Beyond The Gully: The Changing Shape Of Indian Hip-Hop

The rap revolution led by Divine and Naezy has disrupted the music industry in unprecedented ways. Let’s take a trip.

- Nirmika Singh

Swadeshi and Nirmika Singh.

Last year around this time, a colloquial ‘Hinglish’ phrase found its way into people’s conversations and onto their T-shirts. Whether it was the cool-cat optimism that Apna Time Aayega carried or the way it was stylised in an irreverent font, the fact that a hip-hop slogan had hooked a nation was a curious thing to see. The craze was all thanks to Gully Boy, the Zoya Akhtar film, loosely based on the inspiring lives of breakout Mumbai rappers, Vivian Fernandes aka Divine and Naved Shaikh aka Naezy.

For the majority of India, Gully Boy served as a first brush with ‘desi’ hip-hop, with a noticeable rising trend of rappers, spitting verses in their mother tongue. But hip-hop ‘scenesters’ in Mumbai and Delhi would tell you that the film was simply a Bollywood-style chronicle of a thriving culture that had existed for at least a decade. In our many conversations since 2015, Abhishek Dhusia aka Ace, the founder of one of Mumbai’s oldest hiphop crew, Mumbai’s Finest, has repeatedly said, “We have been doing this for years. It’s only now that people are sitting up and taking notice.” Dhusia started Mumbai’s Finest with a bunch of ‘homies’ in 2006 and in the days of YouTube infancy, a song got viral via Bluetooth sharing. In an interview with Rolling Stone India, Dhusia had said how his group’s first song ‘Shake It’, a homespun recording via a headphone mic and free beats, became quite the thing. “We’d go eat bhurji pao at 3 a.m. near Andheri Station and people would be bumping that shit. We were like, ‘Oh, that’s my song,’ and they wouldn’t believe us.”