A Bhojpuri devotional track is headed for a mainstream Hindi film, and the man behind it says it's personal.

Vishal Mishra has lent his voice to 'Chhathi Maiya,' a new song from Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia's The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest. Zee Music Company put out the teaser on Tuesday, and it's built entirely around ritual. Tamannaah appears in a red saree, performing a puja by a river, the kind of frame that immediately signals which festival this song is built for.

Mishra isn't new to this territory. He'd already put out a track called 'Chhathi Maiya Bulaye' outside of films, and he's treating this one as a continuation of that project rather than a one-off. On social media, he framed it as a language finally getting its due in Hindi cinema.

"Some time ago, I had said that Bhojpuri should get back the respect it deserves," he wrote. "After 'Chhathi Maiya Bulaye,' today is another step in that same journey. Our Bhojpuri is not just a language, it is the soil, culture, traditions, folk and identity of Bihar and Purvanchal. Now, in Hindi cinema, in our own Bhojpuri, our song 'Chhathi Maiya,' dedicated to Chhathi Maiya, is coming. This is our language, our soil, our pride."

That's a fairly loaded statement for what's technically a promotional teaser, and it points to something bigger than one song. Bhojpuri cinema runs its own massive industry out of Bihar and eastern UP, but it rarely crosses over into big-ticket Hindi productions with this kind of visibility. A film starring Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia carrying a full Bhojpuri track, rather than a token folk interlude, is the sort of crossover that tends to get noticed in music circles even before the film itself does.

The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest hasn't had its full music or release plans laid out publicly yet, going by what's surfaced so far. What we do know is that the teaser is designed to build toward the actual song drop, and Bollywood Hungama reported that the anticipation around the Bhojpuri connect is very much the point of releasing a teaser first rather than the full track.

Whether 'Chhathi Maiya' becomes the kind of song that travels beyond the film, the way festival anthems sometimes do, will depend on the full version landing with the same conviction as Mishra's statement. For now, the teaser has done its job of getting people talking about a Bhojpuri song sitting inside a Sidharth Malhotra film.

The complete track is expected to follow soon, and so is more clarity on when The Vvaan itself reaches theatres.