Emiway Bantai

Timeline

1. 1995Born Mohammed Bilal Shaikh on 13 November in Bengaluru, Karnataka.His family moved to Mumbai when he was about three.
2. 2010Classmates play him Not Afraid by Eminem, the record that turns him toward hip-hop.
3. 2013Releases his debut track Glint Lock with Minta, rapped mostly in English. It goes unnoticed.He is 18 and had dropped out of school by then.
4. 2015Aur Bantai, his first Hindi single, becomes the breakthrough. The video passes six million views within five years.
5. 2018Auditions for India's Got Talent with Aur Bantai and is rejected by the judges, Karan Johar among them.The same year he records five diss tracks against Raftaar.
6. 2019Machayenge goes viral on TikTok and YouTube. He appears as himself in Gully Boy and consults on the script.
7. 2020Firse Machayenge reaches 100 million views in 50 days. A remix with Macklemore follows in June.
8. 2021Releases his debut album Malum Hai Na, covers Rolling Stone India in October, and founds Bantai Records.
9. 2023Releases King of the Streets, his third studio album, and appears on a Times Square billboard for the second time.
10. 2025Marries the actor and singer Swaalina in a private ceremony in January, and releases From The Streets To The Streams, his fifth studio album.
11. 2026Records #SADAK 2.0 with the American rapper Token, releases his eighth EP CNSTNCY, and puts out the protest song Bolra Hai Sadak during the Delhi protests.

Who Emiway Bantai is

Emiway Bantai is an Indian rapper, singer, songwriter and producer, and the most successful example in the country of a musician who built a career entirely outside the label system. His real name is Mohammed Bilal Shaikh. He was born in Bengaluru in 1995, grew up in Antop Hill in Mumbai, and took his stage name from two American rappers whose names he joined: Eminem and Lil Wayne. Bantai is Mumbai slang for brother or friend.^[2]

The career has two distinct halves. In the first, from 2013 to 2018, he was an independent rapper releasing singles on YouTube, unknown to the industry and rejected by a television talent show. In the second, from 2019 onward, he became the proof of concept for a whole generation of Indian artists who watched him sell out shows and top streaming charts without a corporate backer. The transition happened in public, through a feud, a viral song and a film soundtrack, in that order.^[2][3]

The numbers around him are large and mostly self reported. His videos run into hundreds of millions of views, he has appeared on a Times Square billboard twice, and he has collaborated with Macklemore, Snoop Dogg and Token. None of that came through a label advance, which is the part of his story that Indian hip-hop repeats most often.^[2]

Antop Hill, a cafe job and the name

Shaikh was born in Bengaluru and moved to Mumbai with his father at around three years old. He grew up in Antop Hill, a dense working class neighbourhood in the eastern part of the city, and the locality left a mark on his delivery: much of his early work is built on Mumbai slang and the rhythm of the way the city talks.^[2]

His introduction to hip-hop came in 2010, when classmates played him Not Afraid by Eminem. The record is a straightforwardly emotional one, a recovery song rather than a technical showcase, and it is the one he has consistently named as the moment the form made sense to him. He began writing in English, which is what most Indian teenagers trying to rap did at the time, because the music they were copying was in English.^[2]

He dropped out of school, and the accounts differ on whether he left in class 11 or class 12. Bharat Fast says the eleventh standard, Wikipedia says he dropped out of class 12. What both agree on is that he did not finish, that the period after leaving was difficult, and that he took a job as a helper at the Hard Rock Cafe in Mumbai to earn money. It is the least glamorous fact in his biography and one of the most useful, because it dates the decision: he was already committed to music before there was any evidence that music would pay.^[1][2]

The name came together in the same period. Emiway is a splice of Eminem and Lil Wayne, the two rappers he was listening to most, and Bantai was added later from Mumbai slang. The construction is a small thing, but it explains the aesthetic he would build: American hip-hop technique, Mumbai vocabulary, and no attempt to hide either source.^[2]

Glint Lock, Aur Bantai and the switch to Hindi

His first release was Glint Lock, a 2013 track with Minta, rapped mostly in English. It made no impression. The failure is instructive, because it pointed at the thing that would later work: an Indian rapper performing in English was competing with the records he had learned from, on their terms, in front of an audience that already had the originals.^[2]

His father told him to rap in Hindi. He did, and in 2015 released Aur Bantai, which became his first hit. Within five years the video had more than six million views, a modest figure by the standards of what came later and a large one for a Mumbai rapper with no distribution in 2015. The switch to Hindi was not just a language decision. It moved his writing toward the cadence of Bombay street speech, which is where his flow sits most comfortably.^[2]

Bharat Fast dates Aur Bantai to 2014. Wikipedia dates it to 2015. The video and the track are the same object either way, but this entry follows 2015 because it is the year the encyclopaedia and the later interviews agree on, and because the one year difference matters for anyone tracing the sequence from Glint Lock to the breakthrough.^[1][2]

In 2018 he took Aur Bantai to India's Got Talent and was rejected by the judges, Karan Johar among them. The rejection is now a piece of his legend rather than a setback, and it is usually retold as evidence that the industry's gatekeepers were wrong about him. It is also a reminder that the television pipeline and the YouTube pipeline were, at that point, completely separate systems with no shared audience.^[2]

