Why Hard Kaur is Hard To Miss

This rapper seems to have left all her angst behind in Birmingham. In Mumbai, it’s an entirely new musical game, what with all the Bollywood flicks and many a reality show

It’s anybody’s guess whether veteran actor Rishi Kapoor fancies tattoos. Rapper Taran Kaur Dhillon, who goes by the stage name Hard Kaur, has reason to believe he does. Kaur, who played the role of Kapoor’s daughter in the Bollywood film Patiala House, says Kapoor took a shine to her dragon tattoo.

“Rishiji calls me Haddo Rani, and, for some reason, likes arm wrestling with me. Everyone else was scared to hang out with him, because they thought he was grumpy, but I, somehow, took to him,” says 31-year-old Kaur, who looks like she’d fit straight into a Meera Syal-directed Brit comedy that takes potshots at Indians, but makes for a 5-foot nothing caricature in Bollywood.

“Hum heroine nahin hai, hume pata hai (I know I am not heroine material),” she says, in an accent that points neither to Punjab nor Birmingham, where she was raised. No more film offers have come her way, she admits candidly. “If I do another film, it has to be interesting. I’d like to play a comedian or a villain’s sidekick. I wish Amrish Puri were alive. He’d say ‘Go and kick his ass’. I’d say, ‘Yes boss.’ That would be so cool.”

When we met Kaur in 2008 just ahead of her debut music album Supawoman’s launch, the story of her journey from Birmingham to Mumbai was filled with accounts of racism and sexism. Not that her verse reflected it. A track titled Sexy Boy from Supawoman went something like this: “I don’t care about your cash and jewels/Give me eyes that make me drool/I need a gangsta/Thoda sa lafanga.”

Sexy Boy seemed tailor-made for Bollywood. Sure enough, Kaur shifted to Mumbai in 2008 when Hindi film composers had just begun experimenting with hip-hop influences. Since then, she’s got herself an agency to manage her work, a home loan, and has just been signed on for Comedy Circus, a Hindi stand-up comedy show on TV. The show, known for its over-the-top slant and gregarious judges, can only be described as loud, like everything else about India, really.

When we meet Kaur at her management agency’s office in suburban Mumbai, she tells us that she prefers slapstick over being locked up in a house with other celebrities. “I don’t hang out with celebs. No one’s nobody’s friend. I don’t trust people,” she says. If nothing else, Kaur is a shrewd, hardworking professional.

Kaur warmed up to Indian TV in 2009. “I was being asked to be on all kinds of reality shows, but I like challenges. There’s no talent in eating snakes or beating up people. Usme koi maza nahin hai (There’s no fun there),” she says. Instead, Kaur chose a dance reality show Jhalak Dikhla Jaa, that featured the likes of football star Baichung Bhutia. “I was flung about the floor all the time and ended up sore and bruised with broken bones,” she remembers. The show also grabbed the attention of Nikhil Advani, who directed Patiala House, and Akshay Kumar, who starred in it. “They saw me do the gidda, a Punjabi folk dance performed by women, and called me in to act in the film,” she recalls.

Her role of a demure Punjabi girl living with her large family in Southall who finds her calling in rap music is nowhere close to how her life back in Birmingham played out. “I had only my mum on my side,” she says, “I was really into hip hop—Nas and Mobb Deep. But the Indian girls [there] only listened to bhangra and Bollywood, so I hung out with the Africans who listened to hip hop.”

Kaur’s family moved from Kanpur to Chandigarh after the 1984 riots. Soon after that horror, her father took his life, and Kaur’s family moved to Birmingham when Kaur was six. Adapting to the culture wasn’t easy. “Nobody let their kids play with you. I got labelled naachnewaali and gaanewali because I was into music.” Her own fraternity didn’t make it easy for her, either. “Girl rappers get shit no matter what colour. I got it more because I was Asian. Boys would cancel my gigs for no reason or ask me to prove myself over and over again,” says Kaur, who claims to have begun rapping when she turned 12. She did everything from shaving her head to look tough and showing up at studios with ex-convicts as henchmen so that she would be paid on time. Her headstrong act led one-hit bhangra-rap wonder Panjabi MC to give her the alias Hard Kaur.

Kaur claims that she worked on ‘real’ hip-hop for nine years, slaving all the while at a beauty salon run by her mum to earn enough to pay for studio recording time. Fame eluded her, though she had performed at well-known music festivals such as Glastonbury, until she did Ek Glassy with the South Asian hip hop group Sona Family. It puzzles her even now how the track—about turning into a wastrel—worked. “I was regarded a slut when I was fully dressed up and talking about real things, but when I showed my cleavage and talked about alcohol, nobody thought I was bad. People are fucked,” she says.

It’s equally ironic that she wrote the song to please her mother. “When my mum said ‘Do a song for Indian people,’ I did Ek Glassy to take the piss out of everybody. I thought it would get panned and I’d have a laugh. But everybody, except the male Asian artistes who felt I should stay at home and make babies, loved it.”

Ek Glassy was also responsible for her Bollywood breakthrough in the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy soundtrack for Johnny Gaddaar that released in 2008. “Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy ne toh meri lottery lagayi. They took the first risk to do a song like Move Your Body,” says Kaur, who also rapped on Lucky Boy for composers Vishal-Shekhar in the score of Bachna Ae Haseeno that released in 2008 too. The same year, Kaur landed a track in the Mallika Sherawat film Ugly aur Pagli, but the big hit came in the Akshay Kumar-starrer Singh is Kingg, which turned out to be the biggest grosser of 2008.

Even before the fate of her debut album could be predicted (it tanked), Kaur announced that she’d begun working on her second album. She went onto to cut Desi Dance for the second album, with the Detroit-based rap group D12 that Eminem was once part of, and released a video for the track. But both her big dream to collaborate with American rap star Busta Rhymes and the album have been shelved for now. “Everybody says, ‘Make your album a little more commercial like your Bollywood songs. There’s no money in it’. I like having money and nice things. I’m not gonna die as a struggling artiste for the sake of my art. I’m gonna make my money and keep my soul happy that if I had to rap on the spot, I know I’d still kill it.” We remind her that the last time we saw her on stage (at the South Mumbai music club Blue Frog for a 10-minute spot on reggae artist Apache Indian’s show in February), she was far from impressive. “This is how open mike nights are across the world. Nobody gets battle rap here. I’ve been let down so many times at hip hop nights in Mumbai. Promoters don’t push it either,” she says in defence.

If there’s another complaint on the home-front, it’s the fact that her mother doesn’t live with her in Mumbai. Instead, she has a pit-bull named Bobo and a live-in partner for company.

“He’s like my wife, bechara (poor thing). He cooks for me and keeps the house. I don’t care about what people say. If he were working, I’d be at home doing the same thing,” she says. Well, that’s emancipation for you.

About The Author

Lalitha Suhasini

Lalitha Suhasini is the former Editor of Rolling Stone India

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