Deep in Pakistan’s countryside, Sindhi Chhokri and her teenage brother Toxic Sufi are raising a few eyebrows.
Under the banner the Pahnji Gang, the siblings have also been finding an audience for their rap music in rural Sindh. “Growing up, it was hard to navigate past a string of unsaid things that did not seem right. And when we did, we would be reprimanded by the village elders,” says Sindhi Chhokri, real name Urooj Fatima, speaking from her village in Yaqoob Kapri, near Jhuddo city.
Her 18-year-old brother, Mohammad Kapri, who raps as Toxic Sufi, says music has allowed them to “speak freely” about issues that are otherwise “conveniently shoved under the carpet because they make people uneasy”.
Songs around sexual violence, “honour” killings, police brutality, child labour, even enforced disappearances, are winning the pair a YouTube following although Fatima says they still cannot afford a studio to record videos. For now they have a computer and a microphone from money left by their late father.
A successful performance at the Lahooti Melo, a music festival in Hyderabad, even saw the audience sing the lyrics of their song Inqilab (“revolution”) back at them.
“There must not have been less than 2,000 or so youth, when we started chanting ‘mujhey khappay inqilab’ [‘I want a revolution’], the response was amazing. Now I know how it feels to be a celebrity; I still get a high from looking at the videos of our performance,” says Fatima.
Lahooti was founded by the Sufi musician Saif Samejo as a grassroots organisation to promote Indigenous culture, music and art. He sees rap as a continuation of Pakistan’s heritage of poetry and music.
“The Pahnji Gang talked about resistance in the way that Sufi saints talked about it hundreds of years ago, and their poetic expression found resonance with the spectators,” says Samejo.
He says disenchantment is widespread in Sindh among young people unwilling to accept the status quo and fighting to bring about change however they can. “Those in power, and in cahoots with the religious leaders, have indoctrinated the uneducated masses through fear and patronage,” he says.
“Many have found an alternative, registering resistance and protest and demanding change in a peaceful way,” says Samejo, adding: “The fusion of Sindhi and Urdu added a touch of authenticity, and they connected with their audience and to the latter’s feeling of rage and disillusionment,” he says of the Pahnji Gang’s performance at the festival. “The power of song can really unite people.”
Fatima started making music in 2018, when Kapri made her listen to hip-hop. “I didn’t like it one bit; there was a lot of anger and yelling,” she says. But it struck a chord. “I heard Emiway Bantai. The music addressed life’s struggles, experiences and aspirations; I understood the rapper had found a way to vent all things wrong in society; I thought I could too.”
Pakistan already has one Baloch female rapper, who goes by the pseudonym Eva B. Fatima is also inspired by Dee MC, an Indian rapper. “I’d love for us to be recorded by Coke Studio [noted for providing a platform to established and emerging artists and highly popular],” she says.
Fatima is following in her family’s tradition. “My late father and my mother were followers of a Sindhi nationalist party – the Awami Tehreek – and my father wrote revolutionary poetry as well as plays condemning human rights violations, which was not liked by the village,” she says. He was adamant his three sons and four daughters would pursue higher education, something viewed with suspicion in their village where most children were not allowed “to study beyond fifth grade”.
“The village elders asked my father to put an end to his liberal ways or leave. A panchayat (village council meeting) was held and it was decided that it would be best if he left his ancestral village of Fazal Mohammad Kapri,” she says.
“We moved out to land that belonged to my mother, two kilometres away, and set up our own village, which has expanded to 66 households and is known as Yaqoob Kapri, in 2005,” says Fatima.
In 2015, when she was 16, the family was once again threatened. “I would go to school riding a motorbike so [the villagers] threatened my father that they will kill me if he did not stop me. My father told them off saying it was none of their business as he had given me permission.”
Fatima also helps one of her brothers, a farmer, with buying seeds, fertiliser and pesticide from the market. “I go on the motorbike, get the rates from different shops and then buy accordingly and rent a rickshaw, load the stuff in it and it gets delivered to our doorstep,” she says. “I know I am breaking a lot of stereotypes but all this is possible because I have the full support of my mother and my brothers.”
But she finds mindsets changing in her ancestral village. “I volunteer with a national women’s organisation, Shirkat Gah. I hold awareness sessions there and have formed a women’s club. It has 16 members aged between 18 and 45. After two years of conversations about the importance of girls’ education, I was thrilled when one of my cousins, who had taken her daughter out of school after grade five, enrolled her into secondary school this year. Change, it seems, has come.”
Kapri is keen to discuss a riskier subject – religion. “You can be jailed, you can be killed, and you can be disappeared for ever if you cross the red line,” Samejo has warned him.
“But”, Kapri adds, “isn’t this what rap music is all about – to speak the truth?”
