Two songs. Two pulled videos. Two public apologies. One identical industry that made both possible and will make the next one before the month is out.
Badshah whose real name is Aditya Prateek Singh Sisodia, a detail worth remembering when the persona becomes too convenient a shield is a man who owns a Rolls-Royce Cullinan, a Lamborghini Urus, a Rolls-Royce Wraith, and properties in Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai, London, and Dubai. He built this empire song by song, beginning in the Mafia Mundeer collective alongside Yo Yo Honey Singh in 2006, graduating to mainstream ubiquity with Kala Chashma and Abhi Toh Party Shuru Hui Hai, becoming the kind of artist whose name on a track is itself a guarantee of commercial velocity. He is not a desperate man making desperate choices. He is a very comfortable man who made a very specific choice to write lyrics for a song called Tateeree, to set those lyrics inside a school, to dress girls in uniforms, to name the school Badshala as a portmanteau of his own name and the word for a place of learning and then, when the public read what he had done, to stand before a camera with the expression of a man who had been slightly misunderstood.
“I am a proud Haryanvi,” he said. “I never had any intention or purpose of saying anything inappropriate about any child or woman from Haryana.”
The lyricist of Tateeree is Badshah. Not a translator. Not a collaborator who sat beside him with the Kannada original. Badshah wrote those words. Badshah directed their placement inside a school set. Badshah approved the visuals of minor girls in uniforms throwing away their school bags. Badshah named the location after himself. And Badshah, when the Haryana State Commission for Women issued its summons, simply did not appear. The commission led by chairperson Renu Bhatia, who ordered the Superintendent of Police in Panipat to arrest him was left issuing lookout circulars while the rapper’s representatives managed the narrative from a safe distance.
This is not a man who made a mistake. This is a man who understood exactly what he was making, made it anyway, calculated correctly that the outrage cycle would arrive and depart, and miscalculated only on the question of how long the Haryana State Commission for Women would remain patient.
Consider what Tateeree actually is, stripped of its backbeat and its braggadocio. The word itself is Haryanvi for the grey francolin, a bird, unremarkable, found in the fields of rural North India. In the ecology of the song, the bird is a metaphor. In the ecology of the metaphor, the bird is a woman. In the ecology of the woman-as-bird, the school is a hunting ground, the uniforms are a provocation, and the man at the centre of the frame is the hunter with a name large enough to give the school its identity. Badshala. The king’s school. In the king’s school, girls are the curriculum.
This is not a reading. This is the video.
Now hold that image next to Sarke Chunar Teri Sarke, released within days, from an entirely different production house, an entirely different industry geography, a pan-India Kannada film, not a Haryanvi standalone track — and notice what they share. Not a lyricist. Not a producer. Not a director or a label or a streaming platform. What they share is a premise. The premise is this: a woman’s clothing, and by extension a woman’s body, and by extension a woman’s dignity, is a thing that can be made to move at the instruction of a man with a camera and a song credit. One song makes the clothing fall. The other puts the clothing in a school and makes the school itself into a joke about what happens when girls grow up. Both songs were pulled within a week of release. Both artists issued apologies. Both apologies were, in their careful architecture, not actually apologies at all — they were explanations of why the person making the apology should not be held responsible for the thing being apologised for.
When Badshah says the lines were written “in line with the competitive nature of hip-hop music,” he is not apologising. He is defending. He is explaining to you that hip-hop does this, and that therefore he was simply following a convention, and that the convention is the thing to be criticised, not the man who chose to follow it in a video set inside a school with girls in uniforms.
Hip-hop, as a genre, was invented by people with nothing Black Americans in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, making art out of poverty, out of police brutality, out of the specific fury of being dismissed by a country that had built itself on your labour and your silence. Its vulgarity, where it existed, was the vulgarity of people who had been denied every polite avenue of expression. It was the vulgarity of Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit in 1939 not a comfortable metaphor, not a managed provocation, but the sound of someone who had run out of gentler ways to make you understand what was happening. To invoke the competitive tradition of hip-hop as justification for sexualising schoolgirls in Haryana is not merely an insult to those schoolgirls. It is an insult to every artist who ever picked up a microphone because they had no other weapon left.
Badshah is not a man without precedent in the Hindi-language music industry. He is, in fact, the precise and inevitable product of it.
Yo Yo Honey Singh, his original collaborator, the man he learned the industry alongside — spent the first half of the 2010s being celebrated as a phenomenon and the second half being periodically accused of lyrics so violently misogynistic that they would not pass a basic editorial review in any serious publication. Songs attributed to him described acts against women with a specificity that went beyond braggadocio into something that a psychologist might classify differently from the music press. The industry’s response, at the time, was to note that he was very popular, that his songs streamed very well, and that in any case it was a different kind of music for a different kind of audience, and did you hear how catchy the hook was?
The hook was very catchy. The hook is always very catchy. That is the mechanism. The hook gets into your head before the lyrics do, and by the time the lyrics have settled in, the hook has made them feel inevitable. This is not an accident of songwriting. It is a strategy.
