Bulleya

A Voice From the Other Side of History

At the center of "Bulleya" is a cry. Not a call to a lover, but a call to a guide: a spiritual teacher who walked the lanes of eighteenth-century Punjab and left behind poetry that still unsettles and comforts in equal measure. When the song addresses Bulleh Shah by his intimate name, it is borrowing the weight of a three-hundred-year-old tradition of Sufi devotion and pressing it into the service of a contemporary, utterly human story of love without return.^[1]

Bulleh Shah was born around 1680 in Uch Sharif, Punjab, and grew up in Kasur near Lahore. He studied under the Sufi master Shah Inayat Qadiri, a relationship that would define his spiritual life and provoke scandal: his teacher was of a lower caste, and orthodox society considered the discipleship an act of apostasy. Bulleh Shah was formally denounced as a heretic. He responded with poetry.^[1]

Over his lifetime he composed more than 150 kafis, short meditative verses in Punjabi that used folk imagery, romantic narrative, and direct address to both God and teacher. His philosophical core was straightforward and radical: love, freely given and freed from ego, is the only honest path to the divine. To invoke his name is to invoke all of this. The film Ae Dil Hai Mushkil knew exactly what it was reaching for.^[1]

Karan Johar and the Landscape of Longing

Released on 28 October 2016, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (loosely translated as "The Heart Is Complicated") was written, directed, and produced by Karan Johar.^[2] The film follows Ayan, played by Ranbir Kapoor, who falls completely and catastrophically in love with Alizeh, who regards him only as a best friend. What makes the film unusual is its refusal to treat unrequited love as a problem to be fixed. Johar presents it instead as a distinct emotional state with its own dignity, its own poetry, and its own capacity to permanently change a person.

Johar has described writing the script in just thirty days and called it the most personally revealing work of his career. The film is saturated with his signature visual warmth, set partly in London and Vienna, and built around characters who mistake emotional intimacy for romantic love and spend years trying to understand the difference.^[7]

For a film so centrally concerned with loving in the wrong direction, the soundtrack needed something that could hold both the romantic and the spiritual in the same breath. Composer Pritam (Pritam Chakraborty) and lyricist Amitabh Bhattacharya delivered exactly that.^[3]

The Kafi Form and How the Song Works

"Bulleya" is built on the kafi, a classical Punjabi and Sindhi verse form central to Sufi devotional practice.^[6] The word derives from the Arabic "qafiya," meaning rhyme. Kafis were traditionally performed by wandering dervishes as offerings to their murshid, their spiritual guide. The form is defined by its repeating refrain, which returns with each verse and creates the effect of a spiral rather than a straight line. Nothing about a kafi resolves in a Western musical sense. The point is to circle the central longing, to return to it again and again.

The song's structure follows this pattern faithfully. The refrain comes back repeatedly, carrying slightly more accumulated weight with each pass. The invocation of Bulleh Shah's name becomes a kind of mantra, and the vocabulary throughout draws directly from Sufi Islamic mysticism: murshid (spiritual guide), tajalli (divine manifestation), ishq (transcendent love). The Sufi tradition uses earthly romantic longing as a mirror for the soul's yearning toward God, and "Bulleya" operates on both registers simultaneously.^[4][9]

The original film version of "Bulleya" was sung by Amit Mishra and Shilpa Rao. The reprise version, most closely associated with Arijit Singh, was included on the deluxe edition of the album.^[3] Both versions carry the same lyrical DNA. The difference lies in tone. Arijit Singh's voice is one of the most recognizable instruments in contemporary Bollywood, characterized by a quality that critics and listeners consistently describe as inherently bittersweet. He does not decorate a melody so much as inhabit it, carrying grief with a naturalness that sounds almost involuntary. In the reprise, this quality brings a quiet devastation to the song's already loaded spiritual vocabulary.

Love Without a Destination

The central emotional territory of "Bulleya" is what happens when love cannot reach its object. The protagonist is not angry or defiant in the manner of many heartbreak songs. The tone is closer to bewilderment: a sustained, aching disorientation at the fact of loving someone who cannot or will not return that love.^[7]

The song reaches for an ancient Punjabi way of making sense of this. It invokes Ranjha, the legendary hero of the Punjabi folk epic Heer-Ranjha, traditionally interpreted in the Sufi tradition as a figure for divine wandering: the soul perpetually in search of what it was made for.^[4] To compare one's love to Ranjha is not simply a romantic flourish. It is to say that this longing is cosmic, that it carries the same quality as the soul's yearning for God, and that it therefore cannot be satisfied by any earthly fulfillment.^[5]

