The country liquor floor

Three traditions share this floor and they are not interchangeable, so it is worth saying plainly what separates them. Punjabi is the one with the export market - forty years of bhangra pop, then Bohemia inventing Punjabi rap, then the Sidhu Moose Wala and AP Dhillon wave that turned Punjabi into the biggest non-film music economy in the country. Haryanvi is DJ music built for outdoor speakers, descended fairly directly from ragni, the sung verse form of Haryana's folk theatre - the boast-and-answer structure in Dhai Litre Dudh Gelya is the same rhetorical move that ragni singers were making sixty years ago. Bhojpuri is the loudest and the least polished of the three, built on double meaning, and it out-streams both of the others.

The Punjabi record that travelled furthest was not made in Punjab. Panjabi MC put Mundian To Bach Ke out in 1998 on a bassline lifted from Busta Rhymes, who had lifted it from the Knight Rider theme, with vocals by Labh Janjua. It went nowhere for four years, then a German single release and a Jay-Z remix in 2003 made it the first bhangra record most of the world heard. Labh Janjua also sang London Thumakda before he died in 2015, which means the same voice is on a Coventry bhangra twelve-inch and on a Kangana Ranaut wedding sequence.

The Haryanvi section carries a warning that matters more than any other credit on this site: the singer and the person in the video are usually different people. Sapna Choudhary is the face of a dozen records she does not sing on - Bawli Tared is the clear exception. Gajban Pani Ne Chali is Vishvajeet Choudhary, not Ajay Hooda. Bandook Chalgi is Narender Bhagana. Desi Desi Na Bolya Kar is sung by Raju Punjabi. The popular press gets all four of these wrong routinely and a Haryanvi listener notices immediately.

Bhojpuri's biggest is Hello Kaun by Ritesh Pandey with Sneh Upadhyay, which in 2020 became the first Bhojpuri song past a billion views on YouTube. Haryana's is 52 Gaj Ka Daman, sung by Renuka Panwar with Pranjal Dahiya in the video, which crossed the same mark in under a year. Neither had a film behind it, neither had a label anybody outside the region has heard of, and both outperformed most of what Bollywood released those years. The three regional pages have the detail: punjabi daru party songs, haryanvi DJ songs, and bhojpuri daru songs.