Mundus, Pearls and Crop Tops: A New Fluid Masculinity Is Rising in South Indian Rap

“Sooraj has a uniform,” said the stylist Disha Pai, reflecting on styling the rapper Hanumankind, or Sooraj Cherukat, on some of his earliest projects. “It’s a baniyan and a pant.” Not much has changed since then, considering that’s exactly how the Bangalore-based rapper skrrted onto our screens last year in Big Dawgs. While his white undershirt and baggy trousers derive from the evergreen style perpetuated by an earlier generation of ’90s and early 2000s American rappers like Tupac and 50 Cent, it simultaneously refers to everyday Indian streetwear – this essence of desiness is furthered when Cherukat sometimes forgoes the pant for a mundu, “which is very Tamil,” added Pai.

“I want the Fendi, I want the whole Balenciaga,” sang the Keralan rapper ThirumaLi while wearing homegrown in the music video for Legacy. While this incongruency also has to do with the South Indian rap industry simply not yet having the kind of money and sourcing power that the more North Indian rap scene, with a long history of mainstream visibility, can take recourse to, there are rappers like Killa K who are separating the Southside aesthetic by consciously preferring the indigenous. He even appeared in an advertisement for Liberty Shoes which proclaimed that. Furthermore, Cherukat choosing to be styled in Indian brands like Polite Society and the emerging Outbreak Lab for his Billboard cover merely confirms that Southside is moving towards an alternate rap masculinity that reps the local, with a move towards indie designers and fluid dressing.

In the music video for Ayyayyo, MC Couper is chased by a gang of boys and, momentarily, our attention goes towards the Keralan rapper’s black T-shirt with the words Local Teashop printed on it – campy and localised at the same time. “Southside wants to get more mainstream,” noted Pai, “but it’s going to be rooted in their culture at the end of the day. More than money and brand names, we give importance to the story,” noted stylist Kanmani K, who styles rappers like Killa K and Yung Raja. “That’s why I have a lot of respect for homegrown brands which add an emotional aspect to clothes in the South.” Kanmani has been working with Erode – a clothing brand that works with modern interpretations of textile weaving techniques from Tamil Nadu like Jamakkalam and Toda embroidery – and styling the rappers in Erode’s genderfluid clothing.

While the traditional rap masculinity exudes a certain kind of hardcore, a younger generation of rappers of colour, particularly A$AP Rocky and Bad Bunny, have shifted to fluid choices, with Rocky channelling the dandy in Harlem fashion, particularly Dapper Dan. While we’ve seen some of North Indian rap go a similar route, with Diljit Dosanjh recently styling a sheer Marine Serre top with a pearl necklace, or the young Delhi-based Chaar Diwaari in a nose ring, an older generation of Indian rap is still stuck in a loop of wanting to look very hardcore and masculine, said Pai. “It’s difficult to get them on board with feminine colours – and even prints,” she exclaimed. “Even accessorising has been hard, as they don’t want things like pearls. They want their background dancers sexy.”

Which is why Kanmani gushes while talking about Yung Raja, who she’s worked with for the past two years. “He’s open to everything,” she gushed. “He wears a bindi sometimes and loves Tamil jewellery – particularly his aunt’s.” In one of his shoots a couple of years ago, he only wore jewellery, with his hair slicked back and a bindi. Kanmani recently styled him in one of Bangalore-based brand Grandma Would Approve’s classic clashing printed jackets, where floral painted prints coexisted alongside leopard prints and tie-dye in the music video for Nalla Neram. “Raja is like a shot of espresso,” she laughed. “He’s very energetic – if you’re with him, you’ll never be tired. So, his fits were also colourful and clashing.”

This penchant for the campy and colourful was strong in the music video for the Marathi rap song Tambdi Chambdi, released earlier last year, where a sparkling psychedelic jacket became a symbolic representation of brown skin shining under the sun. Giving off a similar vibe, Kanmani made Killa K wear a smooth silver shirt which clung to the skin in Podu Mike, which also featured Yung Raja. “It was inspired by an old Kamal Hassan song where he wore a full silver fit,” she explained. “Our idea was to give them a Rajnikant and Kamal vibe, as they’re icons in the Tamil film industry.” She had made him wear a white floor-length trench coat to insinuate his position as a don in the video – after he shrugged it off, we see a gold miniature knife hanging from his Armani belt and similar pendants around his neck. “Killa wore a lot of gold as we were going for a thug vibe,” she said. “In the South, gold is as loved as silver is in the North!”

