ਬੋਲੀਆਂ بولیاں Boliyan

A bolī is a machine for landing a line. One voice recites, faster and faster, and at the moment the last line arrives the whole circle takes it away from her and throws it back. Understand that one mechanism and you understand the form — which is why this page explains the mechanism before it prints a single verse.

What a bolī is

ਬੋਲ بول bol is an utterance, a thing said. ਬੋਲੀ بولی bolī is its diminutive: a small said thing. The same word also means “language,” which is a coincidence worth noticing but not a derivation to lean on.

A bolī is not a song. Punjabi does not even use the verb for singing about it. You do not sing boliyan, you “put” them — ਬੋਲੀਆਂ ਪਾਉਣਾ بولیاں پاؤݨا bolīāṅ pāuṇā, not bolīāṅ gāuṇā. The verb is doing real work. A bolī is placed into a gathering the way a card is placed on a table.

The unit everything is built from is the ṭappā (ਟੱਪਾ ٹپا) — one line made of two phrases, short enough to fit inside eight beats. Because it has no second line, it has nothing to rhyme with; it simply says its thing and stops. Ṭappe also live off the dance floor entirely, circulating as proverbs.

Chain two to four ṭappe together so that the last word of each rhymes with the last word of the others, and you have a short bolī. Go past four and you have a ਲੰਮੀ ਬੋਲੀ لمّی بولی lammī bolī, a long bolī. That is the whole taxonomy. There is no upper limit; a long bolī runs until the reciter is done.

The rhyme-slot — the thing nobody explains

Ask any Punjabi to recite a bolī and you will very likely get this:

It is the most recognised line in Punjabi folk verse. It is not a bolī. It is an empty slot, and the blank takes whatever noun rhymes with the verse that follows — no matter how absurd. The famous version in which twelve years of labour produce a handful of chickpeas is not a joke about a useless husband. It is a joke about rhyme. The opening has no semantic relationship at all to what comes after it; its entire job is to set the sound the rest of the verse must match.

Once you can see the rhyme-slot you can see it everywhere. A long bolī often opens by repeating a single unrelated word three times — ਆਰਾ, ਆਰਾ, ਆਰਾ آرا، آرا، آرا ārā, ārā, ārā, “a saw, a saw, a saw” — for no reason except that the verse to come will rhyme in -ārā. West of the Ravi, the ḍholā has its own version of the trick, and the māhīā's opening phrase works the same way, and so does the wedding game of chhand parāge. It is not a quirk of one genre. It is the signature device of Punjabi vernacular verse, and English writing about boliyan almost never mentions it.

This matters for how you read everything below. When a line ends in a word that seems to come from nowhere, the honest first question is not “what does this symbolise” but “what does this rhyme with.”

How it is performed

One woman recites. She takes the ṭappe in order and speeds up as she goes — this is not a tune so much as an intoning, a few stock patterns of narrow melodic range that verses are swapped freely between. Then the last line (ਤੁੱਕ تُک tukk) arrives, and the circle takes it off her: everyone repeats it, fast, together, over and over, while two or four dancers come into the middle. Then it stops, and someone else begins.

That handover is the form. Everything else is preparation for it.

There is usually no drum. This is worth saying flatly, because English writing about Punjabi music reaches for the dhol by reflex. The giddha circle is carried by clapping hands, by ringing bangles, by a clay pot struck with a ring or a pebble, and by whatever is in the kitchen — a steel platter, a winnowing tray. The two-headed hand drum, the dholkī, comes only when a professional musician does: traditionally a mirāsan, a woman of the hereditary musician families who was invited to sing at households she had served for generations. The great shoulder-slung dhol belongs somewhere else — outdoors, in the fields, in bhangra.

The men's giddha of Malwa is louder and differently equipped: whistling, clapping, and the chimṭā, the kāṭo and the sapp.

Who sings them

Boliyan are commonly described in English as women's verse, sung in giddha. That is where the largest and least documented body of them lives, and it is the reason this page exists. It is also not the whole truth, and the shorthand has become an error worth correcting.

Bolīāṅ and ṭappe are among the very few Punjabi folk genres that belong to men and women alike. Almost everything else in the folk repertoire is gendered hard — the wedding songs, the mourning songs, the songs of Teej (ਤੀਆਂ تیاں tīāṅ in Malwa) are women's and only women's. The bolī is not.

The form's home is giddha. And giddha, though everyone calls it a dance, is really a gathering at which boliyan are performed — historically the dancing mattered less than the name suggests. Women's giddha runs on ṭappe and short boliyan, quick and light.

