Is India’s Big-Ass Rap Beef Over or What?

At first it seemed like a joke which then raked in <20M views between five songs (or diss tracks, amirite?). But I guess it’s fair enough to keep the interest piqued. Raftaar and Emiway are big names in the Indian hip-hop game—reaching out to varied, massive audiences over the last few years, with their popularity only rising day by day. And with both names beefing, fans of Indian hip-hop have had much to cheer, or not.

While Raftaar may have started out underground, his co-opting with Bollywood and other so-called mainstream avenues has catapulted him into big money, big success and a bigger audience. Emiway Bantai on the other hand, has built his YouTube audience from scratch and continues to grow—without the support of any label, sponsor or major partnership. In what seems to be a big year for Indian hip-hop, the quality of music has only been sub-par until now, while plenty of avenues have found themselves wanting a bite of the rap game pie, be it a PUMA, or a Jack & Jones, or biscuits or even Gully Boy, Zoya Akhtar’s next big release.

The beef started from a statement made by Raftaar to popular interviewer Raaj Jones that got taken out of context, and well, the rest played out on YouTube for fans of Indian hip-hop, and content creators. This led to Emiway dropping “Samajh Mein Aaya Kya”, refuting Raftaar’s claims in the Raaj Jones interview that Emiway wasn’t earning much yet, but eventually would build an empire of his own. It was all fine up until now, but it started getting personal. This was met with “Sheikh Chilli” from Raftaar’s side, that aimed to take Emiway’s half-truths down, baring the fight and its claims out in public—almost readying for a social media trial of sorts.

This was followed up by what can be deemed a Halloween special from Emiway titled “Giraftaar”, that was pretty self-explanatory. In this retort, Emiway takes shots at Raftaar for selling out to the mainstream, and that his presence was barely felt in the underground – a fair assumption to make. Raftaar dropped a slightly cringe-y “Anime Hentai” (???) after this, which to be fair, had some good bars and verses, but like his previous releases in the same saga, fall flat when he goes into spoken word. A series of hits and misses for both parties!

In the midst of this out-of-control week, Raftaar took a moment to step aside from the beef to praise Emiway’s new song (man, what is up with these guys) featuring Manj Musik, of RDB fame. I mean, what the fuck is even going on?

This led to Ranveer Singh (how can he be far behind?) dropping a dubbed over video calling for peace, before Emiway called for an end to it, finally leading to Raftaar taking the apparent higher ground and throwing us a much-needed (lol) explainer yesterday. Man, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind keeping up with this, but also you’re made to think it’s all nothing but a well-planned marketing ploy, hatched by both in conjunction. Look at these off-shoots!

While the entirety of the scene has grown in the last decade, and particularly since the last couple of years, the beefs have been far and few, but largely lame AF, imo. For instance, the Haldwani–Dehradun beef seems real and grounded in some bad blood. Poster boy for Indian hip-hop, DIVINE, has been facing plenty of flak since a while, be it from VICE India contributing writer Uday Kapur, Kolkata trio Adiacot (who dissed Emiway on the same joint), or comedy collective Tadpatri Talkies and their spoof rapper creation Gari-B & Badboy Bandya (#neverforget), and of course Prabh Deep. All through this, his stance has been largely non-confrontational. As entertaining as some of these beefs are, they leave much to be desired on the quality front, and perhaps we can only hope for them to get better.

Until then, let’s all blame this guy – he tried.