Gold jewellery was also seen on the Tamil Canadian musician SVDP in a shoot for Erode, where he almost transformed into a Tamil cowboy in a hat – except the hat’s band had a waist chain around it. In another photograph from the same shoot, he’s in a striped pink shirt that falls apart to reveal a gold necklace that was inspired by the mangalsutra. “I was like, why should only women wear it? Men should wear it too,” said Kanmani. “It was like a rebel thing. Then, I used vanki (finger rings) for his nail rings, and Kasumala (a traditional South Indian necklace featuring gold coins) details in his earrings.” Continuing to style him with traditionally female accessories, Kanmani used a septum or nose ring in his cowboy shoot, studded with red and green stones – which you see a lot in Tamil culture, she added.

SVDP transforms into desi Barbie, as Kanmani puts it, in another shoot for Erode with Australian singer Dhee. They sit in the back of a car like papped celebrities in the early 2000s, both in coordinated baby pink and gold jewellery. “He is wearing jhumkas, again all supposedly feminine pieces,” said Kanmani. “He’s open to experimenting, and it’s my job to balance their personality and how open they are to trying new things.” Zesty is a stylist who made the Keralan rapper Vedan wear a distressed crop top for Kuthanthram, the promo song for the film Manjummel Boys. “Vedan wasn’t someone who experimented a lot,” she noted. “I wanted the costume to not overpower him and so I gave him a crop top instead of something that covers him.”

The DIY energy runs strong throughout many of these stylings, considering how Zesty would rather build an outfit from scratch than simply source, or Pai screen-printing Killa K’s name in Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada on a lungi he wore in the music video for Puriya Vei, which he rewore in his concerts. Pai scoured through second-hand and vintage stores to get a jacket with signs of wear for the Bangalore-based rapper King Sinister to wear as the villain in his music video Kettaman. Mashar Hamsa, the go-to costume designer in the South Indian film industry and also for many rappers like Hanumankind, recalled how he created the delicious red velvet shirt for the hip-hop music producer MHR in the music video of Panthalchant, which was about playing football.

“The culture around rap is pretty much everyday in the South,” said Pai. “There are ciphers happening everywhere on the street in Bangalore,” she added. “I’ve grown up here and it’s been wild to see the music culture here expand so much.” This has percolated into Southside’s silver screen, considering now every movie has a promo song which is usually rap – much like it was with the rap boom in Bollywood music about a decade ago with Honey Singh and Badshah. However, here rappers like Hanumankind or Baby Jean are also acting, and Hamsa finds himself frequently styling them on the sets of films and music videos – he was the one styling Hanumankind for Big Dawgs. “He loves to wear basketball jerseys and we’ve seen him wear it so many times in interviews,” said Hamsa, considering Cherukat also draws from his upbringing in Texas. “He wanted to do some kind of vest and so I styled him in the relaxed-fit Double Box pleated trousers and Converse.”

The last movie Cherukat was in was Rifle Club, where he played a brother seeking revenge, strolling into a club with his rifle in yellow sunglasses and a yellow Lacoste tracksuit complete with thin gold chains around his neck. “We referenced Bruno Mars with the glasses, his moustache and jewellery,” laughed Hamsa, who styled him. “The track was a retro co-ordinated set.” It particularly made sense as Lacoste was a brand which was always in our dad and uncles’ closets in the ’90s and early 2000s. “The members of the Rifle Club are rich people, so I followed how Kerala culture would interpret that,” noted Hamsa.

“We are very proud of how we grow up,” said Kanmani. “We are evolving but we’d never leave our story behind us – we carry it with us to remember where we came from, and that’s why I add these tiny elements in my styling, like a gold knife on Killa’s belt.” Even though Killa’s belt was Armani, the rest of his fit was homegrown – and that’s also how Vedan feels. “He is someone who is into his roots and that’s how he’d like to be identified and represent himself before his audience,” said Zesty. “That’s also the same with a few other rappers I have worked with. If I put Nike or Gucci on Vedan, he’ll just say no to my face. He likes to keep it very simple. If we see North Indian rap, they put a lot of brands on their artists – here, artists are willing to explore new brands.”

“Every rapper here forwards the culture,” said Hamsa. “Vedan is talking about his caste and religion,” he said. “Dabzee is talking about Malabar, and so the lyrics have Malabar slang.” South Indian hip-hop is more earthy and gritty, reflected Pai, and the sweat stains clinging to ThirumaLi’s red baniyan as he works in his meat shop in Ayyayyo place it far away from the swanky and pristine. The fight club energy is strong in Ayyayyo and so is boxing – “as everyone here watches UFC,” laughed Hamsa. There are artists like Pasha Bhai, who lived in a Muslim ghetto in Neelasandra in Bangalore, who rap in Dakhni, which is the Karnataka version of Urdu – a language that’s almost lost, said Pai. “It’s a lot more about, hey, do you know the problems our people are facing, as we barely get represented, instead of my life is glam, my life is fun,” she added. This fashion might also change considering how Andheri’s DIVINE can get bigger brands as he is mainstream now, noted Hamsa. “The Southside is just beginning,” he said. “Maybe in a couple of years, things will be different.”



Feature images courtesy Erode