians as serious players in the Western rap scene which is great,” mentioned Abid Haque, a PhD scholar in New Jersey.

“But he sounds too much like an American rapper lifted out of context into the Indian scene. While the Big Dawgs music video relied on an Indian aesthetic, the lyrics and music feel divorced from an Indian reality,” 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 approach of navigating his sense of belonging: “I think it really moulded me as someone who never really had a place to call home… and that kind of shaped the way I perceive music, people, and culture,” he advised Complicated.

However he additionally insists on viewing himself from a wider vantage: “I’m not an Indian rapper, but I’m a rapper from India,” he is mentioned 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 model. Some worldwide listeners battle 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 id.

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 previous hip hop traditions he grew up with and injected it with recent social commentary.

“He isn’t trying to cater to an Indian audience, which shows in his music and he is unapologetic about it,” mentioned Arnab Ghosh, a psychiatrist primarily based in Delhi who just lately found Hanumankind via Huge Dawgs.

“When I listen to his music it can be from anywhere in the world. That sort of universality is appealing to me.”

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

As he as soon as mentioned: “You keep certain things as your roots, but it’s up to you to adapt to the environment and go with the flow, as long as you don’t compromise on integrity.”