Meet Spitfire, the 20-year-old prodigy behind Gully?s Boy?s ?Asli Hip Hop?

By Kanika Katyal

The “Asli Hip Hop” hook from the Gully Boy that you’ve been tapping your foot to? It was created by Nitin Mishra, aka Spitfire, the young rapper from small-town Madhya Pradesh whose verses have set the Ranveer Singh-starrer aflame.

Picture this: You’re a regular teenager, struggling with homework, going about your ordinary life. One day you get a phone call from Bollywood heartthrob Ranveer Singh. He says the three magical words you’ve been waiting to hear. “Chhote, Bombay aaja.” That is how Nitin Mishra, aka Spitfire, a 20-year-old songwriter and rapper, an OG gully boy from Madhya Pradesh, went on to become the lead writer in the Ranveer Singh-starrer Gully Boy. The “Asli Hip Hop” hook that you’ve been tapping your foot to? That’s his creation.

“I write poems and I overthink,” reads his Instagram bio. His public account is an eclectic mix of pictures with Ranveer Singh and Zoya Akhar, his debut appearance at the Lakme Fashion Week, his many tattoos, and all things expected of a rapper. But a look at his private account, and you know what’s special. An image of an aam-papad and churan stall is captioned “nostalgia”, a freshly bloomed rose from a home garden peeps out, two glasses of tea are queued up on blue PVC tables. This is the milieu that Mishra occupies – and this is the milieu you experience in his verses.

Mishra’s hip-hop style is confessional. I had heard his songs, “Seedhe Midzone Se”,“Jee Le” and the hard-hitting “#Black” and a few minutes into the conversation, I could tell where they were coming from. Like the majority of Indians in small towns, Mishra lived a lower-middle-class existence in an environment that is slow to modernise. When millennials his age, in metropolitan cities are confidently subverting gender norms, he tells me that in his school, a girl and a boy can still not sit together in a classroom. In the world that the Mishras occupy, people “don’t understand any art”. The young Mishra too had to contend with the same rehashed views of “doctor ban jao, engineering kar lo”. Very early on, he knew if he were to dive into an unconventional career, he’d have to support himself.

If Gully Boy continues its dream run, there is only one thing to be said about Mishra’s career – Iska time aa gaya.

He was 15 when he was bit by the hip hop bug. A sense of unease, restlessness, and angst, had begun to set in, but back then he was not aware that the “azaadi” he sought will eventually come from his own words. All he knew was that he had things to say. “I didn’t even have a phone back then but I became friends with someone at school who did.” Ayush Khare, who goes by the street name, “Wordsmith” was that cool kid in middle school who owned a phone with an internet connection. “He had studied the global hip hop movement, and literally schooled me on how to write. We were a group of eight boys, six of whom would give us a topic, hook or idea, and the two of us had to produce a rap around that in 30 minutes,” or about as long their class periods.

This tomfoolery landed him in a lot of trouble. His parents were called. His bag was inspected for suspicious material and having found his journal full of “filth”, he was suspended. “There was no filth,” he clarifies. “It is a common perception that hip hop is a verbal pollutant which glorifies alcoholism and sexualises women. But I write about the aspirations, conflicts, or struggles, shared by me and my friends. Even my name Spitfire, came out of those sessions with my friends. One day, someone commented, ‘Bro jab tu likhta hai ya bolta hai, toh aisa lagta hai jaise aag ugal raha hai’ (When you rap, it seems like you’re spitting fire).” These contestations find a resonance in his work, particularly, his single “Midzone se”, where he describes being seen as “Mishra ji ka pagal ladka.”

Through it all, Mishra just clung to words to lift him up.

Koi yahan tere liye na aayega,
Jitna darega tu yeh jag tujhe utna darayega
Toh awaaz utha, tere saath hai khuda
Aur jee le zara
– “Jee Le”

Mishra’s verses describe his intense desire to break out, and speak out against everything that held him back. Mishra and Khare, perform as a duo, and post their songs under the YouTube handle, RAPresent.

His big break came through the Jack and Jones commercial “Don’t Hold Back 2.0”, in 2017, when he was merely 17, where the payoff was a chance to feature with Ranveer. Mishra had the words, but there was no recording studio in town. “So I recorded my rap on a phone and sent it. When the list of selected rappers was released on the website, my name wasn’t there,” he tells me.

But he did eventually get selected – and was allowed to leave only after he had cleared his Class XII Board exams and after the producer of the video, “Anushka (Manchanda) didi agreed to FaceTime with me”.

“Don’t Hold Back 2.0” also marked the arrival of three other artists, Devil The Rhymer, SlowCheeta, and Kaaam Bhaari – the latter two also went on to work on Gully Boy. A sense of the communal and collaborative is the backbone of hip hop. This kinship also extends to the collaborative nature of Gully Boy, where a bunch of rappers across age, language, and region have contributed cyphers and songs, and are equally credited.

Historically, hip-hop stands for the voice of the voiceless, forging solidarity through shared experiences of marginalisation. When Mishra first heard some parts of the Gully Boy script, he felt that his own story was being told. The hip-hop movement in Mumbai’s slums, which forms the backdrop of Gully Boy is often compared to the political movement of the 1990s US when socially-conscious rappers spoke about the frustrations of Inner City life. Vivian Fernandez aka Divine’s debut single Mere Gully Mein featuring Naved Shaikh aka Naezy was hailed as an ode to the neighbourhood where he grew up. Like them, Mishra also situates his rap in the same tradition, of speaking to the disenfranchised.

What sets Mishra’s rhymes apart are their linguistically striking features – if Bombay rap has slang, Mishra’s Bundelkhand origins include shuddh Hindi. “Mere gaon mein abhi bhi log kahawaton (idioms) mein baat karte hain.” And that is evident in songs like “Shakkar”.

I ask him if he was now a big shot in MP. “Kind of,” he says shyly. If Gully Boy continues its dream run, there is only one thing to be said about Mishra’s career – Iska time aa gaya.

This article was originally published in Arre.