its a little over 10 days since she got her most recent tattoo a heart feeding a lotus from which emerges a trishul if youre a fan of indianamerican rap sensation svetha yellapragada rao aka raja kumari youll know how those three symbols are a striking reflection of her music and personality raja kumari made it to every hiphop loving indians playlist when her single city slums with rapper divine hit all the right chords besides slaying it as a powerhouse in her music videos the singersongwriter rocked the red carpet as a preshow host at the recent 2019 american music awards the first indian to do soshes also judged an indian reality tv show and played a cameo in zoya akhtars 2019 bollywood flick gully boy read on and youll see why this grammynominated artiste is all about heart emotion and power raja kumaris trishul tattooq given the success of gully boy would you say that bollywood will have a role to play in taking indian rap to the worldtheyre gonna try it is a huge platform the collaborations i have done with bollywood have exposed me to 90 million views we cant not respect the power of the bollywood platformq but a lot of independent artistes are not for ityou can go ahead and stay independent and underground my goal is to put the music in the whole world because i come from america where we indians are less than 1 of the population weve been fighting for representation in an intense way i grew up without seeing even one indian face i was living in a whole environment that was created to make me feel not beautiful my goal is mass exposure bollywood will continue to be interested in the rappers that are coming up and its our job as artistes to try to maintain the spirit of hiphop its not selling out its about exposing people to the art form that is hiphop a lot of people did not think of it as art and gully boy really helped us tell people that it is a true expression of the human experience i think bollywood will help i want to do a song in bollywood where i sing in hindi and rap in english i feel like people need to hear me sing in hindi itll be funq artistes across the world are being accused of cultural appropriation today your thoughtscultural appropriation has been an issue for a long time for the indian community because in a lot of ways people like to sample us but not allow us to speak on our own behalf but im happy to say that were in this new era that id like to call the brown renaissance where people like hasan minhaj are having their own shows theres mindy kaling and priyanka chopra so many people this time of visibility is going to help us be a part of the conversation and then its no longer