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If indeed one wanted to tell a success story in purely economic terms, why use hip-hop as the fulcrum in the first place? Infusing class into any political articulation of marginalised groups is second nature for many intellectuals – but the idea that hip-hop can be stripped of its crucial link with identity seems a little difficult to digest. This manifests in different ways: from Mayawati having to be lambasted for building statues – an exercise that is pivotal to Dalit-Bahujan self-respect and sense of ownership over public space – to “poor” upper-castes being handed a reservation policy without even placing a political demand for it. There is almost an instinctive need to express any kind of history of oppression in economic rather than socio-political terms. Identity politics in India too is regularly broken down and categorised into the standard left-right binary of the mainstream. Thus while rap may be cognizant of the class angle to discrimination, to reduce its prophetic fire to an identity-neutral politics is deeply problematic. This kind of politics is often seen as “selling out”, but is an essential tactic to address the equality and self-respect aspects of identity-based movements. Ideas like reparations for slavery and black entrepreneurship and wealth accumulation are not seen as mutually exclusive strategies but rather as complementary paths to liberation by hip-hop. So I’ma spread my wings, you can meet me in the skyīoth Jay-Z and West have identified themselves with the politics of the Black Panther Party and see themselves as legatees of their socialist and anti-racist beliefs, including community defense, radical education for black children and redistribution of wealth in the form of reparations. Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could runīarack Obama ran so all the children could fly Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk As Jay-Z memorably rapped during Barack Obama’s run for president of the USA: Hip Hop artists with a sense of history see themselves as fulfilling different roles along the long route to equality – not as simplistic conveyors of identity-blind rich vs poor stories. But this reading is a fundamental misdiagnosis of what rappers like Kanye West would call “ the civil rights element of owning property”. Today it has almost become fashionable to decry themes like wealth accumulation in hip-hop. This idea seems strange because at its core, hip-hop is not simply random resistance music – but music that is deeply rooted in the history of identity politics. I said I want to use it and so we spoke to Divine and Dub and we changed the song to fit into the narrative of Gully Boy. My narrative is about the class system… it’s about the economic disparity and how the characters are dealing with that. The original song contained excerpts from Kanhaiya Kumar’s speech that called for freedom from patriarchy, caste discrimination and Brahminism, among other things. The director, Zoya Akhtar, confirmed this stance recently when addressing questions of appropriation around the song ‘Azadi’.
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One can’t but wonder if the art form will suffer in the long run for its now inextricable link to Bollywood’s ‘apolitical’ rags-to-riches storytelling. However, it is precisely this ability to confront society with uncomfortable questions that is the essence of hip-hop. Undoubtedly, the film would have been immensely less popular had it focused on uncomfortable elements of what holds the main characters back in life – their identities of being Muslims growing up in post-riots Mumbai, of being spatially segregated in caste ghettoes, of being structurally condemned to doing their parents’ working class jobs because of the vice-like grip of caste on the political economy.Īlso Read: The ‘Gully Boy’ Soundtrack Co-Opts – but Also Gives Credit to the Street The answer, I believe, is in a particularly pernicious political undertone of the film: that class is the primary site of discrimination and conflict in Indian society, and so long as that can be overcome, one’s other identities are relatively immaterial. It is no small matter that in India’s current political climate, one can go to theatres and watch scores of young people cheer, dance, whistle and celebrate the success story of a young, poor, Muslim boy from the ghetto.īut this also, quite naturally, begs the question as to why this film succeeds – when the same audience that is lapping it up today were in theatres a mere few weeks ago, celebrating a film like Uri: The Surgical Strike. The music is upbeat, the cinematography aesthetic the narrative is gripping and the performances laudable. Let me start by saying that Gully Boy is a remarkably well-made film.