The World is Ours—Divine leads the rise of Desi Rap, with an assist from Nas
Nas and Divine
The unlikely fandom of American rap legend Nas in India; and the surprising connection between Nas, Divine, and the rise of India’s real hip hop culture.
I didn’t know what it meant to have ‘taste’ in music before I discovered Nas. I would’ve been an adolescent then—12 or 13 years old—just getting over my obsession with the Baazigar soundtrack, Main Khiladi Tu Anari, or mainstream ‘Western’ music hits without any specific genre to hang my hat on: from Bryan Adams and Backstreet Boys to Michael Jackson and Scatman.
I didn’t choose the music I wanted to like; the music chose me. Every Bollywood/Indie-Pop song on the ‘Philips Top 10’ on Zee TV was likeable. Every foreign music video on early MTV or Channel V was interesting. I bought English music not by any careful curation, but by random draw of availability from the cassette-wallah uncles in the small Indian cities where I grew up. With a miniscule budget, I picking up whatever was displayed on the glass counters without much thought: Slippery When Wet, Bat Out of Hell, Said and Done, Michael Learns To Rock, and, most excitingly, any sort of ‘Best Of’ collection that specifically taught me what was popular, like Now That’s What I Call Music! or the annual Grammy Nominees albums.
The only rap I knew was Baba Sehgal. That was, until the shop-wallahs started stacking up hip-hop cassettes on their display cases too, offering this exciting ‘new’ genre of music that came with a Parental Advisory sticker, almost daring us to listen to it without our parents’ consent. I discovered Dr Dre, Warren G, 2Pac, The Notorious B.I.G., Jay Z, and Eminem. I discovered Nas.
There was little I could relate to in the lyrical content: not the racial dynamics, the class dynamics, the economic condition, the bravado, the sexual conquests, the Queensbridge borough neighbourhood, the city, the country, nothing. But there was undeniable poetry in the verses of Nasir Jones: Inhale deep like the words of my breath / I never sleep, cuz sleep is the cousin of death.
Nas and his music evolved over the next two-and-a-half decades, with a dozen studio albums and innumerable classics, from Illmatic and It Was Written to Stillmatic and God’s Son, and most-recently, The Lost Tapes 2. The medium of my music intake evolved, too, from cassettes to CDs to Apple Music downloads. There were moments of brilliant creativity (“I Gave You Power”), moments of storytelling (“Undying Love”) moments of confrontation (“Ether”), moments of leadership (“I Can”) and moments of outrage (“Cops Shot The Kid”)—and almost every other spectrum in between.
His words were “Street scriptures for lost souls, in the crossroads.” For 20+ years, he became (and continues to be) one of the soundtracks to my life, always a click away.
I remember finding particular delight in the opening verse of my favourite track, the Pete Rock produced “The World Is Yours” from Illmatic, where Nas begins:
I sip the Dom P, watching “Gandhi” ‘til I’m charged
Then writing in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin
The greatest rapper, in the best song of his greatest album, was rapping about the Gandhi film? The lines immediately made me feel ‘seen’ as an Indian, by an artist whom I admired so much.
American rappers had appeared on songs for the Indian audience before, but the Nas/Divine/Naezy track “NY Se Mumbai” felt like a true moment for Indian hip-hop, a worthy tie-up of two cultures and two of the world’s largest metropolises, different in so many ways, and yet, cousins in the spirit of their underground arts and culture.
Coming from any other mainstream rapper, the ‘Gandhi’ line might’ve been surprising; but Nas always separated himself as an intellectual and a poet in the guise of a rapper, a scholar who spoke in rhymes. I noticed a couple more Gandhi references from Nas in the album God’s Son, in the tracks “Book of Rhymes” and “Revolutionary Warfare”.
Unlike young people in bigger Indian cities, I didn’t have access to fan-circles or alternative-cultures that could celebrate artists like Nas. My Nas fandom felt isolated, and as Nas himself passed his prime in the limelight and handed over the baton to the next generation of mainstream American rappers, I felt alone on the island, a mid-30s something still obsessing over B-side hip-hop classics few around me had heard about. As far as I was (mistakenly) concerned, Nas was hardly on India’s radar.
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India, however, was definitely on Nas’s radar.
