🇮🇳 Badshah

He was born in Delhi to an army family that moved frequently before settling in the capital, and was schooled at Bal Bharati Public. He took a civil-engineering seat at PEC Chandigarh almost as a default — engineering was what bright Punjabi boys did — and spent his evenings rapping in Hindi over instrumentals downloaded on a college LAN. He met Yo Yo Honey Singh in 2006 and joined the Mafia Mundeer collective, the unruly Punjabi-hip-hop crew that would shortly reset the genre's commercial ceiling.

The split with Honey Singh in 2012 — public, bitter, and never fully explained — pushed him solo. He released 'Saturday Saturday' in 2013 with Indeep Bakshi, which the producer Vishal Dadlani heard at a wedding and bought for the soundtrack of Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania. By 2015 he had 'DJ Waale Babu' with Aastha Gill, the first Indian YouTube video to cross 50 million views inside a month.

He has spent the decade since alternating between independent Punjabi releases and Bollywood paid features, often producing both ends of the same song. 'Tareefan' for Veere Di Wedding, 'Garmi' for Street Dancer 3D with Nora Fatehi, 'Genda Phool' with Jacqueline Fernandez, 'Paani Paani' with Aastha Gill again and Jacqueline — the formula is consistent: minor-key Punjabi melody, English-Hindi-Punjabi codeswitch, the Roland-808 kick that announces a Badshah credit before the verse arrives.

He took the judging seat on Hustle, MTV India's homegrown rap competition, across three seasons from 2019, and used the platform openly to push regional MCs from outside the Mumbai industry. Younger rappers from Haryana, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and the North-East have credited him with first-cheque budgets at a stage when the labels would not return their calls.

He launched his own label as a Saregama-distributed imprint and made the rare Indian artist transition into venture and equity — early stakes in Rare Rabbit, in a cloud-kitchen chain, in the rapper-led streetwear brand The Saga. His Forbes India listing in 2021 put him in the top ten Indian celebrity earners, the only musician on the list.

The personal life has been a tabloid file: marriage in 2012 to Jasmine Masih, daughter Jessemy in 2017, a low-key divorce confirmed only in 2023, and an ongoing dating speculation around the actor Isha Rikhi that he refuses to confirm or deny. He still records most vocals at a home studio in Mumbai's Lokhandwala, and still credits his early Chandigarh roommates on liner notes.

He has been candid in podcast interviews about the depression that followed his weight loss in 2019 — almost forty kilos in eighteen months — and about the imposter syndrome of being the Bollywood rapper while the hip-hop purists from Dharavi and Khar called him a sell-out. His answer, on a 2022 podcast, was characteristically blunt: 'I am writing songs for the country to dance to. I have never claimed anything else.'