This article looks at a set of homegrown artists pushing back against homogenised ideas of Indian identity by centring regional language, culture, and lived experience in their work.

It focuses on rappers like Arinar Black, Snappy Kaal, and Hruday Satam, highlighting how their music draws from specific geographies - Bihar, Gujarat, and Maharashtra - to explore themes of class, struggle, identity, and personal history, framing the curation as part of a larger shift towards hyperlocal, language-driven expression in Indian music.

It's kind of funny how when we say 'Indian food' or 'Indian outfit' or even just 'Indian culture,' what we usually mean is North India: butter chicken, Hindi, lehenga-choli, and Bollywood weddings. But India has thousands of communities and over 19,000 languages and dialects. Every region is its own world be it food, clothes, or culture. The domination of Hindi in pop culture and insistence on conforming to it is a symptom of a homogenisation of the Indian identity. It's both dangerous and flat-out boring.

In visual culture, there is a general fatigue of the idea of 'India' that brands have banked on to the point of saturation - flowers, weddings, sarees - you get the picture. The ennui of cultural assimilation is palpable and be it visual art or music, more and more artists are fighting it by going local; tapping into their regional identities, micro-cultures, and a specificity that feels like a breath of fresh air.