When Houston A. Baker Jr optimistically announced that rap had become ‘an international, metropolitan hybrid’, which was ‘interrupting the average workday’ from ‘New Delhi to Ibadan’ (Reference Baker1991, p. 223), rap was still being consumed in the aspirational global city's exclusive enclaves inhabited and frequented by elite, anglicized youth. Ethiraj Dattatreyan's book The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity and Urban Space brings to light the ‘slumization’ of Indian desi hip hop, pioneered by engineer-turned-rapper Baba Sehgal, two decades later by young men from diverse ethnic working-class migrant backgrounds dwelling in Delhi's urban villages. The Globally Familiar convincingly argues that migrant working class young men's performance of hip hop's sonic, visual and kinemic aesthetics enables them to reimagine and remake the self and the city. He shows that the young men's adaptation of black hip hop masculinities disrupts 21st century Delhi's normative understandings of masculinity as well as its social order through their transcending their marginalized positions in its urban socio-spatial hierarchy. The book makes a stunning contribution to the burgeoning research on digital cultures, globalization, South Asian urban neighbourhoods and masculinity, deploying the disciplinary framework of anthropology. However, even though it unveils a new musical explosion in Delhi's urbanscape, its homogenization of diverse hip hop voices disengages them from the myriad microregional and transnational narratives they negotiate. Similarly, in focusing on the possibilities offered to these youth to connect by transcending class, caste, gender, religion, language and national difference, it elides the musical production and consumption of their Jat, Sikh, Garhwali or other neighbours in the urban villages to which they lay their claim.
In his Introduction, Dattatreyan coins the metaphor of ‘the globally familiar’ to describe the connection between digital technologies and globalization, and to examine the emergence of what he calls digital hip hop in Delhi's urban villages. The percolation of hip hop to youth growing up in working class migrant urban slums of Humayunpur, Khirki and Tilak Nagar, and their assimilation of black masculinity, illustrates the way the ‘loop links’ of hip hop practice encapsulate both the flow and rupture aesthetic of hip hop. Dattatreyan demonstrates that unlike hip hop in New York that expresses the marginalization of black migrants, blackness's ‘manifest dualism’ can generate vitality, relationships, and economic value even as it indexes exclusion. In a way similar to the transnational mobilization of rural Jat subjectivities in the construction of an Apna Punjab in the virtual Bhangranation, Delhi's ‘Slumgod’ hip hoppers’ self-imagining as a hood on the lines of Afrika Bambaataa's Zulu Nation confirms the emancipatory possibilities of new technologies in forming marginalized brotherhoods across spatial boundaries. The globally familiar becomes a shorthand for elucidating the myriad transformations in the local space, ushered in by smartphones.
The first chapter shows that the young men in Delhi gravitated towards hip hop to form friendships and find romance, following the journey of Jay, a Garhwali of Nepali origin. He demonstrates that the coproduction and circulation of hip hop music videos on social media provides young men opportunities to form friendships and imagine romance in real and virtual spaces across difference. The chapter effectively brings out Delhi hip hop's continuity and rupture with American hip hop in its reproducing hip hop's hood and male-centric lens even as it performs heterosexual male friendship and romance in a way that disrupts normative hip hop misogyny. He makes the important point that despite Jay's transformation into a global male urban subject through his embodied reproduction of a hip hop inflected aesthetic, his masculinity is fractured by his subscription to subcontinental arranged marriage norms. However, Jay and his friends’ gravitation towards hip hop and disassociation from Bollywood need to be contextualized within the intersection of Delhi hip hop's arrival with large-scale north-eastern migration and the mobilization of a micronationalist discourses of Tibet, Gorkhaland and the North east, which explicates the bonding between earlier upper caste Nepali Garhwali and recently migrated north-eastern youth.
Chapter Two turns to the materiality of the global familiar and offers an extremely nuanced reading of style by deconstructing the complex ways in which young men in Delhi produce themselves as global subjects. Dattatreyan argues that the transformative and citational value of branded T-shirts, snapback hats and sneakers, even if fakes, equips the young men with a difference and a brash confidence, captured in the slang term ‘swag’, through which they are able to muster the courage to transcend their concrete identities and connect with global peers. Dattatreyan unpacks the complex meanings of fetish, swag and fake through the young men's fetishization of hip hop's sartorial objects. The emphasis on style as a marker of distinction in studies of youth subcultures acquires new meanings in the Delhi hip hop context, since the difference it produces permits entry into spaces of exclusion.
Chapter Three reveals the corporate interest in India's burgeoning youth market and the pull factor of real and virtual hip hop performances in brand marketing. In unravelling the complex relationship between labour and capital in the era of global capitalism, Dattatreyan invokes the concept of hustle to connect the freedom offered by hip hop with the acquisition of value as labour. Conceding that Delhi hip hop, like its New York counterparts, is enmeshed in circuits of capital, he emphasizes its disruption of the global capitalist logic. He uses the phrase ‘aspirational commodities’ to underline the practitioners’ performance in capital's non-spaces and virtual dissemination of their videos in the hope of creating employment opportunities. The notion of affective commodities introduced here offers a redefinition of commodity image through its focusing on the affective charge of spontaneous improvised hip hop performances that are commodified into a product by corporate hip hop brand managers. Dattatreyan concludes that Dalit hip hopper Dhruv's conscious disruption of the workings of global capital writes a note of disjuncture in the promoters’ universalist narrative of hip hop and reappropriates hip hop as a political space.
