Bijoy Shetty: Redefining Indian Hip-Hop Through Music Videos

For Bijoy Shetty, it all began with dance. Long before he became one of India’s most sought after music video directors—with credits such as Hanumankind’s chart- busting Big Dawgs and Raftaar and Badshah’s Baawe under his belt—Shetty was just a kid who was obsessed with the groove, with music’s ability to make bodies and minds move in rhythm. When he wasn’t dancing, he’d put on his headphones and walk around Mumbai, trying to make the real world around him sync up with the beats he was listening to.

Discovering the Power of Editing

Then one day, he was hanging out with his mentor Rajesh Parmar, who introduced him to the magical possibilities of video editing via a classic Alfred Hitchcock tutorial —three clips that you could re-arrange in different ways to tell completely different stories. His mind was blown.

“I just became obsessed with editing,” he told me a few months ago, when I interviewed him for Vogue India. “It gave me the same satisfaction as properly landing a [dance] step. When the visuals are on beat, it’s like a performance that you are curating.”

From Instagram Montages to Music Videos

Pretty soon, he moved from editing to directing, shooting montages featuring his friends that he edited to music he liked and shared on Instagram.

“That was also like conducting music in a way,” he said. Those videos eventually led to paid work. One of the first music videos he made was for Hanumankind’s 2021 single Genghis.

That video already shows some of the foundational elements of his visual aesthetic—gritty visuals that make great use of the Indian urban landscape, a certain economy of motion, even a nod to the motorcycle daredevilry that would be key later on.

Building a Visual Language with Hanumankind

This was the beginning of a creative partnership that has catapulted both artists to global fame. Their collaboration found its apotheosis in the music video for Big Dawgs, a single that ended up charting at #23 on the US Billboard Hot 100 charts. The video—which features a banyan-clad Hanumankind rapping in the middle of a “ well of death”, with cars and motorbikes racing past him along a vertical cylindrical wall—was instrumental to the song’s success.

“When I heard the song, there’s a sample that really sounded like a bike,” said Shetty. “And that reminded me of the circuses I would go to with my family as a child. So I thought about picking that element up and building the video concept around it.”

Rooted in the Streets of India

Shetty’s other work also often draws inspiration from his own lived experience, and the things he sees on the streets of India. His video for Martin Garrix and Arijit Singh’s Weightless, for example, offers a fresh, unique visual take on the classic dahi-handi celebrations, while last year’s Run It Up video with Hanumankind blends contemporary hip-hop sonics with visuals of traditional Indian martial arts and references tribal deities.

What’s next for Bijoy Shetty: From Music Videos to Feature Films

Having redefined the Indian hip-hop aesthetic with his music videos, Shetty is now looking ahead to bigger, more narrative-led film-making. Eventually, even feature films. But he acknowledges that there’s a long way to go, a lot more to learn. But whether he’s making a DIY music video or a big-budget Bollywood blockbuster, he’s sure that music will always remain central to his creative vision.

“I want to make music with images,” he says. “To figure out how to take my lessons from music videos into narrative film-making—how I can make the camera, the characters move musically. That’s the idea that most excites me right now.”