The desi vibes of Pataka Boys

Also read: Is Bal Gangadhar Tilak the original Hindutva icon?

“Part of the impetus behind the whole thing was learning about Punjab, the culture, and each generation’s different version of it," says Dubai-born, London-based rapper Pavan Mukhi (aka PAV4N), speaking over Zoom from the US. Mukhi forms one-third of Pataka Boys, alongside Birmingham rapper-producer Sonny Sathi and Ludhiana beatsmith Kartik Sudhera.

“I think there’s just lots of levels and layers to the humour and the entertainment in it, because there’s the British hip-hop side, the British Asian side, and then there’s the Indian side, you know, our versions of India, which is all mixed up."

Mukhi and Sathi are both elder statesmen of the UK rap scene. Mukhi co-founded London rap and dubstep group Foreign Beggars in 2002, and has worked with producers like Steve Aoki, Knife Party and Skrillex. Sathi has spent the past two decades honing his brand of hedonistic, boom-bap adjacent rap music, working with everyone from MF Doom to Jay Electronica and Madlib. The two have been close friends since first crossing paths in 2004, occasionally jumping on tracks off each other’s albums or mixtapes.

In 2021, Mukhi—who had just started his new label 4NC¥ (Foreign Currency)—began receiving beats from a 21-year-old from Ludhiana named Kartik Sudhera. He was immediately blown away by Sudhera’s alchemical concoctions of vintage soul, Punjabi folk and Bollywood-tinged funk blended together into a sound that was familiar yet entirely its own thing.

“It was a bit crazy because every day he was sending me 10 new beats," remembers Mukhi, who also shared the beats with Sathi. “But (the music) was so f****** good. I didn’t jump on it straight away because I was like I need to rap properly for this, you know."

For Sudhera, now 23, making these beats was an escape from the hospital waiting rooms he was spending most of his time in those days. It was peak covid-19, and his mother was hospitalised with kidney failure. When he wasn’t dealing with the doctors and nurses, he sat down with an ageing, broken-down laptop and worked on music. In fact, some of the dialogues he samples on the record come from the movies he watched to pass the time in the hospital.

Sometime in 2022, Mukhi and Sathi were in the recording studio for another project when they decided to finally rap over one of Sudhera’s beats. That session led to Brown Sauce, the two rappers flexing their lyrical muscles over choppy, twitchy percussion and the occasional burbling synth. Within two days, they’d written five tracks. They realised they had an album on their hands.

“Sonny is such a good rapper and the competition really made me bring my A-game as well," says Mukhi. “We were educating each other with the references we were dropping, and then also just flexing on each other lyrically to entertain ourselves."

As they worked on the album, a few key themes emerged. One was the celebration of the Indian diaspora and its kaleidoscopic cultural heritage, embodied in the hyper-referential multi-lingual rhymes and cross-continental beats, but also in the star-studded lineup of desi guest features, including Indian-American rapper Heems, Delhi rap duo Seedhe Maut, British-Bengali rap pioneer M.O.N.G.O and UK Punjabi pop artist Juss Nandhra.

“It’s about being Indian rappers pushing the boundaries of rap music, and not just being the Indian guy who does rap," says Mukhi. “And everybody on the album is on the same level. People who have been pushing hip-hop culture and music forward, without going ‘hey I’m an Indian person, look at me!’"

Songs like Glassy Junction—named after the UK’s first Punjabi pub in Southall (now closed), owned by Sathi’s uncle—and Bud Bud Ding Ding also push back against the racism that has been ever-present in the British Indian experience, turning slurs into badges of pride. Punjabi Munde (feat. Sikander Kahlon), which pays homage to the classic Sukhbir Singh track with the same name, is a vibrant expression of Punjabi pride.

This fascination with the homeland extends to the album’s music videos, shot during a trip to India, which create an Indo-futuristic landscape that marries the bling of gangsta rap with Bappi Lahiri, and the hedonism of the Punjabi theka with that of the Birmingham boozer. In a nod to Punjab’s over-sized influence on the album—and desi diaspora music in general—the videos also have Punjabi subtitles for the English lyrics, written down in gold-accented Gurmukhi.

“We wanted to communicate with a lot of the Punjabi speakers in the village who like hip-hop," says Mukhi. “We just wanted everybody to really be able to understand the grease, you know?"

Thugs from Amritsar only just dropped in July, but the trio are already working on a second album. They’ve also got a tour of Australia and New Zealand scheduled for the end of the year, with an India tour also in the works.

“You put me and Sonny in a room with a bunch of Kartik beats and there’s going to be four joints in a few hours," says Mukhi. “We love doing it. We love hanging out. At this point, it’s not work for us, it’s fun. It’s like a second family."

Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.

Also read: The history of Mughal glass emerges from the shadows