Before Honey Singh, there was the boom of 2010 Munni Badnam Hui and Sheila Ki Jawani arriving within months of each other and teaching the industry something it has been applying with compound interest ever since: that a woman’s body, set to a thumping four-four beat, generates revenue without requiring a story, a character, a reason, or a reckoning. Before that, there was the 1990s item number, which at least had the honesty to exist within a narrative, to belong to a scene, to give the woman performing it a role within the world of the film rather than simply a surface for the camera to traverse.
The line from Sarke Chunar to Tateeree does not run sideways between two songs released in the same week. It runs backwards through fifteen years of industry decisions, each one greeted with outrage that lasted until the song hit number one, at which point the outrage became indistinguishable from enthusiasm. The moral economy of the Hindi music industry has, for a decade and a half, operated on a simple and largely unexamined principle: that consequence is always temporary and numbers are always permanent.
Here is the word that nobody in the coverage of either song has been willing to use, perhaps because it is too large for a news cycle, perhaps because it implicates too many people across too many years. The word is childhood.
Tateeree is not, at its core, a song about women. It is a song about girls about school-aged girls, set in a school, in uniforms that are the specific uniform of childhood in India, that signal not sexuality but the years before it, the years that are supposed to be protected, the years that the entire architecture of a civil society is theoretically designed to keep safe. When Badshah placed his camera inside Badshala and directed it at girls throwing away their books, he was not making a comment on female liberation. He was doing something that has a specific name in child protection frameworks and that the music industry does not want to call by that name because calling it by that name would mean acknowledging what was made and why.
The Haryana State Commission for Women described it as a song that “uses abusive language against women and contains objectionable visuals.” The UP State Women Commission wrote to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath seeking a ban on stage shows. These are bureaucratic responses to a bureaucratic problem, and they are not wrong, but they do not reach the thing that sits beneath the complaint. The thing beneath the complaint is that a very successful, very comfortable man, surrounded by a professional team including a director, a music producer, a label, and a streaming platform, looked at the concept of a school video with girls in uniforms and decided, collectively, at every stage of production, that this was a fine idea. Not one person in that chain said: stop. Not one person said: this is not music, this is a school, and these are children, and the thing we are making is not a song.
The thing they made was not a song. The song was the delivery mechanism.
What is most instructive about the week of Tateeree and Sarke Chunar is not the outrage. Outrage is available in India at all times and at no cost; it is the most renewable of our national resources. What is instructive is the simultaneity. Two songs, from different languages, different industries, different artists, released within days of each other, both pulled within a week, both followed by apologies in which the apologist explained at length why the thing being apologised for was not actually his fault. The simultaneity is not coincidence. It is the result of an entire industry operating under the same set of permissions, the same calculation that the cost of this kind of content is always manageable and the reward is always bankable.
Raqueeb Alam said he was bahut dukhi very sad about the association with Sarke Chunar. Badshah said he was a proud Haryanvi who never intended harm. Both statements are designed to perform contrition without accepting responsibility, which is to say, both are designed to end the conversation rather than start one. The conversation that neither man wants to have is the one about the industry consensus that made their songs feel routine enough to produce, professional enough to release, and calculated enough to pull the moment the mathematics of the outrage exceeded the mathematics of the views.
That conversation is the one the industry has been declining for fifteen years. Not because it doesn’t know how to have it. Because it knows precisely what the conversation would find.
There was a composer named Naushad who once said that a song should enter a home and make it brighter. Naushad scored Mughal-E-Azam, Mother India, Baiju Bawra he was a man who believed, with the uncomplicated conviction of someone who had never been given reason to doubt it, that music was a form of address, that you were speaking to someone when you wrote a melody, and that the person you were speaking to deserved the best version of what you could offer. Lata Mangeshkar, who sang for Naushad and Sachin Dev Burman and Madan Mohan, once said that she could not sing a line she did not believe. She meant it as a professional statement. It was also a moral one.
Tateeree was written by a man who believed it. He believed every line of it, because he chose every line of it, and he set it inside a school, and he gave the school his name, and he uploaded it to YouTube with the confidence of someone who had looked at fifteen years of precedent and concluded, correctly, that the machine rewards this. He was not wrong about the machine. He was wrong only about the week he chose to release it, a week when the country was already watching another song being pulled for the same logic and the same camera angles and the same architecture of excuse.
Two songs. Two deleted videos. Two men with microphones and lawyers and a fifteen-year industry consensus that this is just entertainment.
It is not entertainment. It is a decision, made by comfortable men with expensive cars, about what girls are for.
Until the industry treats it as a decision until producers lose money for it, directors lose credits for it, labels lose artists for it, and streaming platforms lose licensing rights for it the next song is already being written. It has a hook. The hook is very catchy.
And somewhere in Haryana or Mumbai or a studio in Noida, a girl in a school uniform is being told where to stand and how to move, and not one person in the room is going to say stop.
Subscribe Deshwale on YouTube