The Raftaar feud that made him famous

In 2017 Emiway and Raftaar had collaborated on a track called #Sadak. In September 2018 Raftaar appeared on a podcast with Raaj Jones and questioned whether Emiway was making enough money from hip-hop to justify calling himself a professional. Emiway, then 22, treated the remark as an attack on his independence and answered with a track called Samajh Mein Aaya Kya?, which translates as, did you understand now.^[2]

What followed was five diss records in a matter of weeks, and it is the sequence most often got wrong in summaries. Raftaar replied with Sheikh Chilli, which accused Emiway of taking the comment out of context. Emiway answered with Giraftaar, Raftaar came back with Awein Hai, and Emiway closed with Khatam, the title itself a declaration that the exchange was over. Bharat Fast's account reverses the first two records, which is a small error that makes the whole exchange harder to follow.^[1][2]

The feud did for Emiway's career what a marketing budget could not. It put him in front of an audience that had never heard of Aur Bantai, framed him as the independent artist standing up to an established star, and gave him a persona that his solo records could then fill in. Raftaar was the better known name at the start and Emiway was the one who gained, which is the usual outcome in rap feuds and the reason they keep happening.^[2]

The two men later made peace, and both have spoken about the episode as a young man's argument. The records remain in the catalogue, which is how diss tracks work: the dispute ends and the songs stay.^[2]

Machayenge and the mainstream years

In 2019 Emiway released Machayenge, a dance record composed by Tony James, and it went viral on TikTok and on YouTube in a way that none of his earlier work had. He has said he wrote it after three successive releases of angsty rap, as a deliberate change of register. The same year brought Boht Hard with Thoratt, Dhyan De and Skrrt Karenge, and a freestyle called Freeverse Feast in which he claimed to be the only rapper representing India worldwide.^[2]

Rolling Stone India noted in 2019 that he was one of the very few Indian music artists to have reached stardom purely through social media. Platform magazine put it more directly, saying he had cracked the code to building a devoted following entirely online. The observation is obvious now and was not obvious then: the Indian music industry's assumption was that a rapper needed a label, a film tie in or a television appearance, and Emiway had none of the three.^[2]

On Valentine's Day in 2020 he released Firse Machayenge, with Swaalina in the video and shot by the Nepal born filmmaker Nishan Bujel. It reached 100 million views in its first 50 days, was among the ten most watched YouTube music videos in India that year, and finished with 315 million views. In June 2020 he released a remix with the American rapper Macklemore. The record is the clearest single example of his reach: a Hindi dance track with a Seattle feature, made without a label, that a large part of the country heard.^[2]

Also in 2020 he released Khatam Korona, a public health song asking people to stay home during the pandemic, which reached four million views by early April, and appeared on New World by Lexz Pryde alongside Snoop Dogg. The Snoop feature is worth noting for what it says about how the American industry saw the Indian market at the time: collaborations were being offered to Indian artists with large YouTube numbers, not to the ones with the most critical respect.^[2]

In 2019 he had appeared as himself in Gully Boy, Zoya Akhtar's film about Mumbai's rap scene, and consulted on the script alongside other local rappers. The film is usually credited with taking desi hip-hop to a mass audience, and Emiway's presence in it is the link between the film's fictional world and the actual one it borrowed from.^[2]

Bantai Records and the independent label

In 2021, after eight years of singles and EPs, Emiway released his debut album Malum Hai Na. It included Machayenge 3, My Time, Hai Tu Kaun and Jawab De, the last an introspective track about fighting his own habits. The same year he was the cover artist for the October edition of Rolling Stone India, which is the closest thing the Indian music press has to a formal acknowledgement that a rapper has arrived.^[2]

He also started his own label, Bantai Records. The premise, as he described it to Rolling Stone India and to The Indian Express, was creative freedom: artists would decide what to release, when and where, without a company deciding for them. In its first year the roster included Hellac, Loka, Meme Machine, Minta, Swaalina, Thoratt, Tony James and Young Galib.^[2]

Bharat Fast calls the label Bantai The Studio and describes it as a production house. That is not the name the label uses and not the business it runs. Bantai Records is a record label with a roster, and the distinction matters because the label is the institutional part of his career: a rapper who owns the means of distribution can sign other rappers, and the roster is what turns a personal audience into an ecosystem.^[1][2]

The label also solved a problem that had followed him since 2018. The Raftaar feud had made independence his public identity, and a public identity is hard to sustain if every release still needs a distributor's approval. Owning the label meant the argument and the business were finally the same thing.^[2]

Krsna, King and the feud economy

The Raftaar exchange set a pattern that Emiway has returned to repeatedly. In 2022 a long running tension with Krsna, built up through subliminal lines on both sides, broke into the open when Emiway released Chusamba. Krsna answered with Lil Bunty, Emiway with KR L$DA SIGN, and Krsna with Machayenge 4, a title that aimed directly at Emiway's most famous song. Emiway released his own Machayenge 4 in reply and then deleted it after a backlash.^[2]

