Siṭhṇīāṅ are sung at the point in a Punjabi wedding where the two families are finally in the same courtyard — after the days of suhāg in her house and ghoṛīāṅ in his, when the groom's party has arrived and is being received. They come later in the sequence than anything on The Punjabi Wedding, and they are the moment the two sides first sing at each other rather than about their own.
(sing. siṭhṇī) · “siṭh-ṇee-AAN” · retroflex ṭh and ṇ, and a held ṭ — the doubling is part of the word. Punjabi lexicography defines siṭhṇī as speech delivered with satire, and specifically the songs women sing at weddings mixed with abuse.
When the groom’s party arrives, the bride’s women sing insults at them. The insults are detailed, personal, unfair, and extremely funny, and they are answered in kind. This is licensed abuse: a bounded, expected, entirely consensual convention in which two families who have just become permanently entangled say the worst of each other, out loud, in verse, and then eat together.
Nobody takes offence, and taking offence would be the breach. The songs are aimed at the categories — the (the other family’s father), the in-laws, the wedding party’s manners, the size of their appetite — and never at anything that would actually wound. Punjabi has an entire vocabulary of affectionate scolding that English does not, and this is the genre where it lives.
The song
One attested version
Gurmukhi
ਸਾਨੂੰ ਆਇਆਂ ਨੂੰ ਨਾ ਡਾਹਿਆ
ਨੀ ਚੱਲੋ ਭੈਣੋਂ ਮੁੜ ਚੱਲੀਏ
ਸੋਡਾ ਭੀੜਾ
ਨੀ ਚੱਲੋ ਭੈਣੋਂ ਮੁੜ ਚੱਲੀਏ
ਸੋਡੇ ਤੇ ਥਾਂ ਹੈਨੀ
ਨੀ ਚੱਲੋ ਭੈਣੋਂ ਮੁੜ ਚੱਲੀਏ
Shahmukhi
سانوں آئیاں نوں منجا نہ ڈاہیا
نی چلو بھیݨو مُڑ چلّیے
سوڈا ویہڑا بھیڑا
نی چلو بھیݨو مُڑ چلّیے
سوڈے کوٹھے تے تھاں ہینی
نی چلو بھیݨو مُڑ چلّیے
Romanisation
Sānūṅ āiāṅ nūṅ mañjā nā ḍāhiā
Nī challo bhaiṇo muṛ challīe
Soḍā vehṛā bhīṛā
Nī challo bhaiṇo muṛ challīe
Soḍe koṭhe te thāṅ hainī
Nī challo bhaiṇo muṛ challīe
Literal
“We arrived and you did not lay out a cot for us. / Come on, sisters, let us go back. / Your courtyard is cramped. / Come on, sisters, let us go back. / There isn’t even room on your roof. / Come on, sisters, let us go back.”
Natural
You didn’t even put a bed out for us. Come on, sisters — we’re leaving. Your courtyard’s too small. Come on, sisters — we’re leaving. There’s no room on your roof either. Come on, sisters — we’re leaving.
What is actually going on
This is a siṭhṇī in its purest form, and it is worth unpacking because it looks like a complaint and is not one. It is a demand for hospitality, phrased as a threat to leave, which the hosts are delighted to receive — because being sung at means you are family enough to be sung at. The , the woven string cot, is the unit of Punjabi hospitality: to lay one out is to say stay. The , the courtyard, and the , the flat roof people sleep on in summer, are the two places a village house puts guests. The song says: you have failed at all three, we are going home — while making no move whatsoever to go home.
Devices: a refrain that never changes while the complaints escalate; mock-departure as a rhetorical structure; direct address to the singers’ own side (nī bhaiṇo, “hey sisters”) so that the hosts are made to overhear rather than be told.
A note on selection
Many siṭhṇīāṅ are bawdier than this one — sometimes very much bawdier, and about the wedding night. That material is authentic, it is funny, and it is a real part of what women’s oral genres do. This page has chosen verses that survive honest translation for a general audience, and says so rather than pretending the genre is tamer than it is.
Folk / oral tradition · women’s genre
Folk / oral tradition, women’s genre, largely
undocumented in English.
Confidence: High on
the convention and its social function. The corpus is enormous, local,
and almost entirely unrecorded.
A child's version of the same tradition
The site’s Kikli Kaleer Di page flags a children’s rhyme ending in phiṭṭe mūṅh javāī dā — “shame on the son-in-law” — as a child’s version of this tradition.
Where this comes from
The convention and its social function are well attested; the corpus itself is enormous, local, and almost entirely unrecorded, so the verses above are one widely sung version and not the text. Sourcing on this page is encyclopaedic rather than scholarly. One question is open and is carried forward here rather than closed by republishing: whether the verse above reads as affectionate in the original — the tone of a siṭhṇī is carried by delivery as much as by wording, and that judgement belongs to a native reader, not to a translation. The Shahmukhi lane was set from the Gurmukhi for this publication and awaits the same review.