Dizzy. Yup, that’s the word I’ve spent the last three hours looking for.
It’s kind of embarrassing, really. Hanumankind wrote ‘Big Dawgs’ in 20 minutes, while I’ve spent nine times that staring at my laptop screen, searching for one word.
It’s been just over a month since the track dropped, along with a 3-minute-54-second video that borrows the Mad from Mad Max, a month which has seen ‘Big Dawgs’ riding up the global music charts with the cocksure relentlessness of a two-stroke bike in a wall of death.
Out-streaming Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ on Spotify last week. Uh, yeah, uh, yeah.
#31 on the Billboard Hot 100, up from 58 last week. Uh, yeah, uh, yeah.
#9 in Australia’s Top 50, with a six point gain over last week. Uh, yeah, uh, yeah.
Most Shazam-ed song of the month. Uh, yeah, uh, yeah.
Basically, the word ‘dizzy’ perfectly captures both the state the song leaves you in the first time you watch or hear it, as well as the heights it has reached over the last four weeks.
And Hanumankind wrote it in 20 minutes.
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Sooraj Cherukat aka Hanumankind has always been testing the limits of his comfort zone
Desi hip hop has been gaining steam over the last decade, with Divine, Arivu, Seedhe Maut, Raftaar and their lot dragging the genre into the mainstream, but for some reason, Hanumankind and ‘Big Dawgs’ snuck up on all but the most hardcore Indian hip hop fans, before taking the global music scene by storm.
Is it the video, which takes you right inside a maut ka kua—the “well of death” circus trick in which motorcycles and fast cars perform gravity-defying stunts on vertical walls? No doubt, it’s fabulous. Twenty seconds in, it grabs you by the top of your head and the bottom of your chin and spins you like a fidget spinner.
The comments section confirms.
Marcisacrinelli writes, “I think we can all agree this type of music transcends cultural borders as well as physical ones!”
“Aussie here. This hits harder than a box off with my uncle’s kangaroo,” adds JohnnyTester420.
“Iraqi here. This song hits harder than American invasion on my country in 2003,” says @Lynkurd.
Ouch. That last one hurt.
But as it turns out, ‘Big Dawgs’ is just the tip of the Hanumankind iceberg. A first taste, if you will, that made me hungry for more—more music, more information, more influences—and sent me down the most wholesome of rabbit holes.
Hanumankind is the moniker of 32-year-old Kerala-born rapper Sooraj Cherukat. His accent may be confusing, but so is his childhood, a big chunk of which was in Houston (with stints in Nigeria, Dubai, Egypt and Qatar), he went to college in Coimbatore and now lives in Bengaluru.
Cherukat earwormed his way out of the underground music scene with a break-out performance at NH7 Weekender in 2020, and has since collaborated with some of the top producers of Indian hip-hop. You’ll recognise his distinct flow in the soundtracks of Netflix’s Namma Stories and Fahad Faasil’s latest Malayalam hit Aavesham.
Basically, it’s not that he’s flown under the radar—it’s more like the radar itself is faulty.
In just over a month, 'Big Dawgs' has risen to dizzying heights on global music charts
Let’s start with his discography: it’s clear that there’s an A team at work here —producer Kalmi and director Bijoy Shetty are his serial collaborators. It’s also clear that this team likes to test the limits of the comfort zone. ‘Go To Sleep’, released in 2023, has the haunting familiarity of frenzied nightmare, while ‘Rush Hour’ from two years ago, in which Hanumankind rides a bike around Bengaluru—has all the visual trappings of a video game.
Cherukat has said repeatedly in his interviews that the “typical” hip hop trope isn’t his thing: “I think a lot of rap videos, it’s like—I'm a rapper and I rap in front of the camera, it's jewellery, it's a Lamborghini yeah…” he shares.
You don’t need him to say it though, because his oeuvre makes it evident. Seen in the context of tracks like ‘Genghis’, ‘Damnson’, ‘No Hook’ and ‘Skyline’, ‘Big Dawgs’ seems less like a perfect storm and more like the latest in a series of confident experiments. It was only a matter of time before one of them blew up.
Whether or not the track is your cup of tea, it’s hard to begrudge Hanumankind his newfound fame. In three separate interviews, the rapper has shared glimpses of the effort that goes into his craft. When Ankur Tewari asks him about his creative process, he immediately pulls out a blue book full of notes, scribbles, doodles. “I’m always writing. Always.”
In this very fun podcast (where he also shares a hilarious story about getting ragged and arrested on his first day of college in Coimbatore), he offers pearls of creative wisdom: “If you have an idea… it’s on you to make it real or else it just disappears and joins that massive grave.” Then in an interview with Rolling Stone, published right on the heels of ‘Big Dawgs’ global virality, he cuts to the essence of every creative’s niggling problem. “Artists are out here contemplating or overthinking,” he shares. “Maybe this won’t look good on me, maybe this won’t sound good. But if you don’t take the risk, who’s going to know?”
Hanumankind has received an offer to collaborate from Project Pat, a hip hop legend he tips his hat to at the start of 'Big Dawgs'
It is exactly this idea of risk without expectation that Bijoy Shetty captures so spectacularly in his now-viral music video. Watch it again. Soak every stunt in. It’s as if the crew was contractually obliged to say ‘Let’s Do It’ instead of ‘Are You Sure About This?’ every step of the way.
And it has paid off big time. Project Pat, one of his hip hop heroes whom he’s given a massive hat-tip to at the start of Big Dawgs, has offered him an opportunity to collaborate. If getting into that Maruti 800 on the well of death didn’t do it, this offer at least must have left him dizzy.