In 2023 he released King of the Streets, his third studio album, seventeen tracks long. The longest track, King of Indian Hip Hop, had come out the week before and carried diss bars aimed at MC Stan and an implied one at Badshah. Four tracks had videos before the album dropped. A review in The Indian Music Diaries called the record refreshing and picked Chhod Dala, Rule No. 123 and Survive as the tracks that departed from his usual style.^[2]

He has also feuded with the rapper King, over a track containing what Emiway read as jabs, and answered with ROKO 2MG, Meet the Instagram Yapper and Dependent Kauve. The pattern is consistent enough to be a business model: a diss record costs almost nothing to make, guarantees attention, and gives a streaming catalogue a new release in a week when nothing else is ready. It also has a cost, which is that a discography of feuds can crowd out the records that would otherwise define him.^[2]

The feud with DIVINE and MC Stan belongs to the same history, and Wikipedia lists all four names among his major disputes. Indian hip-hop's internal arguments are, in a real sense, its public conversation: the scene is small enough that its artists are all in the same rooms, and large enough now that a disagreement between two of them is national entertainment.^[2]

Swaalina, marriage and the private side

Emiway married Swaalina, an actor and singer who had appeared in several of his videos, in a private ceremony. He shared pictures from the wedding on Instagram in January 2025, with a caption that read simply Alhamdulillah. The two had worked together most famously on Firse Machayenge in 2020, collaborated again on Kudi in 2023, and she was on the Bantai Records roster in the label's first year. Moneycontrol describes her as a model and actor originally from Finland who has appeared in Punjabi and Hindi music videos.^[2][3]

Bharat Fast, published in March 2025, still describes Swaalina as his girlfriend and lists a previous relationship with the rapper and model Mukta Karandikar between 2015 and 2018. The relationship entry is out of date by the time it was published: the wedding photographs had been public for two months. This entry records the marriage and leaves the earlier relationship out, because no source beyond the profile sites carries it.^[1][2]

Beyond the marriage, very little of his private life is public in a way that can be checked. He does not give interviews about his family, and the profiles that fill the gap tend to repeat each other. The one biographical detail that is well documented is the Hard Rock Cafe job, and that is in his own telling rather than a reported one.^[2]

From the streets to the streams

In 2025 he released the single Badshah from an EP called Bajis, followed by four more tracks from the same project including a tribute to Sidhu Moose Wala. In an interview with Firstpost he said the EP's sound was inspired by old Hindi film songs featuring Shah Rukh Khan, which is a surprising reference for a rapper whose early work was built on Eminem and whose public image is built on the street. It is also an accurate description of what the record sounds like: melodic, sample driven, and closer to film music than to trap.^[2]

The fifth studio album, From The Streets To The Streams, arrived later in 2025 with ten music videos released from it. The title is a summary of his own career and a description of the industry he now works in: a rapper who started on a street corner in Antop Hill and ended up as a streaming platform's ideal artist, with a catalogue that performs on demand rather than on release.^[2]

In 2026 he collaborated with the American rapper Token on #SADAK 2.0, a sequel to the 2017 track that had preceded the Raftaar feud, and released his eighth EP, CNSTNCY. He also released Bolra Hai Sadak, a protest song, during the Delhi protests at Jantar Mantar. The record is the first time his music has been directly attached to a political moment rather than to an argument inside hip-hop, and it is the clearest sign that his audience has grown large enough for the subjects to grow with it.^[2]

His film work has continued alongside the albums. He made his Bollywood playback debut with Choozay on the soundtrack of Udta Teer, starring Ayushmann Khurrana, and appeared on Mumbai Sapno Ka Samandar with Sunidhi Chauhan on the soundtrack of Prahaar: The Untold Story of Ujjwal Nikam. A rapper who once could not get past a television talent show now writes for films, which is the industry's way of admitting it was late.^[2]

What has not been confirmed

His net worth is not public. Bharat Fast estimates it at about 1.3 million dollars as of March 2025, calculated from streaming, shows, merchandise and endorsements. That is an estimate by a profile site with no access to his accounts, and the same page gives a height of about 5 feet 7 inches without a source. Neither figure is repeated here as fact.^[1]

The claim that his father is Muslim and his mother Hindu appears on Bharat Fast and is used there to explain a mixed heritage. Wikipedia describes him moving to Mumbai with his father and does not describe his mother's background. The household detail is plausible and unverified, and this entry leaves it out rather than building a paragraph on it.^[1][2]

His education is reported inconsistently. Bharat Fast says he dropped out in the eleventh standard, Wikipedia says class 12. He has not set out the timeline himself in an interview that this entry could find, so the year of leaving school is unsettled even though the fact of leaving is not.^[1][2]

The label's name is given as Bantai The Studio on Bharat Fast and as Bantai Records everywhere else, including the trade press he spoke to. This entry uses Bantai Records.^[1][2]

Finally, the view counts and streaming numbers in circulation are the ones visible on YouTube and reported in press at the time. They change, they are not audited, and a figure quoted in a 2020 article should be read as a snapshot of 2020 rather than as a current total.^[2]