Ragga Royal

The past year or so has seen a considerable broadening of the capital’s appetite for the straight-up and conventional in music. We’ve had the crazy patchwork of Emperor Minge, the brash noise rock of Indigo Children and the highly spirited and individualistic electronica collective DESU, all stepping up to claim avid followings. Amid all this, a few surprised concert-goers must also recall the sight (and sound) of what must be one of a handful, if not the only, Indian dancehall rapper.

Taru Dalmia aka Delhi Sultanate has freestyled at the odd DESU night, jammed live with French DnB maniacs X-Makeena, collaborated with Da-Saz and done his thing at various smaller performance poetry events around town. And given all that one can well imagine going wrong with such a cultural combination, fortunately for him and mercifully for us, he’s pretty damn good at it. “I can only represent what I know or what is within my own realm of experience. I would like to see more assertive urban cultural movements where for instance street kids bond and tell their stories”¦ through dance or music. That is what I hope to inspire,” he said. The interview too, like the Sultanate act, is marked by a refreshing absence of posturing; every thought as clear and precise as the plainspeak the form is built upon.

Born in Delhi, Dalmia bust his chops as a teenage emcee rapping over B-side instrumentals at the local youth centre in a small town on the outskirts of Stuttgart, where he’d moved with his family. He also did a four year stint in the US before returning o Delhi a few years ago. “Had I not spent part of my growing up years abroad I probably would not be doing what I do. I belong to the elite since I have moved back, but growing up as a person of colour in Europe and the US sensitised me to what it’s like to be discriminated against”¦ I got hassled by police on occasion,” he says. “At the same time there was a lot of hip-hop and reggae culture just coming in, which gave kids like me a means of expression, a way to tell our story and speak out.”

The rapper’s lines, delivered by turn in a sluggish sombre tone, staccato bursts of rhyme and mad-fast repetitions, are tempered by a contemporary approach towards the popular hip-hop and reggae themes of police brutality, mental slavery and the dark side of consumerism. “My worst nightmare’s the American dream/They make the world burn like gasoline” he raps on the short ”˜JaladoYe Duniya’, for instance. And “Land developers come down hard build power nexuses/Build more malls and shopping complexeses,” on ”˜Mental Slavery’ (a song that has future club hit written all over it). You can hear both of these, besides other mixdowns and demos including an upcoming track about fairness products, on myspace.com/delhisultanate. “The meaning in politically relevant art lies for me in the ability to call into question and subvert, not so much in slogan shouting a la ”˜fuck the police’,” he said.

Musically, while parts of Dalmia’s output fall prey to clichés of Indianisation, others subvert the same chestnuts with delightfully quirky results. This is best-heard in the use of indigenous melody on the aforementioned ”˜Jalado Ye Duniya’ and ”˜Mental Slavery’ respectively. But he’s set to get enough exposure in the coming months to see what works and what doesn’t go down so well. First up is some eclectic liquid-DnB/dubstep/electro/dancehall stuff from BASSFoundation, which Dalmia got going a few months ago with Ed ”˜Praxis’ Anderson and Maarten ”˜The Viking Warrior’ Klein. “We’re doing this to put music first. We want to give away free CDs at our events to tell people we’re not just doing this to make money off of them,” Dalmia said of the collective. Besides BASSF, he’s also working on two albums side-by-side, which are set for release sometime this year. One of these is a home production with Samrat B aka Audio Pervert of Teddy Boy Kill while the other’s an Indian reggae compilation in collaboration with the Jamaican production team of Sly and Robbie; the latter a project he hopes to rope in Baul and Rajasthani singers for. Enough to make you jump and shout? “Pull up!”