Desi Hip Hop
Desi hip hop is rap music made by South Asian artists, in languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English, at home and in the diaspora.
It joins hip hop beats and flows with South Asian languages, slang and sometimes samples of film or folk music. The Punjabi rap of the Pakistani-American rapper Bohemia in the 2000s was an early landmark. Scenes later grew in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi, and street-level 'gully rap' from Mumbai reached a wide audience in the late 2010s.
Artists it is known for: Bohemia, Divine, Raftaar, Badshah.
- Family
- Indian
- On Spotify
- A current genre
- What it is
- A scene
- From
- South Asian diaspora, 1990s to 2000s
- Also called
- DHH
- Trackify listeners who play it
- 2%
About 2,000 of 83,000 Trackify listeners with public profiles have desi hip hop among their top artists of the last four weeks. Rounded; updated 13 November 2026.
Desi Hip Hop artists
Karan Aujla
Anirudh Ravichander
AP Dhillon
Seedhe Maut
Shubh
Badshah
Hiphop Tamizha
Sidhu Moose Wala
Guru Randhawa
KR$NA
The desi hip hop artists most Trackify listeners have in their top fifty. Each opens on Spotify.
Sources
The definition is written for this site from open sources, and was checked against them on 13 November 2026.