The next chapter engages with the role of diasporic Indian hip hop practitioners who Dattatreyan calls hip hop emissaries in promoting hip hop culture in Delhi and the complex ties that bind them to the young men in Delhi as mentors and facilitators. Dattatreyan presents the diasporic influence as split into two groups, the Indian American and European, and elucidates the difference in their understanding of hip hop ideologies. The Indian American diaspora is ‘decolonial’, invoking hip hop's generic origins in New York working-class migrant neighbourhoods, and closes the gap between the black and brown hip hop communities. European emissaries are ‘universal’ and view hip hop as a positive space that allows friendships to form across all forms of difference. Revealing the shortcomings in each, Dattatreyan concedes that diasporic hip hop producers have indeed served as catalysts in the explosion of Delhi's hip hop scene. The relations that Delhi's young men form with the diasporic producers using kinship vocabularies and the conceptualization of reciprocal exchanges as gifts are also addressed. But the chapters’ foregrounding of the emissaries’ ideological difference and the dilemmas of mentees caught in relationships of obligation does not dwell on other forms of appropriation that diasporic collaboration has entailed in other musics from India.
In the chapter that follows, Dattatreyan investigates the production of a cosmopolitan urban aesthetic in an urban village to contest normative forms of urban development while valorizing other gentrifying forms of urbanity in which local working-class, young male, hip hop producers are coopted to produce a vision of the neighbourhood from below. Dattatreyan documents the transformation of Khirki, a former grazing farmland with a Mughal lineage, with new migrations of construction workers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar followed by divergent multiracial migrations. He takes up the case study of the Aap ki Sadak project by a Khirki-based NGO, Khoj, that is premised on the mistaken understanding that local young men possess a superior experiential knowledge of its streets. Dattatreyan argues that despite the employment opportunities and media visibility that the project brought the hip hop producers, it disseminated images of working-class hip hop to represent Khirki as a cosmopolitan, artistic space with a rich history drawing on the alien global aesthetic of the urban village. He uncovers lyrical and performance spaces reflecting the young men's lived experience that disrupt both the planners’ functionalist vision and their nongovernmental critics’ aestheticized one. Dattatreyan's crucial invocation of the musealization of older urban villages like Hauz Khas and Shahpur Jat sidesteps their residents’ unexpected retention of ethnic Jat or Muslim Rajput codes, despite being catapulted into global cosmopolitanism.
The final chapter addresses the contentious issue of race and the way in which racial logic works within the hip hop universe. Dattatreyan's formulation of the notion of anti-blackness in the context of Delhi, which is framed within the racialized African American and global discourses of blackness, expands the idea of blackness to include all forms of discrimination based on colour, race and caste. He points out that the class-, caste-, colour- and race-based discrimination encountered by ethnic groups from the North East, Dalits and Africans in Delhi makes them ally themselves with hip hop's marginalized blackness. This chapter unfolds the emergence of hip hop among migrants of African origin and their encounters with the Indo-Aryan racism practiced by older residents of Delhi, which is fortified by the colonial construction of Africans as primitive. While teasing out their internal differences and the in-between position of the India-raised Somali refugee Hanif, he brings out the irony of Africans’ exclusion from institutionalized hip hop spaces as they cannot lay claim to Delhi's urban space in the way the children of Indian migrants can. The symbolic significations of the dehistorized and decontextualized term ‘Desi Nigga’ permit racially dissimilar ethnic groups from the North East, derogatively labelled ‘Chinkies’, and the South labelled ‘Madrasis’, to partake in a global discourse of blackness that erases differences of colour. Sensitive to the fractures within this imagined solidarity, Dattatreyan expresses his optimism about bridging difference in the soundscape of hip hop.
The epilogue takes up the problems of ethnography and updates us on the lives of the hip hop practitioners. Here Dattatreyan voices the dilemmas faced by the ethnographer in practicing what he calls hiphopography, who needs to adjust textbook ethnographical issues such as sampling, distance and objectivity, ethics of research, thick description and so on to the era of digital ethnography. The fine line between ethnographical interaction and lasting friendship, or the appropriateness of using pseudonyms, appear unsuited to the ethnography practiced by Dattatreyan. In particular, the reciprocal exchanges that bind both the ethnographer and his subjects in a complex friendship raises important questions about the value of affective ethnography. The chapter concludes that despite Dhruv's symbolic success in reversing working-class youth's representations in mainstream media, the limited employment opportunities offered to the young men through hip hop do not allow them to break out of the circuit of ethnicized, racialized and gendered jobs in the fast-growing service sector. The disparate career moves and developments of individual hip hop practitioners, some of whom have undoubtedly acquired limited or temporary success since the book was written, leaves the question about the future possibilities of hip hop open.
It was the audio cassette in the 1970s and the cellphone in the 1990s that possessed the breathtaking potential to stir up Delhi's urbanscape and usher in sonic democratization (Jeffrey and Dorron Reference Jeffrey and Doron2013). The Globally Familiar incisively deconstructs the smartphone's stirring up of Delhi's urbanscape post-2006, brilliantly throwing light on ‘an emergent masculinity tied to particular spaces and places in Delhi‘ through hip hop producers’ partial and temporary transcendence of their lived experience of poverty, deprivation and limited employment opportunities. However, its examination of the Indian Desi hip hop of the young men in exclusion from diverse Bhasha hip hops, particularly Haryanvi or Garhwali hip hop consumed by Humayunpur's original Jat inhabitants and Garhwali migrants or Punjabi hip hop in Soni's Tilak Nagar, makes it a partial account of the Indian hip hop scene. Despite noticing changes in Delhi hip hop's sartorial style, Dattatreyan averts his eyes from the influence of Punjabi hip hop's ‘wakhra swag’ (Punjabi: different swag) or K-pop's Korean swag that coexist with American or European inspired hip hop.