Bulleh Shah himself taught that selfless love, love without greed, held spiritual significance precisely because it could not be resolved. The pain of longing was not a failure state; it was the state. The song adopts this philosophy and applies it to the situation of unrequited romantic love. The effect is both consoling and destabilizing: consoling because it frames suffering as meaningful, destabilizing because it removes the possibility of resolution.^[1]

The protagonist asks Bulleh Shah to hear a cry, to act as a guide through confusion. There is something poignant in the choice of intercessor: Bulleh Shah himself was someone who loved without clear acknowledgment from his own teacher for much of his life, who spent years in exile from Kasur before being reconciled with Shah Inayat. To call on him is to call on someone who understood this kind of suspended, unresolved devotion from the inside.^[4]

The Electric Spark and the Ancient Flame

What makes "Bulleya" unusual in the landscape of Sufi-influenced Bollywood songs is its sonic texture. The track does not ease into folk instrumentation. It opens with a hard electric guitar riff that caused controversy when the song was released in September 2016: a number of listeners and commentators noted that the riff bore a strong resemblance to the opening of Papa Roach's 2000 rock song "Last Resort."^[8] The track's producer, Sunny MR, denied any intentional borrowing, arguing that the note pattern uses simple timing widely employed across rock genres.^[8]

Whatever the origin of the riff, its effect within the song is meaningful. The electric guitar places the Sufi kafi in a contemporary sonic frame, establishing immediately that this is not a museum piece. The song is old in its vocabulary, ancient in its emotional architecture, and entirely modern in its production. Pritam's approach throughout the ADHM soundtrack favored emotional directness over genre purity, and "Bulleya" is perhaps the most striking example: a rock opening that dissolves into devotional repetition, the meeting of amplified aggression and quiet surrender.^[3]

Recognition and Cultural Resonance

The soundtrack as a whole was received warmly. The Times of India awarded it four out of five stars. Koimoi named it one of the best Bollywood albums of 2016.^[3] At the 62nd Filmfare Awards in 2017, Amit Mishra won Best Playback Singer (Male) for "Bulleya" in the popular category and also received the R.D. Burman Award for New Music Talent. Pritam won Best Music Director for the album. The song crossed two hundred million views on YouTube, a figure that reflects something beyond chart performance.^[3]

"Bulleya" belongs to a long tradition of Bollywood songs drawing on the kafi and the Sufi repertoire of Punjab. Songs connected to Bulleh Shah's verses have been circulating in Hindi cinema since the 1950s and reached global audiences through the work of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the rock band Junoon.^[1] "Chaiyya Chaiyya," derived from a Shah verse and used in the 1998 film Dil Se, is one of the most widely recognized Hindi film songs internationally. "Bulleya" connects to that same lineage while doing something distinctly its own: situating the devotional form inside a story of thoroughly modern emotional confusion.^[1]

Two Readings of the Same Text

A reprise is typically a smaller, more intimate version of a larger production. But in the case of "Bulleya," the Arijit Singh version functions as a second interpretation of the same text, a re-reading rather than merely a re-recording. Where Amit Mishra's version carries a certain controlled intensity, a performance that holds the listener at a slight distance, Arijit Singh leans into personal vulnerability. His version sounds less like a formal performance and more like a private conversation with the dead poet.

This is not a diminishment of either version. The two interpretations illuminate different aspects of the same lyric. In the Amit Mishra and Shilpa Rao original, the song feels ceremonial: structured, a formal invocation. In the Arijit Singh reprise, it feels personal and unsteady, as though the singer is speaking to Bulleh Shah not because it is the proper thing to do but because there is genuinely no one else left to ask.^[4]

The song contains multitudes: it is a classical form, a film song, a prayer, and an expression of contemporary romantic pain. Different voices reveal different facets of the same stone. The inclusion of both on the ADHM soundtrack was not accidental. It signals that the song's makers understood the depth of the territory they had entered.

What the Song Is Really Asking

"Bulleya" earns its emotional power by refusing to separate what most modern music keeps apart. The sacred and the romantic, the ancient and the contemporary, the rock riff and the devotional refrain: all of it is held together inside a song about the specific experience of loving without knowing whether that love will ever reach anyone.

Sufi poetry has always held that the line between loving a person and loving the divine is thinner than it appears, that the two forms of longing share a common structure.^[9] The song takes this claim seriously. It does not use Sufi imagery as decoration. It uses it as a genuine framework for understanding why unrequited love does not simply feel painful but feels cosmically significant, as though something essential is being withheld.

When Arijit Singh sings the reprise, his voice carries something that sounds like recognition. Not recognition of specific words, but of the underlying condition: that loving fully, in any direction, toward a person or toward something larger, is always a form of reaching into uncertainty. Bulleh Shah knew this. He wrote about it across a lifetime. The song calls his name and asks him to confirm it still applies.

Three hundred years on, apparently it does.