'Kodaikanal Won't' rapper Sofia Ashraf to perform in Mumbai!

Socio-political rapper Sofia Ashraf, will be performing for the first time in Mumbai at The Hive in Khar on October 9. iamin caught up with her a few days before, in an effort to understand her newfound love for atheism, her childhood musical influences and her struggle to make Unilever clean up its toxic waste.

Born and brought up in an orthodox Muslim household in Chennai in 1987, Sofia had been, since her school days, a girl who zealously took part in extracurricular activities. “My mother always told me that I’d have to get married soon in life and take care of kids, so I should have as much as fun as I could now,” says the 28-year-old. In college, the number of extracurricular activities she took part in increased, with her being an enthusiastic elocutionist and a dance fanatic. “We used to record ourselves on VHS tapes, dancing to Backstreet Boys. Dance used to be my beyond and all back then. However, it was elocution that brought out the writer in me,” she says.

Early, curious days of the ‘Burqa Rapper’
Sofia admits that ever since her childhood, she’s shared a bond of familiarity with the stage. It didn’t scare her—not when she was a young girl reciting poems in front of her class, and definitely not now while she has asked Unilever to fix the damage their thermometer factory has left behind in the Kodaikanal region. “In Degree College, I was chosen as a singer in the music team by default as my elder sister, who attended the same college and had an astounding voice and was a part of the team as well,” recalls Ashraf. “Soon they realised that I could not sing at all. But then, I saw someone rapping on stage during a college festival and told myself, ‘Hey, I can do that’. That was the beginning for me.” Donning a hijab, she began rapping to her own lyrics in which she questioned people’s attitude towards Muslims after 9/11. The press coined her as ‘The Burqa Rapper’ not knowing that Sofia, while discovering her talent for rap and hip-hop, was also undergoing a spiritual transformation.

“I used to run a youth Muslim group back then, and was studying Islamic History and Philosophy ardently,” she says. “My research, done solely from an academic point of view, gave me a different insight into religion. I looked at it from a historical and philosophical aspect, which is what led to a slow degradation of old values that had been ingrained and conditioned in me since my childhood. An epiphany occurred over time and eventually I gave up its notion completely.”

Battling inner conflict
In 2010, Sofia visited Mumbai for the first time. “I realised that as long as I was shrouded in the hijab and around my family, it would be impossible for me to break out of my shell. I felt the need to throw myself into a space where nobody knew me and I knew nobody,” says Sofia, pointing out that it wasn’t like her family had disowned her after she decided to renounce religion. “My mother is very spiritual. She believes that religion is a very personal thing and cannot be forced upon someone. People need to embrace it.”

Sofia’s parents first thought that her newfound atheism was just another phase of hers and that this too, would pass. However, now, they’ve slowly come to terms with it, as their daughter has emerged a victor, one that belongs to a different breed of Indian women. “I have seen the beautiful side of Islam and it truly is compassionate and wonderful. For the longest time, my family and cousins thought I’d given up only the hijab but was still a Muslim. When they found out I had turned atheist, my cousin sat me down and told me, ‘You are more Muslim than the rest of us because you truly have faith in your own beliefs and the courage to stand up for them.’ In fact, my aunt, mother and a bunch of other relatives, attended my recent ‘Justice Rocks’ concert —dressed in hijabs!”

The success of Kodaikanal Won’t
If somehow ‘The Burqa Rapper’ had failed to put Sofia on the map, her Youtube video Kodaikanal Won’t definitely did announce the arrival of a new brand of activism.“The whole point of the video was to get Unilever’s CEO Paul Polman to speak up, as he had been very silent on the issue until then. We were pretty much sure that he wasn't even aware of the ecological and health damages the thermometer factory left behind,” says Ashraf.

Not only did the video receive immense response from politicians and the police in Tamil Nadu, it also caught Polman’s attention and generated a response from him on social media. The video received 1.5 million hits within the first week itself. The message and demand, however, was for Unilever to fix the damage, not to make people aware of their negligent behaviour of dumping toxic mercury waste into the Kodaikanal waters. She says, “The most useless thing for a musician to do is spread only awareness and not do anything in reality about the issue. All the hype will definitely die down, if not sooner, then later. But a solution had to be found and that was the point the video was trying to drive home.”

Even when Paul Polman was awarded the UN’s highest environmental accolade,’Champion of the Earth Award’, Sofia and her supporters wrote to previous awardees, asking them to oppose the award. “Some of the previous awardees wrote to Polman saying ‘This award comes with a responsibility; clean up your mess in Kodaikanal’. We also gave him a ‘Shame Award’ in the form of a brass lota at this year’s Justice Rocks concert,” she adds.

Life in the South Vs life in the Bay
In the last five years, Sofia has been shuttling between Chennai and Mumbai for work and for personal reasons. “Yes, we from the South, come to Mumbai with our noses in the air, slightly conditioned with a superiority complex, with pre-formed modules in our head. But when you embrace this city for what it truly is—the diversity, the joy, the fast-pace, it becomes home in itself,” says Sofia. “Some of my songs are very personal and not regarding topics that I talk to my friends about. They involve topics close to my heart like my family or my journey of giving up a corporate job and entering the lesser-paid zone of being an artiste.”