Hanumankind ‘Runs it Up’ at Coachella: Behind the scenes of an iconic US debut

It’s less than one month before Coachella, and rapper Hanumankind, real name Sooraj Cherukat, is fully immersed in preparation mode. “It’s wild to think that our first performance in the US is Coachella,” the rapper says, slightly bemused. “We’re getting psyched and trying to get into the right headspace—trying to find that balance between making it a performance while still keeping it personal.” 

Hanumankind and his team have already struck this balance, with last summer’s hit single “Big Dawgs” that propelled the artist towards international stardom. The hit track featured the rapper’s Project Pat-inspired flow accompanied by a thrilling, high-velocity video set in Ponnani, Kerala, the artist’s home state. It depicts Hanumankind amid a series of stuntmen and women defying gravity by driving cars across the walls of a pit known as the “well of death”—a common attraction at Indian carnivals. The highly charged kinetic optics are inherently performance-ready. 

The rapper’s personal dimension comes from drawing from his local environment and combining vernacular cultural elements into a fast-paced, compelling narrative grounded in hip-hop. The divergence from portraying typical cultural tropes in mainstream hip-hop videos (in India and the West) is deliberate for the artist and his team, including producer Nikhil’  Kalmi’ Kalmireddy and Bijoy Shetty, who directed the video. Besides developing his own cinematic aesthetics, Hanumankind raps in English, reaching fans far beyond the region.  

 Amassing over 220 million views on YouTube and countless reaction videos from all over the world, “Big Dawgs” peaked at #9 on the Global charts and #23 on Billboard Hot 100, ending the year in the Top 10 Most Streamed Rap Songs charts on Spotify. Since then, Hanumankind has had a whirlwind nine months. His meteoric rise captured the attention of hip hop stalwarts such as Project Pat himself, and A$AP Rocky, with whom he released a remix of “Big Dawgs”, then followed that up with the song “Game Don’t Stop” for the soundtrack of Squid Game season 2, and subsequently released the new hit single “Run it Up”. 

He’s also signed with DefJam India and Capitol Records, and performed at Rolling Loud festival in Thailand, Lollapalooza Mumbai, and Ceremonia Festival in Mexico, culminating in his Coachella debut this month.   

Ahead of the festival, the artist spoke with me from his home in Mumbai, where he just relocated from Bangalore. “It doesn’t really matter where I live, because I live like a hermit,” Hanumankind says of the move. “This isn’t always the case, but as of late, I’ve generally kept to myself. It’s been about being locked in an environment in which I can create.”  

South India, especially the city of Bangalore and the state of Kerala, have been crucial to his artistic pursuits. This is most apparent in the video of his latest release, “Run it Up”, which came out last month.  

Spinning faces bearing ornate masks traditionally worn while performing Kathakali, a form of dance-drama originating in Kerala, transition into a man wielding swords and standing on the backs of two running horses. He’s mid-charge while practising Gatka—a Sikh fencing art. The scene switches to footage of Mardani Khel, a Mahrastian martial art form, and then Thang Ta, yet another sword and spear-utilising art form from Manipur in northeast India. Practitioners of Kalaripayyatu, a fighting form rooted in Kerala, steal the spotlight with their deceptively graceful yet lethal moves. 

All of these scenes flash onto the screen at an incredibly rapid pace, punctuated by Hanumankind’s assertive lyrics and grounded by the sound of the Chenda, a traditional Kerala drum. The rapper and his team respect the source, both in terms of hip-hop and the use of South Indian instruments. Raw and gritty, but packaged with high-value production, the aesthetics show their own merits, lending authenticity to both his sound and videos, which are acclaimed for. Hanumankind teases out the essence while incorporating it into his creative process.

He transported this essence to Coachella, bringing a troupe of Chenda drummers to perform a live, unfiltered rendition of “Run it Up”. The powerful, defined beat, typically heard at South Indian festival processions or temples, reverberated from the Mojave Stage throughout the valley, momentarily plunging festival-goers deep into the sounds of Kerala. 

The music video’s disparate scenes get a bold and daring treatment by Hanumankind and his collaborators. Not only do they inject a spirited energy that goes with his track, but these different forms of culture, which evolved over centuries or millennia, are presented in a fresh way where South Asians, across the region and diaspora, are able to regain agency in how they’re perceived. “Most people still have a fixed idea of what India is, and there is so much more to it than that. I’m just part of a movement, a collective,” the artist says.  

As he proclaims in the song: “We’re dealin’ with things you ain’t seen before. We’re feelin’ the weight of our ancestors. We’re healin’ with ways that don’t last for long.” 

