Meet Hanumankind, the genre-smashing rapper from Kerala whose latest song is a global sensation

The Bengaluru-based Malayali rapper, standing in the centre of the clay pit, starts to quarry thoughts about identity. The skin colour like the bourbon/ A worldwide sign that we face close curtains/ Out here yo, nothing’s ever certain/ Only thing that’s promised is that promises are broken/ Yeah, so we findin’ ways to cope then… he sings in a gravelly voice.

The explosiveness and the slick production are magnified by the addition of some swashbuckling motorists zipping around a Freddy Mercury-esque Cherukat — he is dressed in a white ganji and pants, and sporting a moustache — in the velodrome made of wooden planks alongside some gnarly and gritty beats.

Hanumankind’s lyrics are political. (Photo: Hanumankind/ Instagram)

Cherukat’s latest single outing, ‘Big Dawgs’, has the world talking. The song on YouTube, created in collaboration with producer Kalmi Reddy and directed by Bijoy Shetty, has raked in over 15 million views and over 50,000 comments that are mostly aligned on one thing — ‘Big Dawgs’ is a summer banger.

In the track, Cherukat, who has signed up with the label Def Jam Recordings India, gives a shout-out to Project Pat, the American rapper and Three 6 Mafia co-founder. Impressed, the Memphis rap legend gave Cherukat an unexpected shout-out on Instagram.

“The track’s outreach has been insane. We never expected this response. We thought it would be another one of our songs,” says Hyderabad-based Reddy, a mechanical engineer-turned-independent music producer who’s been working with Cherukat for five years.

Among significant reasons for the phenomenal global response, says Shetty, are facts that the rap is in English, Cherukat’s command over it lyrically and his accent. “In the past, Indian hip-hop was restricted to the space it belongs to, which is why many English rappers couldn’t make it. And which is why I had to use the aggressive idea of the well of death,” says Shetty, who wasn’t surprised by the racist comments amid the brown togetherness and global appreciation that entered the timeline.

While one comment spoke of Cherukat feeling like “he’d come out of a call centre”, another seemed to know what the place “smelled like”. Another, who was impressed with the song, said, “He’s not Indian”.

“This is how India is still understood and which is why when English rappers make videos, they create the kind where they are perceived larger than life. But this is the most Indian video we could have made,” says Shetty about the piece that was shot in a day.

The song, he says, began on a Zoom call, after Reddy really liked a sample — one that’s been worked to sound like a car engine in the beginning of the number — and told Cherukat about it. “How he pens down his realisations is what’s interesting. My job is to uplift that idea, and him and I bounce off well in the studio. Staying authentic is key,” says Reddy, who is also working on an upcoming album with Cherukat.

Born in Kerala, Cherukat was raised in many countries, including Africa and UAE, due to his father’s work with a leading oilfield company. His family finally settled in Texas, US. Before he turned to rap, Cherukat returned to India after a degree in business administration and joined Goldman Sachs. He took the stage name ‘Hanumankind’ for two reasons — it was a play on ‘Humankind’ and a reference to ‘Hanuman’ implied strength. It stuck.

Soon, he was trying to enmesh typical Indian music and motifs alongside slick English rap. While his piece ‘Southside’ infused the beats of the tabla along his rap, ‘Genghis’ was shot in the bylanes of Bengaluru, among people who inhabit them.

Cherukat was also heard in the recent Fahadh Faasil-starrer Malayalam action comedy Aavesham. Composed by Sushin Shyam, the rapper was front and centre in ‘The Last Dance’, the hip gangsta rap that put him under much spotlight.

And like most interesting rap, Cherukat’s lyrics were political. In ‘Genghis’, he drops the verse: But what you partying for? We got issues in our nation cause there’s parties in war. ‘Big Dawgs’ is only a logical successor to the kind of music Cherukat has made in the past few years. “Only, that the shoot was as risky as it could get,” says Shetty, about Cherukat hanging out of a white Maruti 800 circling on the creaking wall in the well of death.