'When Men Express It Is Art, When Women Express It becomes Political': Wild Wild Women, And The New Sound Of Revolution

“Do you ever think about the world?” asks Pratika, as she lights up the stage, clad in a blue checked lungi, with a tucked in rumaal, channeling Bombay energy as she taps into cultural markers from Kerala, in an indoor stadium that is ready to breathe fire. The setting is South Side Story – an annual South Indian Music (and Food) festival, that just completed its 7th explosive year in the last weekend of August 2025.

Pratika is one of five members of the band Wild Wild Women – a polyphony of “game-flipping”, boundary-breaking performers touted as “India’s first female hip hop collective”. They performed an early set – in the late evening of the second (and last) day of the popular music festival that has captured the imagination of a heterogenous “South Indian Community” in the national capital.

Wild Wild Women’s colourful ensemble consists of hip-hop artists Krantinaari (Ashwini Hiremath), HashtagPreeti (Preeti N Sutar), MC Mahila (Shruti Raut), JQueen (Jacquilin Lucas), and Pratika (Pratika E. Prabhune), two break-dancers, FlowRaw (Deepa Singh) and MGK (Mugdha Mangaonkar), a graffiti artist Gauri Dabholkar, and a skateboarder Shruti Bhosle. Their set turned the stage into a carnival, with an unabashed, “full-power” performance that had the audience on their toes. A huge roar exploded in the stadium when the MC announced the band’s name.

During a long chat with the 5 artists after the event, while speaking about audience-engagement, and the responses their shows had been receiving, a beaming HashtagPreeti observed how the audience revved them up for their performance - “The set that we performed at South Side Story, we haven't performed that set ever in the last 4 years. So it was fresh for us as well… overall with South Indian people especially, we always have a blast. When our name was announced, we heard the cheers from the crowd and we were like “Now we have to kill it!” … It was one of the best shows we've performed at.” While they shared stage space with familiar names and seasoned players such as Avial, Thaikkudam Bridge, Raghu Dixit, Sooraj Santosh, Job Kurian, even T.M. Krishna, and Shobhana, WWW brought a fresh, contemporary take that was completely in-tune with the charged-up audience at the festival. JQueen talks of the importance of this “gig” - “Southside Story is like one of the events I wanted to, you know, tick mark in my life like a place where I always wanted to perform. For the past two years I was thinking about it …and people going mad looking at our set was like massive I mean they were literally listening to all our lyrics and they were trying to connect with us.”

The Music and Lyrics of “Everyday Politics”

Pratika’s question (“Do you ever think about the world?”) to the audience dislodged a self-serving, “apolitical” and privileged perspective that set the pace for the performance of her song “Ever Wondered”: “It's just about when you sit around and you think about the world around and you think about how the structure of society has made it so difficult for us as women to just live “normal” lives…you also think about how women over the years and over time continue to be used as tools and weapons in political situations in Manipur, for example – we spoke about this when we played our show in Pondicherry because that was around the time when the riots in Manipur were going on.”

A fierce, celebratory politics is inherent to the group’s dynamic, embodied presence – an “everyday politics” that is attentive to notions of power and defiance, simply by allowing natural impulses to be freely articulated. A recurring thread of empathy and equality “without attacking anyone else” finds its way through the lyrics. In their title track, MC Mahila sings the lines ““jo bhi diya pyaar se liya, nahi farak kisime kiya” emphasising the “sachchai” that rides her pen, in this “harsh” world. JQueen describes a similar feeling while speaking about her song “Thatti Veede”: “You know we have this life but we are just taking tension. Can we just take a break and forget about everything and let's just dance because when you dance you just lose yourself, you just lose your mind. You just be yourself and like you know all the negative energies goes away and you enjoy”.