“This country is full of talent, and then there’s our history,” says Hanumankind. “Historically, we’ve had a lot of things robbed from us, and I think everybody’s impacted by that. So we’re all trying to claim something that we feel was taken from us. We’re going to take what is rightfully ours—in terms of how we’re supposed to be perceived.” 

The rapper continues, emphasising his personal trajectory that’s grown alongside his music: “There’s a lot of deep-rooted shit that I’m trying to process myself because that sound brought it out of me,” he says referring to the Chenda beat in “Run It Up”. “I didn’t write it to unite the people; it just naturally happened.”  

The result of experimentation and a fun riff session, “Run It Up” started almost as a joke, according to the artist. First, they laid down the beat with the Chenda Melam, an entire percussion ensemble including the drums, and then the words just fell into place: “Run it up, the sun is up,” says Hanumkind reciting his own lyrics. “It’s so basic, but it’s so fun, and that’s where I’m coming from. When you have these sounds, I’m naturally speaking about and to my people.”  

It’s a consistent theme in the artist’s life and work, as he declares in the second line of the track: “I put money down on all of us. On my people now, on what I love.” 

This outlook he reaffirmed after spending more than a decade in India—call it a second graduation of sorts. Cherakut first moved back to the country in 2012. He had two goals: to finish college and develop a real and sustained understanding of his heritage and cultural roots.  

“My perspective of India was limited to summer vacations,” says the rapper, who had a largely peripatetic upbringing that involved moving between Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, and Nigeria before finally settling in Houston, Texas. “I made a conscious decision to stay here [in India] because it’s the first time I ever got to know what it means to live in my country; I’d never had that before. My parents and family were always on the move—one year, we’re going to one country, and the next, it’s a different country. We were constantly uprooted.”   

Though Hanumankind began rapping as a therapeutic hobby in high school in Houston, “hip-hop saved me in so many ways because I gave me direction and purpose and a mission,” the artist says; it was in Bangalore that he was truly able to develop his talent and pursue a career. While the world was recently made aware of the artist’s rapping and lyrical prowess, he had slowly started cultivating a presence. He began by performing at open mic nights, then graduated to larger venues such as clubs, including a memorable Boiler Room set in the city in 2023, garnering a following along the way.  

His earlier songs, such as “Genghis” and “Damnson” in 2021, also established the artist as an emerging talent. Around this time, he met and began working with Shetty and Kalmi, both of whom have had an immense impact on the artist and helped take his artistic practice to the next level. “For the longest time, I didn’t even think I would be making music videos, says the rapper, who at one point only thought of himself as a live performer. And then I met Kalmi, who has such a beautiful headspace for creating music and sounds and reached out to Bijoy, who, as it turns out, was just as weird and crazy as me.”  

Sources of Hanumankind’s inspirations are vast and varied; his hip-hop influences range from the ubiquitous sounds of Kendrick Lamar, Three 6 Mafia, and Bun B, which he was exposed to during his formative teenage years in Houston. Being able to incorporate elements of these influences and seamlessly blend them in his own distinct flow defines his mass global appeal, giving him a way to highlight these localised cultures. It’s similar to how one of his other major influences (he’s a self-professed metalhead), System of a Down, incorporated Armenian folk music into their heavy metal repertoire, drawing from age-old tradition to craft fresh sights and sounds. 

“There’s so much more I want to do; I’ve barely scratched the surface,” the artist says, looking ahead. “I know that there are so many levels to this that I’m just starting to see and realise; there are so many sounds and visuals I want to explore.” 

His soon-to-be-released project promises to reflect the multitude of cultural and artistic influences the artist himself embodies. As much as the artist is in a headspace to start something fresh and create sounds from scratch, the new body of work consists of music the rapper has “collected” over the past years. “It’s a mishmash of what I think music is,” he says of his latest work, hinting that it includes special star collaborations. “It’s important for me to put together who I was and build on what made me who I am. And right now, these are the sounds and perspectives [that speak to that].” 

Hanumankind only divulges this much about the forthcoming project, but audiences at Coachella might have caught a snippet as Houston rapper Maxo Kream joined him on stage to preview a new song. Alongside his older songs, “Go to Sleep” and “Rush Hour”, he closed out his set with his most popular hit “Big Dawgs”. With this debut he joins the recently growing South Asian presence at the festival including Diljit Dosanjh, Ap Dhillon, Ali Sethi and Sid Sriram.

As the first rapper from India to perform at Coachella, he’s ready to galvanise audiences again for the festival’s second weekend with the refreshing novelty that results from the now trademark combination of his sound and gripping visuals, shaped by global forces but very much rooted in India. “We move in a certain way and think in a certain way.  I don’t think so many people on that side of the world have really been able to understand that,” he says, intending to catalyse that shift.