Rapping Against the Heat: How India's Marginalised Artists Are Sounding the Climate Alarm

The kilns are lit before dawn. By mid-morning in the brick belt districts of central India, temperatures have climbed past 45 degrees Celsius, and the workers — backs bent, faces scarved against the dust — have already been at it for hours. For Madhura Ghane or Mahi G , a rapper from Maharashtra's Mahadev Koli tribal community, these images are not metaphor. They are memory.

'Back scorched in the kilns, blood boils under the sun,' she raps in her 2025 track Heatwave Rising, released in collaboration with Greenpeace India. 'The one whose sweat builds your home is himself left homeless.'

Released as India was emerging from yet another punishing summer, the track is part of a growing body of climate-conscious rap being made by artists from India's most heat-exposed communities — communities that rarely appear in official climate negotiations, but that are living the crisis in full.

A Year of Records

India's climate emergency is not a projection. In 2024, the country recorded extreme weather events on nearly 88 per cent of all 365 days, with the India Meteorological Department confirming it as the warmest year since 1901. Over 3,000 lives were lost, more than 3.2 million hectares of crops were destroyed, and upwards of 235,000 homes were damaged. Heat was among the deadliest hazards — 733 heatstroke deaths were recorded across 17 states between March and June alone, a figure widely considered an undercount. A 2026 study in Frontiers in Environmental Health estimated that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally.

The dead are disproportionately outdoor workers: street vendors, construction labourers, sanitation workers, delivery riders. People whose jobs offer no shade, no break, no alternative.

It is precisely these lives that Ghane's music attempts to reclaim from statistical anonymity.

An Inheritance of Struggle

Ghane grew up in Kalyan, on the outskirts of Mumbai, but her roots lie in a small village in Ahmednagar district, where her grandparents still live. She came of age between two worlds — the relative infrastructure of urban Maharashtra, and the resource precarity of rural Adivasi life.

'When I visited my village for vacations, I could see the struggle,' she said in a telephonic interview. 'Walking a kilometre to fetch water, carrying pots back without chappals. There is a dam just four kilometres from my village, and yet water would come once every fifteen days during summer. It would go to the large farms. The small people were left behind.'

Her introduction to rap came through the television show Hustle and the film Gully Boy, but the language that emerged was shaped by something older. She writes in Marathi when addressing her community, in Hindi for national politics, and occasionally shifts to English for lines that feel global in scope. 'El Niño affects weather worldwide, heat waves rising, no place to hide, there is no sense in war when our forest is on fire,' she raps in one verse — a pivot she explains as instinctive: 'Global issues — I learned about them in English. So that is how they come out.'

She is careful to describe herself as an artist first, not an activist. 'I did not set out to write protest songs. But these topics are everywhere and nobody is talking about them enough.'

From the Forest, With a Mic

A few hundred kilometres away, in the green corridors of Mumbai's Aarey forest, another artist arrived at climate consciousness through a very different route.

Aklesh Sutar, who raps as MC Mawali and co-founded the multilingual collective Swadesi, grew up near Aarey and spent his childhood swimming in its lakes, harvesting mulberries, and fishing with help from Warli Adivasi residents. His pivot to ecological justice came when he noticed fencing appearing along a path he had walked since childhood. Plans were underway to build a metro car shed inside Aarey, which would require felling approximately 2,700 trees and demolishing Adivasi settlements predating the forest's official designation. Six hours after the Bombay High Court dismissed protection petitions in October 2019, contractors moved in by night and began cutting trees. Twenty-nine protesters were arrested.

Through activist contacts, Sutar met Prakash Bhoir, the Warli chieftain. He spent two years attending community meetings, documenting traditional paintings, recording oral testimonies, and listening. Then he wrote a song.

'The Warli Revolt', released by Swadesi featuring Bhoir, became an anthem for the Aarey movement. Sung in Marathi, it invoked the Warli leopard deity Waghoba and drew a direct line between deforestation, displacement, and the erasure of Indigenous culture. 'I wrote the rap as a Warli person,' Sutar explained in a telephonic interview. 'What would he say if he had the mic? What would he rap, fused with the tribal rhythm?'

He followed it with 'Adivasi, a second song made in collaboration with the community — one that shifted from accusation to affirmation, celebrating Warli gender equality, communal house-building, and a way of living in which the forest and its inhabitants are not separate. 'Instead of saying you are wrong,' he reflects, 'I prefer saying we are right, we are better.'

When the Forest Is the Song

Ketan Nangare, who raps as Tiny True with the collective Tappori's Paradise, came to environmental music from a beatboxing background. At 26, his path was shaped by growing up near Aarey in Goregaon, Mumbai.

'I used to go to the forest just to get that vibe,' he said in a telephonic interview. 'In the city, you cannot breathe properly. But when you pass through the edge of the forest, you feel it — it becomes cooler. That place has no price. You cannot compare it to gold.'

His most recognised song, 'Vanmanus' — written in Marathi during the Covid-19 lockdown — translates roughly as 'the precious forest', a meditation on nature as home, lungs, and sanctuary. The song has been used at environmental protests and, he says, has prompted listeners to plant trees in their own neighbourhoods. 'We cleaned up a slum settlement recently. The children helped. Once they planted a tree, they started caring for it. One tree, one child, one neighbourhood.'

For Ketan, music functions as what he calls 'an entertaining way' to shift minds. 'A child might not know the meaning,' he says, 'but if they are singing it and ten adults are standing nearby who do — those adults will start thinking.'

Sound as Frontline

What unites these three artists is not a shared genre but a shared conviction: that the communities most harmed by climate change are the least present in conversations about it, and that music can bridge that gap where policy has failed.

India's climate governance has improved in some respects. Heat Action Plans are now being rolled out across 23 states, and the government has pledged better heatstroke surveillance. In April 2026, Delhi unveiled its Heat Wave Action Plan 2026, one of the country's most detailed to date: outdoor construction work is banned between noon and 3 pm on severe-heat days, over 30 hospitals have set up dedicated 'cool rooms' for heatwave patients, 3,000 water ATMs are being deployed across the city, and a Cool Roof Policy applies reflective coatings to buildings to reduce indoor temperatures. But critical gaps persist. There is still no robust, publicly accessible national system for tracking heat-related deaths. Outdoor workers — the protagonists of Ghane's songs — have no guaranteed right to shade or rest under most state labour frameworks. Adivasi communities continue to face displacement through infrastructure projects that invoke development while erasing ecological knowledge systems.

The artists are not naïve about what music can and cannot do. 'An artist is a mirror to society,' Ghane reflects. 'We try to show that mirror — to the government, to the people.' But she is clear: she writes because the issues demand it, not because she has calculated the outcome.