Someshwar Mahadevan and Ankush Singh Aka Loneking
The 6-minute-11-second track, made with rapper LoneKing, aka Ankush Singh from Rajasthan, moves through the epic in a combination of traditional verses, Hindi rap and contemporary music. Gen Z accounted for more than 70% of hip-hop listeners on its India platform, while hip-hop made up close to 30% of India’s Top 50 tracks in 2023, according to Spotify. “My father passed away in 2020.
Mahadevan’s “Ramcharit Rap”, released last Oct, takes the same broad idea of changing the form without abandoning the epic. The challenge is how to make those values relevant to a generation growing up with social media, constant digital exposure and instant gratification, Mahadevan said. That, he said, was the purpose of his “Ramcharit Rap”. The idea was to create a contemporary doorway into something timeless,” said Mahadevan. She became the producer, and it gave us both something to work on together,” he said.
I don’t want to preach to them. I want to give them something that makes them pause, think and discover these ideas for themselves. “I wanted to take values such as discipline and courage and put them into a format that young people would listen to. The choice of rap also fits a dramatically changed Indian music ecosystem. The project is also personal. After that I wanted my mother to keep herself engaged in something meaningful. So I involved her in this project.
“Young people today live in a world of instant reactions and instant gratification, with constant digital exposure.
The production was revived in 2024, retaining its rock-opera format and touring across different cities in India to introduce yet another generation to this masterpiece.
Pune: When Lillete Dubey took the Mahabharata to the stage as “Jaya” in 1998, she chose rock and roll. The play was conceived as “the Mahabharata for the 21st century”, said Dubey, with its characters speaking like contemporary people rather than in archaic language. Nearly three decades later, in singer-composer Someshwar Mahadevan’s retelling of Ramayana , rap has found a place, compressing the seven kaands into a little over six minutes.