Like many of you, I skeptically watched the first trailer of Bollywood film Gully Boy in early 2019, a sort-of desi version of Eminem’s 8 Mile. The idea of Ranveer Singh as poor Indian rapper, at first, made me cringe. But then I learned more, like the story was an adaption of the life of truly talented Mumbai rappers, Divine and Naezy. The soundtrack, closely-curated by Divine himself, was brilliant, ushering asli Hindi/desi rap into the mainstream Indian charts. My concern turned to excitement; this could actually be good.
Days before the release of the film, a couple of bombshells dropped to blow my mind away: Nas—yes, that Nas—was the executive producer of Gully Boy. Nas had also recorded a song with Divine, Naezy, and Singh on the chorus. American rappers had appeared on songs for the Indian audience before (who can forget Snoop Dogg on Singh Is Kinng?) but the Nas/Divine/Naezy track “NY Se Mumbai” felt like a true moment for Indian hip-hop, a worthy tie-up of two cultures and two of the world’s largest metropolises, different in so many ways, and yet, cousins in the spirit of their underground arts and culture.
Gully Boy—directed by Zoya Akhtar—was better than advertised, and the Nas influence was all over the film. Singh’s character Murad quoted Nas lyrics expertly in one scene. Later, a competition to open for Nas in a (fictional) Mumbai performance motivated Murad to take the leap and join India’s hip hop elite.
The song that elevated Murad to the limelight was “Apna Time Aayega”, a defiant announcement of the character’s “arrival”, of rapping his way out of his life’s problems, and to capitalise on his “time”. The song, written by Divine and performed by Singh, served as a larger metaphor for the arrival of Divine the rapper, too, who made a bigger leap into the Indian mainstream from this film than he did even after his viral video “Mere Gully Mein” in 2015. The soundtrack also announced the arrival of asli Indian rap, of youth culture open to accepting a genre that had already defined street music as well as chart-toppers in the West for decades.
“Apna Time Aayega” is loosely connected to the Nas’s “The World Is Yours”; while the Mumbai debutant Divine speaks of his time to conquer, Nas words a similar motivational message—to himself and others—in a different language.
Although Nas didn’t make an appearance in the film itself, he found another way to capitalise on India’s breakout rap moment. The American music label Mass Appeal Records—co-founded by Nas—partnered with Universal Music Group in India to launch Mass Appeal India, India’s first major rap label. Mass Appeal’s roster has featured Nas himself and a number of rising and established hip-hop talents, including Dave East, DJ Shadow, and formerly, Run The Jewels.
Mass Appeal India’s first signing, of course, was Divine.
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Born Vivian Fernandes in Mumbai in the late 80s, the story goes that Divine only discovered hip-hop in 2011, after seeing a friend wearing a T-shirt with the image of 50 Cent’s debut album, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’. He quickly found inspiration in lyrical American rappers, including Eminem, Rakim, and yes, Nas.
India has had rappers before, of course. The comic godfather of Indian rap is probably Baba Sehgal, who was big in the 90s, along with other indie (read: Non-Bollywood) pop-stars like the British-Indian rapper Apache Indian. In the past decade, Yo Yo Honey Singh and Badshah had some success with crossover hits, but their music was at best, a watered-down parody of hip-hop culture for the Bollywood audience; and at worst, incredibly annoying.
(And of course, I have to mention Sameer Dada, son of popular beautician Shahnaz Husain and the founder of self-proclaimed “Goonda Rap” in the early 2000s, who embodied the Indian Snoop Dogg/DMX persona, made explicit songs about being a gangster in Delhi, and passed away in 2008.)
But the movement that Divine, Naezy, and other rappers of the current generation have ushered through has felt far more authentic. These artists have been inspired by the American hipmhop culture, but have their own stories to tell, in their own language, in the true spirit of rap that originally made the genre an underground phenomenon.
The song and video for Naezy and Divine’s ‘Mere Gully Mein’—shot in the bastis, nakas, slums, and other neighbourhoods of Mumbai—went viral, amassing millions of views, and announcing the asli voice of Indian rap. The gully rappers turned their hardships into art. It was classic rags-to-riches aspiration, the true spirit of hip-hop.
It is this basic framework of Divine’s story that was peppered with a little Bollywood masala and a grander scale that turned him into Ranveer Singh’s Murad in Gully Boy. By the end of the film, Murad ‘makes’ it, with a little help from Nas.
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In ‘real’ life, Murad’s inspiration—Divine—took his next big step in hip-hop with some help from Nas, too. Soon after Divine signed with Mass Appeal India, he released his major label debut album Kohinoor, with a titular song and video that worked as a succinct thesis in his place in Indian rap.
