Who is Shubham Jadhav, the ‘rockSun’ rapper at the centre of Pune university controversy?

He had failed his Class 10 exam and had to retake it so that he could go to junior college. But his family’s poverty and his father’s alcohol addiction meant that he had to struggle to pay the paltry fees of the government college. Also, it was becoming clear to him that his passion for Hip Hop had no future in the village.

So, in 2014, he ran away from his village by stealing Rs 100 and landed in Pune.

“He had to sleep at the railway station and had to endure the lathis of the policemen. I have seen him selling tea in Balewadi,” said Askshay Mali, a Pune-based photographer who has also directed the video of Jadhav’s first hit rap Gulabachya Phula.

“I have known him since 2018. It was a peculiar sight because he used to work at the tea stall dressed in formals. After we met, he approached me with a rap which I did not like. After some time, he returned to me with another song – Gulabachya Phula – which literally blew me away. It spoke about the uncomfortable truths and harsh realities of our society. We shot that song at a budget of Rs 1500. That became very popular online and it gave ‘rockSun’ his first hit,” said Mali, whose photography exhibition at Balgandharva Auditorium last year was shut down by the management for “nudity” in the artwork after receiving complaints.

As per Jadhav, he was first introduced to Hip Hop through Honey Sing’s 2013 song Blue Eyes when he was in school back home in his Vadshinde village.

“I came to know that what Honey Singh was doing was called ‘rapping’. So, I searched for that word on the internet and I learnt that it was something that originated in America. Then I listened to raps done by artists and groups such as 2PAC, DMX, Easy E, and N.W.A. Given my Marathi medium schooling and the fact that I was very poor in studies, I had to translate the lyrics into Marathi using the internet so that I could understand what the songs were about,” Jadhav had said in an interview with a video blogger last year.

Soon after, he wrote his first rap song which he now finds embarrassingly bad to recite. However, after shifting to Pune, he worked on his craft—on flow, beats, sound and lyrics.

“I also read up a little bit about Bahujan literature. That helped me develop subjects. Then I wrote a rap called Bedhadak, which was about the government and governance. Then another Dhara 376 which was in reaction to the Hathras rape incident. But both these were removed from YouTube as their contest was found to be objectionable,” Jadhav, who is in his early 20s, had said in the interview.

He tasted success in 2021 when Gulabachya Fula was released and went viral, garnering over 5 million hits on YouTube. His subsequent releases, Ghat Jhala, Baap Pandurang, and ‘Shasan’ also did well. He improved the production quality with each new release.

“Although Pune has a burgeoning rap scene, I have largely worked independently. I feel that the Pune or Marathi rap scene has the potential to garner audiences beyond Maharashtra if we break open the imagined walls that are limiting us. Look at how Punjabi rappers have created a fan base across India and beyond,” he said.

Jadhav feels Marathi artists should also try to bring glamour to their art like Punjabi rappers. “We can’t keep showing valleys and nullahs in the videos. We have to bring in grand scales and creativity. That’s what we will try to do in future,” he said in the 2022 interview.

It seems that this penchant to bring visual scale took Jadhav and his production unit to the SPPU’s 19th-century building that once was the abode of the governor of the then-Bombay Presidency.

Although the police have booked him for ‘trespassing’ and ‘using obscene language’ in the song, he has maintained that he had taken permission to shoot on the premises. “We had taken oral permission from the registrar. That’s the reason the security officials opened the gates and the halls for us on a Sunday and allowed 15 of us to shoot for six hours,” Jadhav had said after the criminal offence was registered against him.

The university has denied this version of events and formed a high-level inquiry committee to probe the incident that has snowballed into a major controversy. With protests by student unions escalating over the issue, even NCP leader Ajit Pawar has stepped in, calling for action.