In her latest rap song, Madhura Ghane, known by her stage name Mahi G, walks on a barren, drought-stricken hill where a large, leafless tree has fallen to the ground. In the following frames, with the background music slowly rising, the video shows close-ups of Indian laborers — men, women, and children — working at a brick factory in Maharashtra. As the background tempo reaches a crescendo, Mahi G fires the first few bars about brick kiln workers, sewage cleaners, and construction workers toiling under the scorching sun. “The one whose sweat builds your house himself wanders homeless,” she raps in Hindi. “But who cares about the one who died working for you in the sun?”
Mahi G’s song “Heatwave,” which was produced in collaboration with Greenpeace India, dropped in June, just as the country was reeling under soaring temperatures. Last year, more than 100 people died across India because of an extreme heatwave during the summer. Prolonged heat exposure can lead to heat strokes, a risk disproportionately borne by outdoor workers.
In India, those workers typically occupy the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. The country’s caste system divides people into four main groups based on birth. Those who are placed outside the system — referred to as Dalits — are often relegated to the most hazardous jobs. Members of tribes or indigenous communities — referred to as Adivasis — also fall outside this structure and face systemic discrimination. Successive governments in India have evicted Adivasis from their ancestral lands to clear the way for exploiting mineral resources.
Mahi G’s music primarily speaks to the experiences of Dalits and Adivasis. She belongs to the Mahadev Koli tribe, a community found in the western state of Maharashtra, and lives in Mumbai. She has released 12 songs so far since she first began rapping in 2019. Nearly half of them are about climate justice.
Growing up, the 28-year-old rapper witnessed her community struggle to access clean drinking water. “It always made me sad to see women walk long distances to fetch water,” she said. As an Adivasi woman, her drive to research and write about the environment comes from a deep, personal space, she said, and she chose to rap about sociopolitical issues because “you can talk about a big issue in a short, powerful, and aggressive way.”
India’s mainstream hip-hop scene has been mostly dominated by upper-caste male artists, primarily from Maharashtra and Punjab, a northwestern state. But in recent years, a handful of Dalit and Adivasi rappers have broken into the mainstream, using their music to challenge caste hierarchies, critique government policies, and spotlight social injustices.
Among them is Arivu, who shot to fame with his track “Anti-national,” a bold critique of the Indian government led by Narendra Modi, a right-wing Hindu nationalist, whose party and supporters routinely label dissenting voices as anti-national. In another song, Arivu lays bare feudalism and its contemporary manifestations while paying homage to his grandmother, a landless labourer in a tea plantation. The video has garnered more than half a billion views on YouTube.
Mahi G’s videos haven’t had that level of reach, but she draws support from activists and nongovernmental groups working on environmental and social justice causes. Her videos typically garner tens of thousands of views, and one song about Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a social reformer and architect of the Indian constitution, has more than 300,000 views. But the music hasn’t made much money so far. She hasn’t monetized her YouTube channel and is instead funding her music through her salary as an engineer at a private company.
“Heatwave” is not the first time Mahi G has used her music to talk about climate justice. In her first rap song, “Jungle Cha Raja” — King of the Jungle — Mahi G explored the relationship between tribal communities and the natural environment, highlighting how they have long worked to protect it. In another song, “Vikasacha Khul,” she raps about the cost of development — how the building of roads, skyscrapers, and shopping malls has come at the expense of forests, lakes, and clean air.
Rappers like Mahi G and Arivu are often making music that challenges the political establishment at great risk to themselves. In 2023, Umesh Khade and Raj Mungase, two rappers from Maharashtra, were jailed after the right-wing political party ruling the state alleged they had made defamatory statements about their politicians. Despite these concerns and looming threats, Mahi G said the response to her songs keeps her going. Her music has compelled people to think about the environment and has helped them realize that they don’t want industrialization that destroys forests, she said. Even though her community members, who are often new to rap, do not understand her music, she said they have appreciated her work to spotlight climate change, which has directly affected their lives. Shifting rainfall patterns and depleting water resources have taken a toll on the Mahadev Koli tribe’s ability to sustain themselves.
Asim Siddiqui, who teaches at Azim Premji University in southern India’s Bengaluru city and works on the educational and cultural politics of youth, said that rappers from lower-caste and indigenous communities who have been historically marginalised grow up in contexts where they are intimately connected to their social and natural environment. Ecological destruction or social injustice has a personal impact on their emotions and identity. “It becomes obvious for them to bring out these themes in their musical expression,” he said.
Siddiqui said that singing was historically stigmatised in India as a degrading occupation and, therefore, confined to lower-caste communities. But once India gained independence from British rule and embarked on its nation-building project, “some of the music traditions got classicized and later commodified, which excluded singers and performers from Dalit and Adivasi communities,” Siddiqui said. Hip-hop provided access to marginalised communities across the world, he added, as it enabled young rappers like Mahi G to tell their stories through music.
For Mahi G, music is a platform for activism. “My rap focuses on protecting natural resources,” she said. “If you can’t plant a tree, at least don’t cut one down.” These basic principles form the core of her message.
