Underground cyphers are helping young Kashmiris reclaim their voices

Spaces Between the Beats is a series spot­light­ing music and cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ties around the world, explor­ing their sto­ries as they build resilience and find mean­ing and hope in connection.

Against the back­drop of a dilap­i­dat­ed silk fac­to­ry in Sri­na­gar, a group of young peo­ple assem­ble on aban­doned ground on the out­skirts of the city. The speak­ers blast old-school hip-hop while the event organ­is­er helps peo­ple nav­i­gate their way to the loca­tion via Insta­gram. The stage is now set for anoth­er cypher in the cap­i­tal of con­flict-rid­den Kashmir.

Stand­ing near a rust­ed car body, 18-year-old Iqra Nis­ar – the youngest rap­per in the group, who goes by the name Yung Illa – takes the spot­light and spits about her expe­ri­ence of com­ing of age in rur­al north Kash­mir. Her moth­er watch­es in awe. Young kids play crick­et in the dis­tance, and a few near­by shep­herds occa­sion­al­ly glance over towards the hub­bub while tend­ing to their sheep.

“I love hip-hop. It’s the only thing I want to do with my life, and my fam­i­ly sup­ports me,” Yung Illa tells me, adding that she’d take up music pro­fes­sion­al­ly. ​“In Kash­mir, talk­ing about human rights brings trou­ble and being a girl is even more difficult.”

From a hard­line gov­ern­ment at the helm in Kash­mir to a con­ser­v­a­tive soci­ety, young rap­pers face a lega­cy of free speech crack­downs. The gov­ern­ment sees Kashmir’s hip-hop move­ment as a threat to their author­i­ty, as artists often use the genre as a vehi­cle for address­ing human rights abus­es by the Indi­an state. Rap­pers have been harassed, intim­i­dat­ed, and had their stu­dios raid­ed by the gov­ern­ment agencies.

Organ­is­ing a cipher is even more dif­fi­cult since India revoked the region’s lim­it­ed auton­o­my in August 2019 and clamped down on civ­il lib­er­ties. How­ev­er, in the mid­dle of an over-three- decade-long armed con­flict, young peo­ple in Kash­mir con­tin­ue to find their voice through hip-hop.

Amid intim­i­da­tion and the con­stant threat of being arrest­ed for crit­i­cis­ing the gov­ern­ment, young hip-hop artists come togeth­er when­ev­er they can, with the aim of pre­serv­ing the Kash­miri expe­ri­ence, the region’s his­to­ry and, more impor­tant­ly, to express their frus­tra­tions with the sta­tus quo.

To organ­ise a cypher, the com­mu­ni­ty remains in touch on social media and meets at least once a month with­out dis­clos­ing the loca­tion until the last moment.

Wear­ing a den­im jack­et with a map of Kash­mir embroi­dered on its back, 28-year-old Fahad Idrees, also known as K2, didn’t cut any slack as he high­light­ed the human rights vio­la­tions that the Himalayan region has wit­nessed over the years.

“I’m the cof­fin of free­dom cov­ered on the mar­tyr / And writer of the truth cause the truth speaks loud­er / I’m the sword of the faith ​’n prayers are my armour / Flail in my hands will bleed every mon­ster / Cur­few in my city, scari­ness every­where / Arrest­ing lil kids, won’t lead you any­where / Cause I’m gonna bomb your régime / And Mar­tyrs will hear your scream.”

​“I’m sor­ry, but I can’t rap about peace and love when I don’t see it around me. It is injus­tice to this art. It is dirt on jus­tice,” Idrees tells me. ​“Rap is not to abuse, pro­mote drugs, or car­i­ca­ture a woman as a sex-sym­bol. Rap is an art of speak­ing truth to pow­er, which was the pur­pose it was born for.”

Idrees got into hip-hop when the genre took the val­ley for a spin in the 2010s. In the midst of a civil­ian upris­ing, in which over 120 peo­ple were killed in street protests, Kash­mir heard ​“I Protest”. Shared wide­ly via Blue­tooth, the song imme­di­ate­ly became an anthem of the peo­ple and shot the artist, Roushan Ilahi, pop­u­lar­ly known as MC Kash, to fame.

Since then, Kash­mir’s rap scene has seen sev­er­al upheavals. Artists have faced state intim­i­da­tion, gone under­ground, or peeled off to pur­sue careers in oth­er fields and earn a sta­ble income. For Illahi’s part, he con­tin­ued to rap about the civil­ian dis­ap­pear­ances, mass graves and the strug­gle in Kash­mir until 2016, when state intim­i­da­tion became so bad that he, too, called it quits.

Scared of get­ting arrest­ed, Idress also left the scene. ​“I’m a rebel­lious rap­per. I rap about the blood­shed in Kash­mir. I have writ­ten 125 songs and all of them talk about Kash­mir pol­i­tics, sup­pres­sion and human rights vio­la­tions,” he tells me. ​“One has to be hon­est to his art.”