Later in the day, Sooraj Santosh dedicated his performance to the revolutionary spirit of Gauri Lankesh, MM Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar, and Govind Pansare. One wonders if the festival organisers bristled – they had also asked WWW to strictly not perform any songs that contained Hindi or Marathi. But JQueen casually mocked this right at the beginning by telling the audience that “Teacher” had given strict instructions and guidelines. They ended up performing two of their core songs with Hindi/Marathi lyrics including their signature “Wild Wild Women” Track; and the audience was ecstatic. Disruption lies at the heart of their vision - Pratika describes herself as the “friendly neighbourhood culture shock” talking of her Metalhead roots, and how she was perceived as a “misfit” because of her appearance. In the early days, many in the hip-hop circuit questioned their credibility, fat-shaming them, and mocking their efforts in putting together a feminine crew.

But WWW have been unfazed and unapologetic – their poetry doesn’t fit into any simplistic, conventional hip-hop aesthetic; rather they use Mumbai slang, and local regional phrases referencing their own affiliations. Their metaphors and pop cultural references ground their music in lived experiences that most young audiences can relate to. “Sagla aapla ravas haay” sings HashtagPreeti, in their signature track - Raavas is marathi for the much loved Indian Salmon fish, but in “Tapori” or Mumbaiyya slang it’s a term that is used as flattery translating as “premium”, or “top-notch”. “That's how we speak every day, these are probably the kind of things you would hear If you listened to wild wild women speaking in a room” says HashtagPreeti in explanation. In the same stanza, she makes a reference to a popular Marathi serial Uncha Mazha Zokha. Her words turn the central plot into a metaphor that clicks with a wide audience, (including the captive viewers of Zee Marathi) – “It is like a perspective that I'm sitting on a swing on a mountain and I can see the world being very small and I am you know swinging away all my problems.”. Critics often speak of how artists find the magical in the mundane, the extraordinary in the ordinary – but WWW’s politics of the everyday is more nuanced, and without unnecessary frills. It takes the world head on.

Girls Coming Together

Krantinaari summarises the disparity and hypocrisy that has followed them over the years, with an inspirational statement that she has “internalised”: “When men express it is called art, but when women express it becomes a part of politics”. Her song Krantinaari is a powerful indictment of the patriarchal and misogynistic system that she, like several other young women, have had to combat: “I think of how women are always judged through their body…how they look or behave or how their presence is in the system. But no one really thinks about the woman's vision, what the woman's dream can be, or what it is that makes her so graceful - you know the soil inside her, which is so fertile. I imagine myself within the crew as a very internal ball of energy rather than an external body that people relate to…. So it's like if you look at me I will be the reflection or a mirror to what the society is right now. If you see me angry that means the society is angry”.

Even as they appear on stage, dropping truth bombs in their saris, and (in this case) lungis, breaking boundaries spatially as a moving tableaux in performance, their message streaks across all sorts of barriers, and manifests itself as a beautiful chaos – a symphony of fire and sound. It represents the seamless integration of the personal – the self or the individual, and the political – the collective.

Speaking of the energy that results from “girls coming together”, (Hashtag)Preeti describes the genesis of the collective: “The beautiful part is that we had no expectations of what is going to come. We just started it from pure will and excitement of just being with girl musicians and making music that's all! The plan was just to be together and just write music and make music. So I think the no expectation zone has given us everything that we never even imagined wild woman to be. Even the name came very naturally (during a rap cypher) and then we were like okay yeah let's go that's what it is and then slowly we became that and we realized “Dude we are that and we've always been that.” It's just that there was no light put on it and now there is light and now we have acknowledged everyone and it's like a family. It's not just good things we acknowledge….. our trauma we acknowledge.. all our problems, and then break it and then make it our strength together.”

Wild Wild Women is blazing a trail of performances across the country, and even, internationally. They’re collaborating with different artists and birthing new sounds. Theirs is a form that is becoming; evolving, without stagnating into any single voice, gesture or style. These artists are not bound by decorum or convention, and their message of love and feminine power “without shame” is taking the Indian music scene by storm!