The song “Kohinoor” is Divine’s mission statement, even for those who may not understand his language. His flow here is markedly different from Nas’s first proper song on his Illmatic debut—“N.Y. State of Mind”—but both songs are a similar declaration of self and the cities that have birthed the two rappers. “Kohinoor” is Divine’s state of mind, a rare Indian diamond, unbreakable.
Cement se nikla gulaab, atehasic kitaab
har hal ka jawaab, sach hue mere khwaab
vafaadar, khabardar, hoshiaar
In “The World Is Yours”, not long after the Gandhi reference, Nas proclaimed that he was out for “dead presidents” to represent him. Translation: out for US dollar notes that print photographs of former dead presidents. “Dead Presidents” then became the title of a trilogy of tracks by another hip-hop giant (and Nas’s former rival) Jay Z, further popularising the phrase as a representation of wealth and capitalism. Divine borrows this theme for his own track “Gandhi Money”, an ode to India’s father of the nation, the very anti-capitalist Bapu whose image nevertheless ended up on all of our legal tender. The video for “Gandhi Money” makes it look like his 'gloating' track, with the usual tropes of rich rappers rapping about being rich. But this song is actually a criticism of what money can buy, the peace that money can bring, but also, what Divine refuses to buy for himself (or change about himself) now that he does have money.
If the Nas influence wasn’t clear enough through the course of Divine’s career and early in this album, the man himself shows up almost halfway through Kohinoor. Nas’s husky voice, the familiar post-smoker-cough delivery, speaks out in an interlude. It feels like the voice of an elder brother, a voice that provides an instant glow to Divine’s album. The interlude is taken from an interview Nas and Divine conducted together for Mass Appeal last year. Divine calls Nas the ‘guru’ of rap. Then, the guru takes over. “This here prove everybody wrong that [Hip Hop] is here that is growing,” says Nas. “And that's a universal language, you know, I love that. And Divine, he's dope man … The way he is saying his poetry, his style. What he’s doing that’s something that really means for us.”
Divine’s influence of American rap storytelling themes is strong in the track, “Chal Bombay”, a song where his city is directly addressed, personified and romanticized. “Chal Bombay” has strong parallels with Jay Z’s 2007 song “Hello Brooklyn”—once again, tying not just hip-hop traditions across the oceans and languages, but also, planting more parallels between Mumbai and NYC.
Jay Z begins his first words in “Brooklyn” with the couplet:
Like a mama you birthed me, Brooklyn you nursed me
Schooled me with hard knocks, better than Berkeley
Divine starts on a similar vein, personifying his city’s as a helpful companion, his weapon, his drug, his special one:
Jab mere sath thi woh, meri khaas thi woh
Meri shooter, mera nasha, meri ghaas thi woh.
The chorus of “Hello Brooklyn” features Lil Wayne addressing Brooklyn directly, asking the city to be the narrator’s lady, asking to go along with it for a ride. Divine in “Chal Bombay” does something similar, telling his hometown how much he adores ‘her’, that he would provide for her, that he would like to introduce her to his mother.
Late in Kohinoor, Divine gets a chance to go toe-to-toe with Dave East, contemporary who—like him—has been influenced and shaped so much by the gritty, lyrical rap that Nas popularised in the mid-90s. On the song “Remand”, the two rappers spit in their respective mother tongues under the same thematic umbrella. Divine carries himself with a confidence and swagger in his voice that he belongs at this stage, waxing over the same track as East, shouldering the burden of expectations. Despite their language barrier, East and Divine show all they have in common: their dark, raspy flow, their focus on hyper-local issues in their lyrics, their music that feels more attune to the sound of the streets (nakas) than the charts.
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In “Azadi”, one of the standout tracks from the Gully Boy soundtrack, Divine forays gingerly into the political space, demanding freedom from corruption, systematic oppression, income inequality, and religious orthodoxy. Despite its obvious strengths as a lyrical masterwork, the song’s subjects are kept relatively vague—avoiding any specific political outrage for the film.
But “Azadi” finds its most memorable lines when Divine turns the camera around, to look back at himself:
Aa nahi banna mujhe Slumdog millionaire
Ye slumdog hai mission pe
System ke keede jo rengte apne kafan pe
He deftly rejects the “Slumdog Millionaire” stereotype, a message particularly to the foreign audience who only know one narrative of India/Mumbai/poverty from the 2008 film. Instead, he has his own unique identity, his own mission, the start of an underground movement.
