Retroactive continuity, situated at the complex intersections of history and story, is a narrative device wherein the storyteller (usually) deliberately alters the plot of that narrative in a way that opens it up to new interpretations in retrospect. A retcon (short for retroactive continuity) can take the form of either a reinterpretation, a reinscription or, at its most extreme, a revision (Friedenthal 2017; Jensen and Shibuya 2015). In this paper, we look at the varied implications of retcon as a storytelling device for a project that utilizes oral narratives to record the history of Hip Hop music and culture in India. Our analysis draws on fieldwork conducted amongst Hip Hop artists—rappers, breakers, DJs, and graffiti writers—from six different cities (Bengaluru, Chennai, Guwahati, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Shillong) in the summer of 2021. We analyze the conversations we had with these artists about their first interactions with Hip Hop vis-à-vis the early days of the culture in India. Our aim in doing this is twofold. First, to understand how our research participants use retcon to position themselves as “being in the know,” effectually vesting themselves with the cultural capital that comes with it (Maira 2000). Second, and perhaps more pressingly, to investigate the ethical and methodological implications of employing retcon in the narratives we construct as researchers.

During the last decade, there has been a dramatic shift in India’s popular perception of music producers, who have transitioned in status from lesser-known roles as studio arrangers to spotlit solo artists. At the forefront of this shift are hip hop producers who interpret Indian motifs into their work. Considering India’s linguistic diversity, hip hop has become a prominent vehicle for non-discursive signifiers – including folk instruments, rhythmic and melodic forms, and timbres representative of place and nostalgia. Producers strategically create music for ciphers, breakdancing battles, and makeshift spaces.to articulate regional identities and sociopolitical claims ranging from urban planning to student rights.

The technological artifacts that producers use – including digital audio workstations, software plugins, sample libraries, grooveboxes, and synthesizers are globally disseminated, yet culminate as locally specific use-cases. How do globally circulating technologies facilitate paradigms that are aesthetically cosmopolitan (Regev 2013) while also informing local vernacular cosmopolitanisms (Bhabha 1997) in the construction of Indian identities? Through local purviews of foreign commodities, hip hop producers, themselves, are consumers of technological products. The products are often employed with the desire of creating new, globally situated experiences while also referencing nostalgic Indian pasts. Drawing on ethnography and participant-observation research in Mumbai during 2018–23, this paper contributes to scholarship of South Asia, hip hop, and music production.

This paper presents an ethnographic account of how a community of Bengali-speaking rappers called the Cypher Projekt, based in the Indian state of West Bengal, created an online place for sociality during India’s harsh Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 (Jha and Mullick 2020). This attempt at online place-making is analyzed through the Indian notion of informal sociality, or the adda (pronounced ud-dah). The social practice of the adda has been described by the social historian and postcolonial theorist, Dipesh Chakrabarty, as “the practice of friends getting together for long, informal and unrigorous conversations”, thus providing “a comfort zone to cope with the ever changing forces of capitalist modernity“ (2000, pp 181). Even though addas are a spatially dispersed social practice, different sites or locations shape the vibrancy and success of an adda session (Bhattacharya, 2017).These concepts provide the theoretical lenses through which the ethnographic study is analysed and discussed. The findings of the ethnographic study revealed how the Streamyard cyphers clearly offered a vibrant place for the undertaking of addas by the members of the grassroots Hip Hop community amid the Covid-induced Indian lockdowns of 2020. Furthermore, the study highlighted the importance of addas, in physical spaces or via online platforms, in establishing bonds and strengthening relationships amongst members of this grassroots Bengali Hip Hop community. This study also augments previous work on how integral addas are to artistic practices in an Indian musical context.