Idress first rose to promi­nence in 2013 when a human rights organ­i­sa­tion asked him to per­form in one of their events, which was arranged in tan­dem with a gov­ern­ment-spon­sored con­cert in Kash­mir fea­tur­ing the renowned con­duc­tor Zubin Mehta. In front of a ban­ner dis­play­ing pho­tos of young peo­ple killed dur­ing the 2010 protests, accom­pa­nied by the words ​‘Haqee­qat-e-Kash­mir’ (Real­i­ty of Kash­mir) in big bold let­ters, Idress per­formed his pow­er­ful song ​“Resis­tance is a Choice,” which talks about fight­ing against the oppres­sion and bru­tal­i­ties of the Indi­an state:

“When rules are so obnox­ious you have to become an out­law / What will you do when your throat is being slit with a sharp saw / You are left with a choice to hold, dri­ve and fight / So tell me why won’t you fight for they have snatched your birth right / They kill you, they maim you, they mur­der you, they tor­ture you / So just go and fight broth­er there is no one to assist you.”

Inspired by the British rap­per and activist Lowkey, aka Karim Den­nis, Idress believes that rap is the voice of the voice­less. That’s why he chose K2 as his stage name – in hope that his voice can reach the same scale as the sec­ond-high­est moun­tain on Earth. “[Lowkey] doesn’t rap non­sense. He talks about the plights of Pales­tine. Intifa­da. Killings. Same thing I want to do for my peo­ple,” Idress says.

A week before the event near the silk fac­to­ry, Koshur Nizam – a promi­nent hip-hop col­lec­tive home to some of the most inno­v­a­tive and best-sell­ing artists, like Ahmer Javed – organ­ised a gig in Sri­na­gar. Dusk fell as eerie silence engulfed the venue, a large flock of birds flew over­head, and Javed took to the stage. The crowd rushed for­ward to get a close glimpse of the newest hip-hop sen­sa­tion in Kashmir.

In his 45 minute per­for­mance, Javed sang many of his hits. The young crowd waved their hands in the air and nod­ded their heads in sync with a rap­per who was rap­ping back-to-back to keep the momen­tum going till he fin­ished his set with ​“Rov” – a song fea­tur­ing the poet, musi­cian and film­mak­er Faheem Abdul­lah, which starts with a woman singing soft­ly about a gar­den of flow­ers where every­one is invit­ed to laugh and play togeth­er. Then the beat drops in, and Javed starts rap­ping: ​“They took my beloved / And my bones become ash / I lost my beloved away from this world / He made me help­less / Who is this thief in my house…”

Talk­ing with Huck after the per­for­mance, Javed says that Kash­miri hip-hop draws its inspi­ra­tion from the same sense of social injus­tice that birthed the genre in the US. ​“When Black peo­ple were treat­ed like sec­ond-class cit­i­zens by whites and nobody was lis­ten­ing to their griev­ances, they came up with rap to tell their sto­ries. Sim­i­lar is the case with us (Kash­miri),” he says, adding that the scene in Kash­mir is still very much ​“under­ground.”

Javed came into the lime­light in 2019 – a time when the Gov­ern­ment of India had uni­lat­er­al­ly abol­ished the spe­cial sta­tus of Kash­mir and there was a wide­spread crack­down on free speech in the Himalayan region. His debut album Lit­tle Kid, Big Dreams, was an instant hit, but back home things were get­ting worse. After releas­ing his album in New Del­hi, Javed came home and saw peo­ple restrict­ed in their houses.

“There wasn’t much to do dur­ing the cur­few days. So, I used to go near the Jhelum Riv­er for leisure, where I found oth­er rap artists look­ing for a plat­form to exhib­it their tal­ent,” he says. There, they came togeth­er to form a hip-hop com­mu­ni­ty called ​“Kashur Nizam (Kash­miri Culture).”

Com­par­ing their moti­va­tion to Rage Against the Machine, whose unapolo­getic rock tar­gets every­thing from Amer­i­can cor­po­ra­tions and war­mon­ger­ing to racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and police bru­tal­i­ty. Like them, Javed says, Kash­miri hip-hop also refus­es to shy away from reality.

“We (rap­pers) are not polit­i­cal peo­ple. We just rap about what we see and observe,” he explains. ​”And if our cir­cum­stances led us to rap about the atroc­i­ties that are hap­pen­ing around us, it is not our fault. It is con­scious music.”

Hip-hop first made its way to Kash­mir in ear­ly 2000s when the val­ley was intro­duced to rap­pers like Eminem, 50 Cent and Tupac. The lyri­cal themes of oppres­sion, pover­ty and racism res­onat­ed with young peo­ple, who saw mir­rors of their own experiences.

Thir­teen years since Illahi’s pop­u­lar­i­ty threw a light on Kash­miri hip-hop, the scene is small but pas­sion­ate. There are around 40 rap­pers in Kash­mir today spit­ting about pol­i­tics, human rights vio­la­tions, mil­i­tari­sa­tion and speak­ing truth to pow­er. In doing so, they are inspir­ing gen­er­a­tions to come.

Among the crowd to watch Javed are two young boys from down­town Sri­na­gar nod­ding their heads to beats. Arsalan (18) and Dawood (19) have been friends since child­hood and lis­ten­ing to hip-hop for eight years now. For them, Kash­miri hip-hop reflects what young peo­ple like them go through in their day-to-day lives.

“It’s like some­one is singing our sto­ry,” they say. ​“We live in the most volatile area in the city, and we have seen so much tur­moil right from our child­hood. This music gives us a chance to lis­ten to our own feelings.”

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