STREETSMART
India’s version of ghetto rap is gully rap, making a stinging statement in
back alleys marked by hardship, poverty, illiteracy, drugs and crime
Dressed in baggy pants, a sweatshirt, sunglasses and a pair of neon sneakers, Naved Sheikh sticks out like a sore thumb in his “hateli ilaka” (strange neighbourhood) at Kurla West, or Bombay 70. Like several of his neighbours, his family is “kattar” (orthodox) Muslim, but it’s a rapper cap that replaces the skull cap on Sheikh’s head. With a wardrobe stocked up from Colaba Causeway, the young man dresses like a rapper and has a motormouth to match. When he took the stage at Blue Frog, a performance club in Mumbai, for the first time in August 2015, he was welcomed with a girl screaming “we love you Naved.” No one is more surprised than he is. “Ek number,” he responds and the crowd is already won over.
His story is the stuff Bollywood films are made of, but there’s little room for babes, bitches or sunny days on beaches. Misogyny a la Honey Singh? No thank you. Kurla, where Sheikh has spent all of his 22 years, is riddled with problems of illiteracy, crime, police brutality and poverty, and that’s what inspires most of his rap songs. So if Singh is Bollywood’s response to Lil Wayne, it’s Kendrick Lamar and Tupac Shakur that Naezy (short for Naved is crazy) looks up to. And if Dear Mama tells Tupac’s tale, Aafat! is Sheikh’s story. The introductory verse talks about his upbringing in the khatarnaak neighbourhood and the khatri gangs that run it. He might mention drugs and crime, but gangsta rap isn’t exactly what he is going for. The genre popularised by Tupac and Snoop Dogg has been criticised for glamourising the ‘thug life’, encouraging violence, hypersexuality and
Ndrugs, but Sheikh only hopes to highlight the problems that already exist in the gullies and ghettos of Bombay 70. It is a sentiment that resonates in the growing underground rap scene across the country. Mumbai alone is home to a large number of rappers who sing about what they see and know in a language that is their own. Conscious of their surroundings, they colour their songs with the issues of a fractured society in the slang of their streets. It’s a style under development. Let’s call it gully rap.
Meri Gully Mein, a Naezy collaboration with Vivian Divine aka Divine which has over 4 lakh views on YouTube, is a sign that the genre is inching towards the mainstream. Just like Sheikh and Divine, who grew up in the drug-addled slum near Sahar airport in Mumbai, crew members of the Swadeshi group also emerge from neighbourhoods neglected by bureaucrats, targeted by the police. Deeply influenced by rappers from the West, this lot expresses an embarrassment towards mainstream ‘desi rappers’.
Aspiring engineer and musician, 22-year-old Rounok Chakraborty aka Cizzy has been trying to bring the movement to the streets of Kolkata too. Under the Cypher Projekt, he and his crewmates have been organising get-togethers and cypher sessions in NAEZY Naved Shaikh Mumbai Language Urdu Listen and