This movement, of course, is the push for Divine and other artists of his time to popularise indie desi rap in India. By 2020, the genre has more confidence than ever in itself, in its own language and its culture. Hip hop fans like myself—who used to cringe at the awkward attempts of earlier artists in duplicating American rap culture, lyrics, and content—can’t help but marvel at how the industry has begun to blossom from all corners of the country in its true voice.
A number of other rising rap talents have since been added to Mass Appeal India’s roster, including Indian-American Raja Kumari, Mumbai’s KIDSHOT, and more. Many intriguing artists and groups have emerged in the Indian rap scene in recent years, including Naezy of course, as well as talents such as Delhi’s Prabh Deep, KR$NA, Swadesi, Seedhe Maut, Kashmir’s politically-charged rapper Ahmer, Shillong’s Khasi Bloodz, Meba Ofilia, as well as artists rapping in regional languages beyond the more-mainstream Hindi-English-Punjabi circles, in Kannada, in Tamil, in Marathi, in Khasi, and more.
My journey as a rap fan has taken almost a 180-degree swing; or to use a cricketing metaphor, it has changed strikes between the two ends, with homegrown batsmen and batswomen getting more attention at the crease than ever before. The Gully Boy soundtrack and Divine’s Kohinoor album feel like the early renaissance, the type that American hip-hop experienced in the 80s and 90s. Producers like Sez On The Beat have created beats that are already classics of the genre in India (my personal favourite is “Jung” by Swadesi). Bollywood films and streaming shows are employing more rap songs into their soundtracks, allowing for the underground rappers to take the stage that was previously occupied only by the commercial artists like Badshah. Giant music festivals are giving more stage time to hip-hop acts than ever before.
The song “Kohinoor” is Divine’s mission statement, even for those who may not understand his language. His flow here is markedly different from Nas’s first proper song on his Illmatic debut—“N.Y. State of Mind”—but both songs are a similar declaration of self and the cities that have birthed the two rappers. “Kohinoor” is Divine’s state of mind, a rare Indian diamond, unbreakable.
There is still a long way to go for desi rap, of course, both in the maturity and confidence of the music, as well as larger acceptance in the Indian mainstream. Gully Boy broke barriers, and Divine—with an assist by Nas—got the ball rolling faster. However, Indian music is still largely a Bollywood-pop-occupied zone, with occasional space made for indie artists that have kept chugging along in a variety of genres, from rock and metal to Hindustani fusions, ghazals, trance, and of course, hip hop.
It is still surreal to believe that Nas reached down and got involved with Indian culture. Nas, whose music is being studied next to Mozart at Harvard; Nas, whose Illmatic is the first result when you google search ‘greatest rap album ever’; Nas, who has sold over 25 million records worldwide and earned a dozen Grammy nominations; Nas, whose verses perhaps influenced the past quarter century of my life more than any musical artist alive.
What separated Nas from many of his contemporaries—past and present—was his affirmed seriousness in hip hop and rap as a true art form. He often made his clear in his music that the art itself was his destination and ultimate goal, and not just a means to another end, like money or fame. Of course, he enjoyed—and gloated about—the latter in his music, too. But a primary reason for his timelessness was how he managed to remain both an artist and an entertainer, both popular and underground.
In his 2006 album Hip Hop Is Dead, the provocative title was a call to resurrect the genre, to spread his message of prioritising the art above all other distractions. In the title track “Hip Hop Is Dead”, he raps:
On my second marriage, hip hop's my first wifey
And for that we not takin' it lightly,
If hip hop should die, we die together
Bodies in the morgue lie together
He’s committed to his art—and that commitment extended to the influence he has had on popular Western rappers of the current generation—Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole—as well as to rappers across the oceans planting a flag for serious rap in India, like Divine, Prabh Deep, Ahmer, and so many more.
We’ve come a long way since hip hop was a niche genre for us in India—not only is the sound dominating airwaves around the world, but the advent of internet and social media has given every Indian fan more access than ever before, making our days of chasing random cassette tapes seem like a relic of the prehistoric age.
Hopefully, the next generation finds their rap idols among the homegrown talents, from their own gullies, their own nakas, their own ilakas. Talents that will not only be influenced by the genre’s history, but also evolve it forward into a brave new tomorrow.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1.
