“I need two minutes alone,” says Badshah, taking a deep breath to collect himself, his head in his hands, as the last reporter leaves the small white tent that serves as his green room. He’s been on the road for three straight days, and sleep deprivation is finally catching up. He gets 30 seconds. Then, his live band troops in for a quick chat before they take the stage at the Bollywood Music Project, a music festival at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. The band forms a huddle around Badshah, who reminds me of an American football coach calling out last-minute plays before a big game. He makes some final adjustments to the set list and reminds his co-vocalists Gurinder Rai and Aastha Gill of their cues. Outside, festival security struggle to hold back a small but belligerent crowd trying to beg, cajole or threaten their way into the tent.

Half an hour later, dressed in a black and blue sports jacket and black track pants, Badshah jogs up the final couple of steps and sprints onstage to join the rest of his band. The roar from the crowd is deafening. For the next 45 minutes, I watch Badshah prowl, strut and leap across the stage, flanked by Rai and Gill, sweat flying everywhere. 5,000 eager fans, Badshaholics, as they call themselves – and include entire families with toddlers in tow – shout along to every word. His exhaustion swept away, Badshah feeds off the crowd’s energy, cracking jokes and urging them to go wild.

It’s no stretch to say that Badshah is one of the most bankable names in the Indian music industry, the man every Bollywood producer turns to when he needs a guaranteed hit. The 31-year-old rapper-producer’s tracks have become a ubiquitous part of our soundscape, blaring out from car speakers, nightclub PAs and at wedding parties. He broke out of the Punjabi rap underground in 2012 with sleeper hit “Saturday Saturday”, a party anthem for urban India – upwardly mobile, brand-conscious and unabashedly hedonistic. After a string of minor Bollywood hits – including Delhi house party favourite “Abhi Toh Party Shuru Hui Hai” and the campy, overblown club banger “Aaj Raat Ka Scene” – he released his debut major label single “DJ Waley Babu”. The track climbed to No 1 on the Indian iTunes chart in 24 hours and was named one of the ten most successful non-English songs in the world by Consequence Of Sound, establishing Badshah as the reigning king of Bollywood rap.

The music video for “DJ Waley Babu” – and subsequent releases such as “Chull” and “2 Many Girls” – offers a glimpse into the party-rapper’s fantasy world, packed with Lamborghinis and gold chains, poolside parties and shiny chrome-walled clubs, ridiculously hot women who can twerk and grind without spilling a drop of beer from their red cups. His music combines hip-hop’s aspirational materialism with Punjabi machismo – stylish, ostentatious, but with the threat of explosive violence lurking behind soft-spoken words. With his larger-than-life persona, fuelled not only by the music videos but also by Instagram photos of expensive cars and equally expensive sneakers, Badshah has tapped into the escapist yearnings of a new generation of young Indians. It’s a rich vein that he’s found, propelling him to the status of a desi rap superstar who appears on reality TV shows and performs to packed crowds in Sydney, Toronto and, of course, Delhi.

When the set ends, pandemonium breaks out backstage almost immediately. The mob of fans waiting to take a selfie or get an autograph has grown bigger, more confrontational. Other artists – A-list musicians themselves – stand by and look amused, utterly ignored in the frenzy for Badshah.

Badshah’s real name is Aditya Prateek Singh Sisodia. He grew up in a middle-class Punjabi home in Delhi – his father worked in a government office; his mother was a school teacher. “They’re god-fearing, society-fearing, just fearing fearing,” he tells me earlier that morning, in the living room of his suite at the Eros Hotel in Delhi.

“I wasn’t a popular kid,” he continues, before downing the rest of his chocolate milkshake. “I couldn’t talk to girls, I probably had a complex because I came from a typical lower-middle-class family.”

Like many kids, Badshah overcame his shyness by assuming the role of class joker. He often had run-ins with the school authorities at Bal Bharati Public School Pitampura, and spent a lot of time standing outside the class as punishment (“I was an outstanding student,” he chuckles at his own dad joke). In the fifth grade, he got kicked out of the school choir for indiscipline. Another time, he got into trouble for writing an obscene rap ditty about his math teacher that became famous (“He deserved it, he was a terrible teacher”). But he was also academically gifted.

A math nerd, he would spend much of his spare time coming up with alternative proofs for classic theorems, or recruiting his cousins to help him perform DIY physics experiments. When he wasn’t geeking out, he was honing his entrepreneurial skills. At age seven, he started a “very profitable” comics lending business out of his bedroom.



