Wild Wild Women have never asked for space – they have tried to make it, create it. The Mumbai-based group, said to be India's first all-female hip-hop group, is changing how representation in the genre looks and sounds like. It began with a few artists meeting at open mics and cyphers and has now grown into a collective that performs across cities, festivals and cultural spaces. Their most recent performance was at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) Music Festival on October 9 at Sunder Nursery. The group began from the question that lingered in Mumbai’s rap circles: 'Where are all the women?' The collective was formed in 2020, when several women met in Marol, Mumbai at a cypher organised by Krantinaari (Ashwini Hiremath) and HashtagPreeti (Preeti N Sutar). The core rappers – HashtagPreeti, MC Mahila (Shuti Raut), JQueen (Jacquilin Lucas), Pratika (Pratika E Prabhune) and Krantinaari – along with break dancers FlowRaw (Deepa Singh) and MGK (Mugdha Mangaonkar) and graffiti artist Gauri Dadbholkar, bring together a multilingual, multi-genre dynamic that reflects the diverse realities of Indian womanhood. “We had to create our own space. Inclusivity didn’t always exist when we went to cyphers earlier. So that became our mission. We built our own space,” says Pratika. At KNMA Music Festival, which was curated by musician TM Krishna, the entire crew performed — a rare occasion for them. “TM Krishna sir gave us the freedom to have the whole crew. That allowed us to express better,” says HashtagPreeti. Despite the mix of ages and background, the audience responded with warmth, pleasantly surprising them. “Usually, we play for hip-hop crowds. This was a new kind of audience, and we loved it,” adds Krantinaari. The lyrics to their music effortlessly slips between Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi and English. They refused to be bound by language or geography, even when they started out. It is a reflection of who they are and where they come from. “Speaking in our own languages gives us authenticity. It connects us to our roots and helps us reach listeners who see themselves in us,” says HashtagPreeti. Their songwriting process is equally fluid — a beat sparks a verse, which sparks another, until the song finds its rhythm through collective instinct. HashtagPreeti explains their songwriting process. She says, “There’s no specific formula for how we create songs. Each track comes alive differently.” She adds that each of them writes their own verses in their languages once the common theme or idea for the story is decided, the structure of the song decides the length of the verses each one of them has to write. There are disagreements amongst them, of course, but those have never been roadblocks. “We always come to a common ground because the purpose is bigger than all of us,” says HashtagPreeti. For Pratika, who came to rap from heavy metal (she once played bass in a band called Chronic Phobia) the collaboration opened new ways of expression. “That cypher was our beginning… I always wanted to be in something that empowered and nurtured women in hip-hop.” For others, too, music wasn’t a childhood certainty but something that arrived unexpectedly. “Most of us don’t come from musical families. Music just came to us, and now it’s our life,” adds HashtagPreeti. Their lyrics are drawn from lived experience – gender expectations, body image, urban survival, mental health – thus making their verses a representation of collective experience that women experience in their lifetime. “We’re women, so naturally we draw from what we face, but not everyone relates. Naturally, we have more female listeners than male. Still, we do it for ourselves.”
