Stories

A boy from the east

Anil Adhikari was born on 30 May 1987 to Ambika Prasad Adhikari and Urmila Adhikari. Reference works give his birthplace as Leguwa in Dhankuta district; Nepali press and family accounts place his early childhood in Salakpur, Morang, where he lived with his grandparents.

It was an ordinary eastern-Nepal childhood, at a distance from Kathmandu and from anything resembling a music industry. The details that later filled his writing — family duty, obligation, the weight carried by people who leave — begin here, long before there was a microphone anywhere near them.

Itahari, Swoyambhu, and the years of schooling

He studied grades 4 and 5 at Pathibhara Boarding School in Itahari before the family's centre of gravity shifted to Kathmandu, where he joined grade 6 at The Excelsior School in Swoyambhu.

He completed his SLC at Excelsior and his +2 at Ed Mark Academy. 2002 — while he was still in school — is the year credited as the start of his active period as a rapper, which means the writing and the education ran in parallel for most of a decade.

Writing before anyone was listening

There was no industry to join. Nepali hip-hop existed as home recordings passed between a small circle in Kathmandu, most of it rapped in English because that was the template available. He kept writing through school and after it, sharpening a technical style on borrowed beats, years before any commercial release carried his name.

In 2009 he relocated to the United Kingdom, recording there while working a regular job — the double life of the migrant worker that would later give his writing its particular weight when it turned to distance, family and duty.

Then, in 2011, his self-titled 21-track mixtape arrived with 'Saathi', 'Yo Prasanga' and 'Grab Ya Khukuri' on it. 'Saathi' — a letter to a friend lost to drugs — did what no Nepali rap record had done: it left the underground entirely and became a song ordinary households knew by heart. From that point the name Yama Buddha stopped belonging to a scene and started belonging to a generation.

Building the stage the scene didn't have

In 2013 he created Raw Barz with Kolin Bikram Rana — a YouTube rap-battle league that turned competitive rap into a public event in Kathmandu and gave MCs such as Laure and Uniq Poet their first real audience.

By 2015, Nepali and international press — from The Kathmandu Post to the BBC — credited Raw Barz with driving the country's hip-hop boom and with opening the battle stage to female MCs. It is the part of his work that kept running after him.

Yama Buddha and Yama Buddha II

The 2011 self-titled mixtape ran to twenty-one tracks and functioned as an introduction, a manifesto and a catalogue at once. Its reach was not the product of promotion; it moved because 'Saathi' moved.

Yama Buddha II followed in 2013, in the same year as Raw Barz and his debut album — the densest twelve months of his career, and the point at which he was unambiguously the centre of gravity in Nepali hip-hop.

Ekadesh and Khatra

Ekadesh, the 2013 debut studio album, carried 'Aama' (feat. Mistah K) — a verse-by-verse address to his mother — alongside 'Yo Prasanga', 'Antya Ko Suruwat', 'Pagalpan', 'Jutta Maa' and 'KTM Grime'. It is the record where the social writing and the family writing sit side by side.

Khatra, seven tracks produced by Nasty, was recorded days before his death and released posthumously in 2017: 'Taaj', 'Paisa', 'Khatra', 'Sapana' and 'Yodda' among them. Between the two albums came film and collaboration work — 'Aaudai Chu Ma' for Talakjung vs Tulke, 'Aawaran' with Priyanka Karki, and 'Nachna' with IRAJ, Chingy and Neha Kakkar.

Asmita

In 2013 he married Asmita Sedhai. It is the year that holds almost everything at once — the league, the mixtape, the debut album and the marriage — and the private half of it stayed private, kept out of the writing that made everything else public.

Nepal to Ruislip

He lived and recorded in the United Kingdom from 2009 onward, in a west London home in Ruislip shared with his wife and in-laws, travelling for shows and returning to Nepal for the work that made his name.

On 14 January 2017 he was found dead there, in what was reported as suicide. He was twenty-nine, and had been recording Khatra days earlier. A family member later told The Kathmandu Post he might have been depressed because his work had not been moving forward after 2012, when he was at the peak of his career.

What kept playing

The Kathmandu Post called him the voice of a generation. The catalogue is small — one self-titled mixtape, Yama Buddha II, Ekadesh and Khatra — and it has not needed expanding to stay in circulation.

Raw Barz continued. The MCs it launched became the next decade of Nepali hip-hop. And 'Saathi', 'Aama' and 'Yo Prasanga' remain songs people reach for at the moments they were written about. Legends never fade.