The Chenda melam drums kicked in and my head bobbed without hesitation. Some sounds are so embedded in our memory that they pull a reaction before we even register.
Hanumankind’s Run It Up had just dropped on YouTube. A friend who’s deep into rap sent it my way and within seconds, I was pulled in. From the intense visuals rooted in Southern culture to the lyrics, it was both a mirror and a megaphone.
“Ooh, baby, it’s dangerous
Your problems, they just not the same to us
We’re dealin’ with things you ain’t seen before
We’re feelin’ the weight of our ancestors”
Indian history speaks highly of the bloodlines we have come from. Too often our past is reduced to the colonial struggle alone, which – though deeply impactful – does not represent the tapestry of our diverse and complex heritage.
To me, our history is as vast as the land goes. Nobody owns India, not even us. The strength of this place comes from the energies left behind: of blood stains, of war, of peace, of fleeting moments of joy, of betrayal.
Run It Up speaks to a history that has too often been pushed aside. The South, where I grew up, has always felt like it occupies the margins of the national narrative.
Take my home state of Tamil Nadu. Here, the fight against caste oppression, language imposition and centralized power structures has been shaped over generations, but rarely receives the attention it deserves in mainstream discourse.
Under the The Self-Respect Movement, spearheaded by Periyar in the early 20th century, people could enter into “Self-Respect Marriages:” ceremonies that allowed couples, often from different backgrounds or castes – to marry on grounds of mutual consent without religious sanction. This helped normalise widow and intercaste remarriages.
The Dravidian movement that followed carried these values forward, organizing marches and sit-ins to confront caste-based exclusion – ultimately pressuring the government to open the roads around the temple to all castes.
Yet growing up, I rarely saw these stories centered. Unlike the people from Northern India, we weren’t the poster children of Gandhi’s non-violent movement, and leaders like Periyar were mentioned only in passing, if at all. Our textbooks were more enthusiastic about Northern leaders, like India’s first Prime Minister Nehru and his infamous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, while anti-caste revolutions from our side went unacknowledged.
The debate over Hindi’s place in India has long stirred strong emotions in the South. For many in states like Tamil Nadu, the push from the central government to elevate Hindi above all other languages has felt like an erasure of our linguistic heritage.
The South’s languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam – are living symbols of our proud culture and histories. When policies emerged that favoured Hindi at their expense, it sparked a deep-rooted cultural resistance about protecting identity that left a lasting imprint on the region’s relationship with the rest of the country.
However, Southern resistance to Hindi imposition has mostly either been glossed over or misrepresented. Films like Padosan (1968) set the template, with Mehmood’s character Master Pillai embodying the archetypal “Madrasi” stereotype: thick accent, exaggerated mannerisms and traditional attire, all played for laughs.
More recent movies like Chennai Express, Ra.One, and Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan continue this trend, reducing South Indian characters to comic relief or background roles and rarely portraying them as complex individuals.
Women from the South are depicted as either voluptuous and garishly dressed, or as classical dancers; while men are nerdy, naïve or overly traditional. The film industry’s habit of lumping all southern states together as “Madrasi” erases the uniqueness of each culture and perpetuates misconceptions.
So when Hanumankind sings about “the weight of our ancestors”, to me, it feels like a reckoning: a call to remember those who resisted and those who still carry that burden without widespread recognition.
We’re healin’ with ways that don’t last for long
Don’t have us the time, ain’t it obvious?
No help for the weak, but the liquor strong
Plenty here, pour it for all of us”
In Tamil Nadu, the government has perfected the art of distraction. People are kept hooked on alcohol, cricket and cinema, while real issues – like water, shelter and poverty – fade into the background.
With more than 5,500 liquor outlets scattered across the state, the sheer scale of alcohol availability is hard to ignore. It’s something you notice in the rhythm of everyday life, especially outside the big cities, where these shops are gathering points – shaping routines and fuelling local economies.
After the COVID-19 lockdowns were lifted, the state’s priorities were laid bare. While many businesses struggled to reopen, liquor stores were among the first to welcome customers back – proof that the government was more invested in keeping spirits flowing than addressing the real challenges we faced.
Hanumankind’s lyrics tap into this reality, pointing out that sometimes the biggest obstacles are the ones that keep us from seeing what really needs to change.
Yet within hours of my first listen, I came across some very different takes to Hanumankind’s latest hit.
“But the song is mid”
“It was just martial arts, nothing else”
At first, I was baffled, then I noticed who was saying it. People from the northern part of India.
Immediately, I thought back to school. History class. Our textbooks were full of stories, but they never felt complete. The French Revolution led the charge, followed by European nationalism, the First World War… but when it came to the freedom struggle, everything seemed to narrow down to the north.
One moment stuck with me: the story of Champaran, a village in northern India, where the people stood up to the British with Gandhi’s support.
“All states unanimously agreed to the Gandhian plan, except the state of Madras,” read the text – Madras now being Tamil Nadu.
No explanation was given as to why. Then the book kept going: Mughal dynasties, the printing press, slavery and industrialization. There was no mention of Southern freedom fighters, such as Subramania Bharati, who actively wrote on freedom from the British, and saw an independent India that was casteless and free of poverty.
Despite the obvious misrepresentation, I felt a strange pride reading that line, because I knew our absence from that particular struggle wasn’t because we were uninvolved. It was because we were busy fighting our own battles: anti-caste movements that challenged the very foundation of society, language activism to protect our cultural identity, and opposition to the British-imposed taxation that was crippling our communities.
At just 15, I brushed it off and carried on with my life, only for this song to stir that feeling up again when I turned 20.
There’s a real danger in reducing people, places and histories to a single narrative. When entire cultures are dismissed as “uncivilized” or “backward”, it becomes easier to justify their domination or erasure.
In a lecture in 2004, Indian writer Arundhati Roy said, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
In my country, this plays out in the way the North is so often celebrated as the epicenter of culture, power and progress, while the South has been sidelined, misunderstood and caricatured.
“From those who came up before me (ay)
I’m here to change up the story (yeah)
Find me at work in the morning (yeah, yeah)
Find me where people are mourning, man (yeah)
‘Cause death is around every corner (yeah)
When life isn’t free for a person, dawg
You act like an animal cornered
Savages speak in a language y’all
You don’t understand, you a foreigner”
These lyrics have helped me realise where I stand — a young blood who feels like she can change the world. I stand on the shoulders of a lot more people before me who also chose this path.
We sing for the sorrow and dance for the pain (yeah)
The pain we carry, the ignorance surrounding it, the stories we’re desperate to tell, and the powerful seats we fight to claim all exploded in vivid colours when I first heard this song. It has helped to shatter the walls I’ve built around myself, confront the things I’ve been taught to ignore, and reimagine what I’ve been conditioned to accept.