Chhath Puja is getting its first proper moment in a mainstream Hindi film, and it's arriving through a song called 'Chhathi Maiya'.

Vishal Mishra has composed and sung the track for The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest, the Sidharth Malhotra-Tamannaah Bhatia film directed by Deepak Mishra. In the visuals, Tamannaah is seen performing Chhath rituals alongside Sidharth, with the festival's rites and devotional atmosphere built into the picture rather than dropped in as background texture.

The lyrics come from Kaushal Kishore, and this isn't a one-off pairing. Mishra and Kishore worked together in 2021 on 'Chhathi Maiya Bulaye', an independent devotional number that went on to cross 16 million views on YouTube. 'Chhathi Maiya' picks up that thread and moves it into a studio film with a theatrical release date attached, which is a different kind of test.

A festival that rarely gets this treatment

Chhath is observed widely across Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, and its songs have a huge, dedicated following of their own, mostly outside the Bollywood ecosystem. Mishra has talked about Bhojpuri as something bigger than a language for him, describing it as tied to the soil and folk traditions of the region. Putting a Chhath song inside a big-banner Hindi release is his way of pushing that culture toward an audience that might otherwise never encounter it on a cinema screen.

"It is truly an honour and a blessing for me to bring the faith and sacred tradition of Chhath, deeply rooted in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, to Hindi cinema for the first time," Mishra said, adding that he wants the culture to travel to every corner of the world.

That's a big claim, first time in Hindi cinema, and it's worth noting it comes from the composer himself rather than an independent verification. What's clear is that the makers of The Vvaan have chosen to build a whole musical sequence around a festival that Bollywood soundtracks have largely left alone.

Whether 'Chhathi Maiya' lands the way the 2021 version did remains to be seen. Independent devotional tracks and songs embedded in a theatrical release don't travel the same way, and a film song has to work inside a narrative, not just as a standalone video.

The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest opens in theatres on September 25. That gives the song a little over a week to build momentum on its own before audiences see it in context, alongside whatever else Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia's film is banking on to pull crowds that Friday.