Malwa also has a men's giddha, ਮਲਵਈ ਗਿੱਧਾ ملوئی گِدھا malvaī giddhā, and it is the home of the long bolī, which is slower and needs the room. Something unusual is recorded about it: it appears to be the only dance form in Punjab, and possibly in northern India, in which men have taken up a women's dance rather than the other way round. Men's boliyan are frequently addressed to women who are not there — love and desire spoken into an absence.

Boliyan are sung in bhangra too, and on the diaspora stage that is where most people now first hear one. But naming bhangra as “the men's context” skips past the form that actually holds them.

The corrections matter and the original point survives them: the women's giddha corpus is the one that has gone almost entirely unrecorded in English. The scholar who collected the largest part of it, walking Malwa villages from the mid-1970s with a notebook, has — by the assessment of the ethnomusicologist who knows the field best — scarcely ever been cited by an English-language writer. This page is a small attempt to change that arithmetic.

Three boliyan

Boliyan are improvised. They are composed in the moment, by anyone, and there are as many of them as there have been evenings. There is no canon here and nothing to be faithful to, which means that any three verses printed on a page are three verses somebody chose. This site chose them, and the choice is an editorial act rather than a representative sample.

Here is what the choice was. All three below are field-collected texts printed with page references in scholarly volumes, rather than the better-known verses that circulate online without provenance. All three come from Malwa, the tract south of the Sutlej, because Malwa is where the largest and most systematic collecting was done. Doaba and Majha have their own collectors and their own corpora; west Punjab's folk material was gathered by different institutions again. A Malwa sample is not a Punjab sample, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Whatever your family sings is not a variant of these. It is a bolī, exactly as much as these are.

A ṭappā — one line, no rhyme

FolkloreOral tradition

Knowledge type: folklore, oral tradition.
Confidence: High. The text is printed in a scholarly article by the collector, and the image is a commonplace of Punjabi speech rather than the property of this verse. What no one can tell you is who first said it, or when.

A short bolī — four ṭappe on one rhyme

FolkloreOral traditionCompeting derivations

Knowledge type: folklore and oral tradition, resting on documented history.
Confidence: High on the text — printed with a page reference in a Punjabi University field collection of women's giddha boliyan. High on lām meaning the war front. Competing derivations on the origin of lām. The garden-as-symbol reading is offered as interpretation, not as consensus.

A long bolī — and the swerve

FolkloreOral traditionFolk legend

Knowledge type: folklore, oral tradition, and folk legend about a historical person.
Confidence: High on the text · low on the historical content of the Jiuṇā Mauṛ ballads · one word explicitly unresolved.

The same machine, west of the rivers

The bolī is an eastern form. Its counterparts belong to the west, and they are not distant cousins: they are built out of the same part.

The western short verse is the ਮਾਹੀਆ māhīā. It runs to three phrases — or a line and a half, depending on which scholar is counting. The first phrase rhymes with the third; the middle one is shorter. But look at it once more and something familiar appears: the second and third phrases together are a ṭappā, and the māhīā is that ṭappā with a rhyming phrase bolted onto the front — a phrase that usually has nothing whatever to do, in meaning, with the two that follow. It exists to set a sound and to put a beautiful image in the ear. It is the rhyme-slot again, three hundred miles west, under a different name.

The name is worth having. Māhī is a buffalo-grazer; māhīā is the vocative, the way you call one. It became the word for a male beloved because in the great Punjabi love-tragedies the hero takes work grazing buffalo in order to be near the woman — Rāñjhā does it for Hīr, Mahīwāl for Sohṇī. The form is named after the beloved it addresses.

There is a female counterpart, bālo, and a story attached to it: that Māhīā was a Kashmiri Muslim boy and Bālo a Hindu girl, somewhere in the Gujrāṅwālā–Gujrāt country, whose families would not permit the match, and who answered one another in verse instead. Knowledge type: folk etymology and legend — a story told about a word, not a documented history. It is repeated here not as fact but because of what it is: the two names of the same verse form are a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl.

Where māhīā comes from — an argument this site will not settle

One account places the form in the Dhan–Pothohār country and dates it to at least the seventeenth century. A competing account makes it much younger and makes it a descendant of the bolī: that when Punjabis from Doaba and Malwa moved west into the newly irrigated canal colonies in the late nineteenth century they brought the bolī with them, and the Jāṅglī people of the bār — the old scrub-forest tracts between the rivers — took the form and made it into something of their own. A third suggestion has it a Malwa product with a west-Punjabi twin in the Sandal Bār.

The honest summary is the one the literature itself gives: there is very probably a historical relationship between bolī and māhīā, and the available evidence does not say what it is. Competing scholarly interpretations; no consensus. It is worth sitting with the second account for a moment, though, because of what it would mean — that one of the things the canal colonies produced, along with wheat and railways and a redrawn map, was a verse form.

Ḍholā — two different things under one name

Ḍholā is also a word for a male beloved, which has caused a century of confusion, because it is also the name of two distinct forms.

