Does Young Cardamom Help Zohran Mamdani?

Forbes

31-07-2025

Zohran Mamdani is charming much of New York City, and young people all over the world. The Indian-African American, who identifies as Muslim, uses the affectionate "habibi" in his campaign videos, smiling goofily and using big hands while taking down the establishment. Almost exactly 10 years before he was grooming the city to become its first Muslim mayor, the would-be Democratic Socialist was speaking his mind under the rap alias Young Cardamom, dropped to Mr. Cardamom as a solo performer in 2019.
Cardamom is named for a rather innocuous spice dominant in South Asian and Middle Eastern desserts. His sole remaining YouTube video extols the virtues of the world's greatest gangster, the Nani, or Desi grandmother, who slaps men in the reel. According to its review in the New York Times, the video was inspired by his grandmother, retired Delhi social worker Parveen Nair, shot for free in a Bangladeshi Kabab King.
Such is his gift: to straddle the line of comic tragedy, of elite art and systemic class inequity.
Family is a big part of Mamdani's trajectory. His musical breakthrough came for the Disney+ release of Queen of Katwe in 2016, directed by his mother Mira Nair, and starring Lupita Nyong'o. Mamdani's father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Gujrati-born Muslim academic celebrated in Uganda, the setting for the true story used in the film. Lupita is the daughter of a Kenyan academic, Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, who once taught at the University of Nairobi before transitioning into politics. One of her first opportunities was on the production crew of Mira Nair's 2006 film, The Namesake. Nair has been quoted in Variety as saying that it was teenaged Zohran Mamdani who encouraged her to take the project and cast Kal Penn. Madamani saw past the "stoner" persona of Kumar in the cult classic Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, and the narrative significance to Muslim Americana.
'It was such a valuable, beautiful piece of advice,' Nair said of Mamdani's recommendation. She added, 'I always definitely hear him when [we] talk about the story I'm making, or who I'm thinking of, or who's good — or who's not.'
At 23, Mamdani collaborated with rapper HAB, releasing an album in the Luganda language titled 'Sidda Mukyaalo', meaning, 'I Shall not Return to the Village', or "No Going Back to the Village." Mamdani told Okay Africa at the time that the title was inspired by a boda, or motorcycle driver, a few weeks prior, with the slogan written on the back of his jacket in Kampala."And it's true for the two of us as well, although for different reasons," Mamdani told the interviewer. "I can't go back to the village because, as an Asian Ugandan, I simply do not have any village. The city is all I have."
Mamdani says he is a third generation Ugandan, presumably through his father, whose family fled colonial India in the early 1900s. Political opponents in the United States, including Black American Mayor Eric Adams, have lambasted Mamdani for identifying as partly African on his rejected Columbia University application, evoking parallels to the 'birther' movement, with paranoia surrounding Barack Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate during his successful presidential campaign.
But Mamdani certainly walked the walk in Africa. As Young Cardamom, he and his partner HAB rapped in six different languages: Luganda, the language of Uganda, Hindi, the language of his parents, Swahili, Runyoro, and Nubi. He sought to find the complicated voice of a city, and continues to do so now in New York.
Mamdani's mother, Mira Nair, has always amplified her filmmaking storytelling with bold musical choices. The 2001 film Monsoon Wedding features a robust blend of Indian sounds, from trance-like background character songs to poppy Bollywood choreography. In the 2012 film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a hauntingly good Pakistani Qawwali opens the mysterious and shadowy themes.
In tandem with Mamdani's interest in music was his lens on the world through race. He said he was "mistaken for white growing up in Africa," but that, "in the U.S...it's the opposite."
The language Mamdani determined for New York was not one of the African dialects he used back in Uganda...not even Hindi.
It was the language of terror.
"Security clearly understands me as brown and Muslim," he told Okay Africa about New York, "And so views me as a threat."
Mamdani pointed out Young Cardamom and HAB's song Askari, about the security guards in Kampala and their implicit bias against Black faces.
"This song came out of our personal experiences," he explained. 'Whenever any of my non-black friends or family come home, the gate swings open immediately. When it's a black friend or family member, it always takes a bit longer.'
In 2017, one year after the Queen of Katwe soundtrack, Mamdani released Salaam under his middle name, Zohran Kwame. He has described himself as a "C-list rapper," and certainly, this solo track is musically uninspired.
Lyrically, Mamdani references his mother in the track. But controversially, he also sends his "love" to the Holy Land Five, a group of Palestinian Americans who sent 12 million USD to Hamas and were imprisoned for terrorism.
It is unclear whether Mamdani actually speaks Arabic, the origin of the word Salaam, which means "peace", although his wife, Rama Duwaji, is of Syrian origin. Despite the six languages of Young Cardamom, there is no mention of "Shalom," the Hebrew greeting for peace, linguistically from the same Aramaic root.
In his 2019 Times' feature, it was noted that Mamdani was professionally focused on dispossessed people in New York at risk of losing their homes. The New York Post, which continues to lambast his platform, noted that as a member of the New York Assembly, he introduced a bill to end the tax-exempt status of the charities with ties to Israeli settlements "that violate international human rights law".
In childhood, it was Mamdani who encouraged his mother to focus on more independent, Muslim-oriented stories. He told her to turn down Harry Potter, starring ethnically Jewish Daniel Radcliffe, and she rejected The Devil Wears Prada, starring Jewish convert Anne Hathaway and based on the autobiographical book by Jewish author Lauren Weisberger.
Throughout his campaign, Mamdani has insisted he is not Anti-Semitic, and has received endorsements from Jewish politicians and regular New Yorkers. Rather, he insists he is asking larger questions about free speech and unlawful detainment, derailing biased power structures in the name of justice.
Alas, music is no longer his primary vehicle for self-expression.