A few years later, he tried his hand at designing sneakers, with dreams of opening a shoe shop. His love affair with sneakers – he owns hundreds of pairs (“I stopped counting at 500”) – has been going on almost as long as his love affair with rap, which started when a school friend introduced him to Tupac. Badshah found the GOAT hip-hop legend a little too gangsta for his desi middle-class tastes, but that discovery led him to Eminem and then deeper into the rap underground.

“My father really wanted me to become an engineer,” he says. “I did not.” After school, he got into the coveted BSc course at St Stephen’s, Delhi, but his father was having none of it. So after a month-and-a-half, he left to join a civil engineering course at PEC University of Technology in Chandigarh, one of the top non-IIT engineering colleges in the country. He wasn’t happy, but the move turned out to be fortuitous: His new college friends introduced him to the Asian underground in the UK, where artists like Jay Sean, Panjabi MC and Rishi Rich were popping up on Top 40 singles charts. Badshah spent hours in the college’s computer lab, digging for music and talking to musicians and fans from all over the world. “There was this revolution going on,” he says. “They were infusing new sounds into Punjabi music, and it was fascinating… I was in love with rap, and then I fell in love with this music. So I wanted to do something which had a mix of both.”

His first rap pseudonym was MC Cool Equal, one half of a duo called Northern Click, which he started with a friend from PEC, who’s now an IAS officer. Cool Equal was just as much of a hustler as Badshah is today, sweet-talking and cajoling people into giving him shows. “Once we opened for Euphoria at a college fest, we just begged Palash [Sen] sir to give us 15 minutes on stage till they gave in,” he says. “Then we kept pushing it – from 15 to 20 minutes, 20 minutes to half an hour. The audience wouldn’t let us go. Then Palash sir came on stage and said ‘Tum hi gaa lo bhai’.”

That set led to a few club gigs around Chandigarh and then a rap feature on a song in 2007 called “(Milade Tu) Soda Mein Whiskey”, produced by DJ Rishi. “Everyone was listening to that song,” remembers his sister Aparajita Singh. “All my friends had a big crush on him. I remember once he came to my hostel in Patiala with cake for my birthday. We were all in our night suits, but when I said my brother was here, everyone started changing!”

Around this time, Badshah finished college and took up a job as a civil engineer in Ambala. He spent his days in the office and his nights in the studio. But that became increasingly unsustainable and he quit a few months in. “My father was devastated,” he remembers. “He asked me what I wanted to do and I said I want to rap. He asked me what that was. So I showed him a 50 Cent video, with girls dancing in bikinis and all. He lost it, he was like ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ That’s it. After that I didn’t try to convince anyone.”

It would be a few more years before Badshah didn’t have to convince anyone any more.

The studio Badshah used was also frequented by the manager of a then up-and-coming Punjabi rapper from Delhi who called himself Yo Yo Honey Singh. He played “Soda Whiskey” for Singh, who invited Badshah to Delhi for a meeting. “I was already following him, and his sound was similar to what was going on in the UK,” Badshah says. “I thought this was a guy I could work with. We met and immediately started thinking of a name for our crew.”

They finally settled on Mafia Mundeer. Singh would be a big influence on the young Badshah, convincing him to drop his Cool Equal pseudonym in favour of his current nom de plume. “We thought of Badshah because I liked to live life large, and also because I used to be a big Shah Rukh fan.” Along with the name, Badshah also decided to drop the accented English and start rapping in Hindi and Punjabi.



“I realised that if I wanted people to understand what I’m saying, I needed to rap in Hindi.”

Over the next six years, Badshah and Singh – later joined by Raftaar, Ikka and Lil Golu – worked hard to build Mafia Mundeer into a pioneering force in the Punjabi music industry. At the time, the fast growing Punjabi rap scene was dominated by one towering figure: Pakistani-American rapper Bohemia. Born Roger David, the Cali rapper’s credited with pioneering desi hip-hop, and his 2002 album, Vich Pardesan De – widely considered the first-ever Punjabi rap album – inspired an entire generation of kids from the Subcontinent to take up the mic. A rapper from the old school, Bohemia’s lyrics drew from his working class immigrant experience, as well as his time on the streets of Oakland and San Francisco – moving drugs across the interstate, losing friends to gang violence and jail time. Bohemia’s social realist approach would become the template for rappers back in the Punjab (on both sides of the border), with early crews like Desi Beam and Kru172 focusing their attention on street life affectations and local issues like the drug epidemic in the state. Mafia Mundeer broke that mould – they were more 50 Cent than Tupac, more Flo Rida than Biggie Smalls, more club than street. Their music also drew from the seamier side of Punjabi folk and pop music – which often glorified aggression, guns, booze and casual misogyny – coincidentally also ticking all the boxes on a Bollywood item-song checklist.