Raja Kumari: I embrace my body but don’t want to be labelled as plus size

Rapper Raja Kumari recently took to Instagram and shard a post that read: “No matter where I go, they’re gonna know I am Made In India”. And that label, along with many others, are close to her heart, except one. And it is the tag of being a plus size icon.

“Sometime back, in one of my songs, I used the lyrics — ‘Too brown for the label’ — and it was really about me being signed by American labels and music labels, and then, me being too Indian. [With people] making sure that I don’t act too Indian in the videos, I always thought was so crazy because nobody would say that to anyone else,” Raja Kumari tells us.

But that does not bother her, as she tells us, “I definitely feel that a lot of times there are some labels with which I am being challenged right now. I love my body, and I’m all in for loving myself, and having self love. But, this whole being labelled as a plus size, as thick and curvy sometimes gets to me. Yes, I embrace my body, and who I am, but I don’t want to be labelled like it in any way, I just want to be myself.”

Here, the rapper, whose real name is Svetha Yallapragada Rao, asserts that she tries hard not to seek validation from other people or get bothered with their opinions in any way.

“It’s very easy to fall prey to this desire to have validation, especially in the social media era. I try to route it for myself in the love of art… I don’t base my value on how people validate me. I’m a human being. I pay attention if everybody is not liking anything, or they really liked something, it makes you feel in a different way. But an artiste’s value is really in their quality, not quantity,” opines Kumari.

Meanwhile, the rapper, who was recently nominated for the Best Indian Act at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2022, hopes that people stay away from the number game in the music world.

“I hope the obsession with numbers goes away because the algorithms are just computers, and they don’t have human emotion. One thing that bothers me is the over consumption and over saturation, like how fast people digest music, and then they just want something new. It takes so much time, dedication and money as an artiste to create an album, and people just devour it and move on. I wish there was more respect put on art,” she wraps up.