By Mannu Shahi

Smriti Bishwakarma, better known by her stage name Dmriti, is a 20-year-old rapper based in Chandragadhi, Jhapa. She has garnered a great response from the Nepali music community after winning the rap reality show Wai Wai Dynamite Breakbars Rap Battle. 

Inspired by eccentric rappers who have paved the way for diverse creativity in the scene like Dong, Kavi G and Amazumi, Dmriti released three singles in 2018 as Smriti Bishwakarma amidst her initial independent music. 
This was followed by two more singles in 2019 made public under the banner Maze, a four-track mix-tape titled Pluto released in 2020 and five singles in collaboration with different producers released throughout 2021; all from the same YouTube handle.  

The emcee, who was overwhelmed by her achievement in the reality show, admitted on an interview about being rather skeptical to enter the competition, but later assenting to enrol, as she discovered the involvement of genuine Nep-hop platform Break Station: a community of artistes dedicated to support and yield local content from the Hip-hop scene of Nepal to a global audience.

Her decision was further solidified through the encouraging gestures shared by popular rapper and co-judge of the show Ease 12. 

Coming from a very supportive and liberated family, Dmriti claims how her parents with no prior interest or inclination towards this style of music have become evidently keen observers and admirers of her incredible prowess. 

In a podcast with Break Station, Dmriti confessed her father suggested strategies and motivation from a viewer’s perspective during her battle round days in the competition.  

Lured into the world of Hip-hop through late legend Yama Budhha, Dmriti at the present is managed by Skathi Records, owned and founded by fellow rapper and producer KTM Souljah. 

The songstress claims she found her home in the Hip-hop genre after discovering the roots of this style of music. The oppression and social bias faced by the Black community in the US led this music to become a movement which resonated to her inner core as the rapper herself has been a first-hand victim of the caste hierarchy dominant in our society till date. 

Thus, the struggles of countless people of colour spoke to the young and aspiring talent, who was also mesmerized by the literary influence of the genre.    
This bi-lingual poet with her fluent diction, great sense of rhythm, dynamic vocabulary and assorted palette of musicianship has indeed brewed ripples that marks a standard of creativity across-genders; an inevitable boost to contextualize Nepali music in a global setting.    

Furthermore, the rapper isn’t a fan of type-casting, a very common element of the Nepali music fraternity, where her gender somehow is elevated as the silver lining of any kind of art she produces. 

In her 2022’s latest single ‘Female Rapper’, Dmriti vents out her ideologies and taunts our social conditioning that demands the continuous reference back to this dated stereotypical loop-hole that most Nepali music consumers fall into. The video with over 160,000 plays is hopefully a wake-up call to these orthodox expectations and a dawn of a new era for a rather neutral art loving community.

And within a month, the artist is back again with her new single ‘Lowkey’ released on February 3, 2022, via Skathi Records and produced by Ktm Souljah. 

This track comes off as a mockery of our crude social constructs and a straight-up loath of the Brahmanical patriarchy that functions as a nucleus to various degrees of ill-practices presiding throughout the country. The laid-back groove infused with Goth melodies complement the emcee’s flow and her fierce personality embodies the quintessence of a determined and resilient leader who impartially entails the vision of this generation.