Tamannaah Bhatia says she didn't see it coming. Shooting the Chhath Puja sequence for 'Chhathi Maiya', a song from her upcoming film The Vvaan, she found herself welling up on set and couldn't quite explain why.

She brought this up at the trailer launch of The Vvaan, held at a Mumbai multiplex, where the cast turned up in full force. Sidharth Malhotra, Ektaa R Kapoor, Deepak Mishra, Arunabh Kumar, Anup Soni, Sunil Grover, Maniesh Paul and Shweta Tripathi Sharma were all there, according to Bollywood Hungama, which covered the event.

'Chhathi Maiya' has been getting attention because it's a rare instance of a Hindi film actually depicting Chhath Puja on screen, a festival more commonly seen at Juhu Beach crowds than in mainstream Bollywood frames. Tamannaah, who grew up in Mumbai watching that annual gathering from the outside, admitted she didn't know the finer details of the festival until she filmed the sequence.

"Mujhe pata laga ki yeh bahut hi kathin vrat hai," she said, explaining that observers of Chhath go without water for 36 hours straight while praying to the Chhathi Maiya. She drew a contrast with how casually gratitude and manifestation get talked about these days, calling the fast a far more demanding, far older expression of devotion rooted in Bihari tradition. What struck her most, she said, is that the ritual gives the setting sun the same reverence most faiths reserve for sunrise. "Yahaan par doobte hue suraj ko utni hi manyata dete hai," she said.

On the tears, she didn't dress it up with an easy explanation. "I don't know why I was welling up," she said, adding that actors are vessels, that you show up thinking you're the one doing the work and something else takes over. It's the kind of line actors reach for often enough that it could sound rehearsed, but paired with an actual festival sequence rather than a generic emotional beat, it lands with more weight than usual.

She closed her comments on a wish rather than a claim: that years from now, whenever someone sits down to observe Chhath, 'Chhathi Maiya' might be the song playing somewhere in the background. Whether a Hindi film song from a Sidharth Malhotra-Tamannaah Bhatia adventure drama becomes a fixture of an actual religious observance is a big ask, but the sentiment tells you how seriously the team is positioning this track beyond the usual promotional single.

The Vvaan itself is being sold as a departure for both leads, leaning into Indian folklore and supernatural elements rather than the straight romance or action they're better known for. Whether that gamble pays off, and whether 'Chhathi Maiya' becomes the film's calling card, gets tested when The Vvaan opens in cinemas on September 25.