It’s not simple being a wild girl in India – as members of what’s believed to be the nation’s first feminine rap group can testify.

The eight members of the Wild Wild Women collective have needed to take care of knockbacks from the boys who dominate the music business and press. They have needed to cajole and battle their dad and mom for permission to play and journey to gigs – as soon as they’ve satisfied them that hip-hop is appropriate for girls to carry out. And they should juggle full-time jobs with their music.

On a Zoom name from their properties in Mumbai, the Wild Wild Women are smiling, chatty, high-spirited and filled with cheerful dedication. They wish to show that girls can rap in addition to males, and provides voice of their lyrics to the treatment of women in Indian society.

The group, who met at a hip-hop cypher (an improvised rapping session) in at Mumbai park two years in the past, grew up in conservative Indian households, who imagine the trail to happiness for a daughter is training, a great job (ideally in drugs or engineering), marriage, house and youngsters. Music may be tolerated as a passion, nevertheless it received’t pay the payments or present an appropriate husband.

“We wanted to speak up, as women in a country where women have been kept down and forced to be silent,” says Pratika Prabhune, who struggled to win over her father who has a background in classical music. “When I was 12, I got a bass guitar and played in a heavy metal band. He didn’t approve of my rapping initially, but now he boasts about my success to his friends.”

“Whether it’s raising the children, looking after the house, looking after the elderly, the house, it’s all up to women,” says Ashwini Hiremath. “We have grown up seeing women at family gatherings with no voice, never speaking or giving an opinion.”

One of the songs she wrote with Prabhune known as Raja Beta (King Son), which mocks the way in which Indian males wish to be coddled and pampered by their moms. The mockery is accompanied by chants in an uptempo refrain of “Don’t give injustice a chance” and “Who are you to stop me?”

While they’ve made some headway convincing household of their musical ambitions, the group’s fundamental problem now’s to assert some area within the Indian hip-hop and rap scene, which has solely a small variety of feminine rappers, together with MC Lit, MC Disha, Reble, Rudy Mukta, and Pho.

When Wild Wild Women launched their debut single, I Do It For Hip Hop, in March 2021, Hiremath was shocked when she heard the response of a music business government. “Someone in the music industry apparently said ‘it’s utter nonsense to create a thing like Wild Wild Women and women don’t have the consistency to be in the industry’.”

Without a document deal, the group pool their cash to document their music. So far, they’ve launched three singles and have carried out in Mumbai, New Delhi, Pune and Bengaluru.

“Our audiences range from college students to clubs, to an all-age Christmas party, and they are not solely women,” says Prabhune. “The audiences have been incredible, they always come up and say they love seeing so many women on stage. It feels like a little victory for all of us.”

But the band should tread fastidiously within the minefield that Indian society has turn into beneath the Hindu nationalist authorities. Any imagined slight to Indian tradition or custom might trigger offence.

“I have just spent two hours with a lawyer friend going over every single word of the lyrics of some of my more politically driven songs just to make sure nothing comes across as too offensive to anyone. There is little space for social and political rap in this country today,” says Hiremath.

She provides: “In one song, I used the word ‘bhakt’, which means a certain kind of devotee, and ‘gangster’ in the same phrase. We decided to change it. Using the word bhakt these days can enrage rightwingers, particularly if it’s clubbed with gangster.”

The rap of Wild Wild Women has a transparent Indian really feel, not solely on account of the lyrics however as a result of they sing in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada in addition to English, flipping between languages in every music. The viewers love that, says Preeti Sutar. “It makes them feel they are a part of the music. It also helps us reach a wider set of listeners and contextualises rap as a genre that can be Indian for the uninitiated,” she says.

The group plans to experiment with Indian devices to offer their music an much more distinctive sound.

The fundamental purpose of Wild Wild Women, although, is to get the voices of Indian girls heard. “By putting our own voices out there, we are representing the larger audience of women too,” says Prabhune.