The first is a fixed five-phrase verse of the Pothohār country, which reads as a māhīā with an extension — and which has its own dummy-rhyme opening: bāzār vikendā ______, “in the market is sold ______,” the exact western equivalent of bārīṅ barsīṅ.

The second is quite different: the Jāṅglī ḍholā of the bār, an open, unbounded stream of rhyming couplets that may run to five lines or to seventy. It is sung standing, with a hand cupped over one ear in the posture of an epic singer everywhere in the Old World, and it opens on a long sustained note called the hek before the words begin. It is sung unaccompanied. Its subjects run from the pain of separation to the Sassī–Punnūṅ and Hīr stories, to Sufi verse on the spinning wheel as the turning of a life, to praise of Allah and the saints — and to the village newspaper: long biographical verses about named local men, including bandits held in the same Robin Hood affection as Jiuṇā Mauṛ in the east, and, after 1857, the rebel Ahmad Khān Kharal. Camel-drivers moving goods at night are said to have taken turns singing ḍholās to stay awake.

The Jāṅglī ḍholā is now very rarely performed anywhere. That is a real loss and it is worth naming as one.

And at the wedding, the same trick again

After the marriage is solemnised, the bride's sisters take the groom indoors and demand verses of him — the game of ਛੰਦ ਪਰਾਗੇ chhand parāge, in which he must produce rhymed ripostes on the spot and they answer him back. Its scheme: a fixed opening line repeated every stanza, then a second line ending in an arbitrary word that the fourth line has to rhyme with. The same machine, at a different moment of the same day.

So: the rhyme-slot is not a quirk of the giddha circle. It is the common inheritance of Punjabi vernacular verse on both sides of the border — a way of composing at speed, out loud, in company, without paper. Learn to hear the empty slot and the whole vernacular corpus opens at once.

What the corpus actually contains

Three boliyan is a very small number. The corpus is unbounded — improvised, anonymous, and still being added to every wedding season — and it is worth being straightforward about what is in the rest of it, because a reader who goes looking will find out anyway, and because the character of the thing is part of the point.

A great deal of the giddha corpus is bawdy, and a great deal of it complains. It complains about husbands: their looks, their competence, their absence, their performance. It complains, with real precision, about the mother-in-law, the husband's elder brother's wife, the husband's younger brother — Punjabi has an exact word for each of these people and the boliyan use all of them. It is candid about desire in ways that would not be printed in a village newspaper. One well-attested verse observes, with satisfaction, that with all the men out of the village there is nobody left to see, and tells the singer to dance.

This is not incidental to the form. It is close to being its function. Consider the arrangement it grew inside. A young woman leaves her peke, her parents' house, and goes to live among her husband's family as the newest and lowest-standing member of it. Her position depends on her mother-in-law's goodwill and, in the older pattern, on producing sons. There is very little licensed room to say that this is hard, and none at all to say it to the people concerned. The giddha circle is one of the few places where it can be said out loud, in company, at speed, to laughter, and with no consequences — because it is a song, and everyone knows it is a song, and the woman who sang it is not the woman who wrote it. The rudeness is the licence, and the licence is the point.

The siṭhṇīāṅ of the wedding courtyard work the same way, and for the same reason: mockery becomes safe at the moment it becomes formal.

Sanitise it and you do not get a gentler version of the same thing. You get a set of harmless rhymes about gardens, and a body of women's testimony turned into decoration.

Nor is it uniformly charming, and this site will not present it as though it were. The same corpus contains casual colourism, an explicit and untroubled preference for sons, and jokes that land on people who could not answer back. That is what a full folk record looks like. It is a record of what was said, not a record of what was right, and reading it as a moral authority would be a category error in both directions.

There is a third thing worth saying, which is more cheerful. The tradition is not closed. Boliyan are composed now, at weddings this year, about mobile phones and visas and in-laws by name; there are diaspora boliyan and political boliyan and boliyan that would have been unintelligible in 1930. A verse invented last Saturday is exactly as much a bolī as anything on this page. The form was never a museum, and the only way to kill it would be to treat it as one.

This page keeps its teaching material and its account of the corpus apart on purpose, the same way Sunder Mundriye keeps the song separate from the darker verses that belong to it. Nothing described in this section is reproduced above.

Keep going

• Where most readers have heard one: the sangeet on The Punjabi Wedding.
• The child's version of the same circle: Kikli Kaleer Di — a spinning game with a mock-insult in the last line.
• The wedding's own licensed-insult genre: Siṭhṇīāṅ.
• The word archive: every term on this page has a card — browse all of them.
• Giddha — the gathering itself, as a Culture page. Forthcoming.
• Māhīā — the western counterpart, in full. Forthcoming.