A defiant rap

In “blatantly casteist” Bhubaneswar, where Sumeet Samos was studying in a higher secondary school — and worked part-time in a chow mein shop to meet expenses — he had an altercation with one of his teachers. According to Samos, the teacher taunted him on his ‘low’ caste. “Do you guys have cowdung in your heads?” he remembers the teacher saying. He never got along with his teachers and fellow-students, he says, since “they could not digest my success at studies and extracurricular activities”. He usually stood third or fourth in class.

Samos threw his notebook at the teacher and left the class. He got a slap from the school’s receptionist for this breach and was suspended later. Final exams were scheduled a month later, and Samos went home to study. He stood second in the institution. When he went to collect his mark sheet, he told the administration staff that while they would remain where they were, he will go places. “They had tried to show me my place and I wished to show them theirs,” he says.

This self-confidence or arrogance — cultivated consciously, according to Samos, to maintain one’s dignity in the face of ‘oppression’ — is paying him rich dividends today. Earlier this week, the rap musician performed in Paris at a concert-cum-discussion organised by the city-based radio show Radio Live, produced by Aurélie Charon and Caroline Gillet in collaboration with the cartoonist Amélie Bonnin. Over two days, it featured artists from around the world who have had first-hand experience of living on the margins of society. The show is a mix of live exchanges, archival inputs, music and on-the-spot drawings by Bonnin. The session with Samos was themed Parents-Children, and included guests from Senegal, Syria and France too.

All in all, it has been a lucky month for Samos. First, he received his master’s degree in Spanish language and literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). His degree was said to have been withheld for the two demonstrations he had participated in last year, against the college administration, organised by the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association (BAPSA), a primarily Dalit organisation based out of JNU. And then came the Paris performance, for which his mother too spoke via video-conferencing from Koraput, in southern Odisha. Lying on the Odisha-Andhra Pradesh border, Koraput has Central Reserve Police Force stationed there permanently to combat Maoists. Samos, who belongs to the Dom caste, faults the Maoists for creating a ‘divide’ between the area’s Dalits and tribals for political gains. “The Dalits are slightly better-off than the tribals, and the Maoists use this to turn them against us, as usurpers of land that originally belonged to tribals,” he says.

Echoing BAPSA and other Dalit student groups, Samos believes that leftist groups led by ‘upper-caste’ comrades would never allow those like him to take centre-stage. “I was with a leftist student group when I first came to JNU, but all they let me do was stick posters.”

It was at JNU that he honed his skills in rap, having dabbled in this music form since his adolescent days. Inspired by the work of black rappers like Tupac, he began uploading his original work online a few years ago. Enthused by the sizeable response, he recently launched a YouTube channel to showcase his songs.

He performed earlier this year at Hyderabad Central University, at a function to commemorate Rohith Vemula, the Dalit student activist whose suicide in 2016 blew the lid off the alleged institutional discrimination against ‘lower caste’ students in India.

At the screening of a documentary on Bhima-Koregaon — the site of a battle that has attained legendary status in Dalit history as a victory of Mahars against the brahminical Peshwas — at JNU some months ago, Samos made it clear that for Dalit radicals like him, it was not only the BJP that was fascist. “We believe that the entire Hindu society is fascist. And it is the Dalit-Bahujans who are fighting this on a day-to-day basis.”

His views are inspiring an entire generation of Dalit youth. Rahul Sonpimple, a BAPSA activist and friend of Samos, wrote on Facebook ahead of his Paris performance: “Many mocked him when he started rapping, writing about his life and his thoughts about change. His everyday writing on social media while giving a tough time for traditional (Upper caste Left-right) intellectuals, is helping many a Dalit-Bahujan youngsters to assert their autonomy against the upper caste moral gaze… For me he is a hero.”

Or, as Samos himself sang at the performance: “ Maang-maang ke thak gaye , ab sab kuch lenge chheen ke (We are tired of asking, we are now going to snatch it all).”

It was through Delhi-based journalist Dhrubo Jyoti that Samos came in touch with Radio Live. “They wanted to speak to youngsters who were queer. But I asked them to speak to Dalit youngsters also,” Jyoti says. Rap music, he adds, has helped Dalit youngsters find a voice, and hear things that mattered to them being spoken of.

“The popular culture is mostly about romance. But black rappers sang of police brutality or living in slums, which our youngsters could identify with.” Moreover, rap music helped dispel the impression that the marginalised were always ‘broken-down’ people. “It helped replace the framework of oppression that Dalits are always viewed through. Instead, here are people who are powerful, who have culture and art, a history, who are interesting and who can resist.”

Abhimanyu Kumar is a Delhi-based freelance journalist

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