Folk songs can be centuries old. They are passed from one generation to another. Many times, the areas of origin are known but who wrote it remains unknown. Yesterday I was in a ClubHouse room and someone sang mitti da bawa (Originally sung by Jagjit Singh & Chitra Singh). She also mentioned that it is written by Shiv. I had my doubts as Shiv was a recent poet and such a thing would of course be documented somewhere. I checked his complete poetry collection and as expected it was not there. That led me to turn to Google and all over the internet it was the same information that it has been written by Shiv.

Today I got a chance to spend some more time on this and came to know that it was originally recorded for a movie called Diva Bale Sari Raat. The movie was made by Harpal Tiwana and Chitra Singh sung it for that movie. The music was done by Jagjit Singh. The movie audio album covers attribute the lyrics to Harpal Tiwana. But it is well known that these lines are part of a lori and they are very old. This video by Deepti Naval mentions that it is a Balochistan folk song. So it could have been a omission on their part to not accurately attribute it. I put the same question to Amardeep Gill (Punjabi lyricist, poet and filmmaker) and he also confirmed that it is almost a century old folk. So it is very much a part of Punjabi Folk and most definitely not written by Shiv.

What I couldn’t understand is how could it have been attributed to Shiv in the first place. Shiv did write a poem with a similar title but it is different and goes like “sajjan ji asi’b mittRi de baawe”