The rapper from India topping international hip-hop charts

In a little while, Indian rapper Hanumankind has swiftly risen as a standout within the nation’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. His monitor Large Dawgs now not handiest crowned international charts but additionally in short outpaced Kendrick Lamar’s diss monitor No longer Like Us. The BBC explores the rapper’s meteoric upward push to status.

Within the video for Large Dawgs, 31-year-old Sooraj Cherukat, sometimes called Hanumankind, exudes boundless power.

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

The track, a collaboration with manufacturer Kalmi Reddy and director Bijoy Shetty, has earned over 132 million streams on Spotify and 83 million perspectives on YouTube since its July unlock, catapulting Cherukat to international status.

At the out of doors, Cherukat’s track follows the hip-hop template of turning in hard-edged tales of side road lifestyles via specific lyrics and uncooked prose.

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

Born within the southern Indian state of Kerala, Cherukat spent his adolescence crisscrossing the arena – most commonly on account of his father who works with a number one oil corporate – and has lived in France, Nigeria, Egypt and Dubai.

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

In contrast to the well known East and West Coast rap contention in the United States, Houston additionally has a particular hip-hop tradition that sticks out in its personal proper.

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

Cherukat has ceaselessly mentioned how his track is an implicit nod to Texas hip-hop legends reminiscent of DJ Screw, UGK, Large Bunny and Mission Pat, who he grew up taking note of.

Even though their affect is apparent in his rap, his taste developed additional after he returned to India in 2021 after dropping by the wayside of school.

He earned a trade level and labored at corporations like Goldman Sachs ahead of realising it wasn’t for him. That is when he determined to pursue rapping full-time, a keenness he had prior to now handiest pursued at the aspect.

Just like his non-public lifestyles, Cherukat’s track additionally displays his effort to shed his cosmopolitan identification and reconnect together with his Indian roots.

His songs ceaselessly boldly discover the struggles of southern Indian side road lifestyles, mixing hard-hitting vocal supply with catchy rhythms. Infrequently, tabla beats and synthesisers supplement his verses.

“We were given problems in our country reason there may be events at struggle,” he sneers in a track known as Genghis, which used to be shot within the lanes of Bengaluru, the place he lives.

In Large Dawgs, Cherukat gives a substitute for the bling and opulence related to mainstream rap by means of ditching flashy automobiles and opting for to concentrate on small town stuntmen, who come from deficient households and are a part of a loss of life art-form in India.

“Those are the folk which can be the actual risk-takers…The ones are the massive canines, for actual,” he instructed Advanced web site.

However despite the fact that the combative power of his track has controlled to show heads, he has gained complaint 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 would possibly prohibit his resonance with non-English-speaking audiences.

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

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

“However he sounds too just like an American rapper lifted out of context into the Indian scene. Whilst the Large Dawgs track video trusted an Indian aesthetic, the lyrics and track really feel divorced from an Indian fact,” he added.

It is a duality that is, arguably, additionally present in Cherukat’s personal figuring out of his paintings.

On one hand, returning to India has been some way of navigating his sense of belonging: “I believe it in point of fact moulded me as any individual who by no means in point of fact had a spot to name house… and that roughly formed the way in which I understand track, folks, and tradition,” he instructed Advanced.

However he additionally insists on viewing himself from a much broader vantage: “I’m now not an Indian rapper, however I’m a rapper from India,” he is mentioned in previous interviews, explaining that he puts himself out of doors of the rustic’s thriving hip-hop scene.

The rapper has confronted a barrage of racist feedback on-line for his distinctive taste. Some world listeners combat to just accept that he’s from India as a result of he does not “glance or sound” like their expectancies. In the meantime, his Indian target market pillories him for a similar causes, wishing he conformed extra to their symbol of Indian identification.

However it’s this precise placelessness of his paintings that lovers have come to like such a lot.

To them, he’s a genre-hopping side road poet who took the previous hip hop traditions he grew up with and injected it with recent social statement.

“He isn’t looking to cater to an Indian target market, which presentations in his track and he’s unapologetic about it,” mentioned Arnab Ghosh, a psychiatrist based totally in Delhi who just lately found out Hanumankind via Large Dawgs.

“After I pay attention to his track it may be from any place on the planet. That type of universality is interesting to me.”

Overcoming expectancies of what a South Asian rapper can succeed in and setting up himself on his personal phrases may well be Cherukat’s biggest triumph – and problem.

As he as soon as mentioned: “You stay positive issues as your roots, nevertheless it’s as much as you to evolve to the surroundings and drift, so long as you don’t compromise on integrity.”