बुल्लेया

Bulleya (बुल्लेया) closes out the three-song soundtrack of Holy Cow (2022), the Hindi satirical comedy written and directed by Sai Kabir. Written by Rev Shergill (Revant Shergill) in collaboration with a lyrics credit to the 18th-century Punjabi Sufi poet-saint Bulleh Shah, composed and sung solely by Shergill, the song is an original film composition inspired by Bulleh Shah's famous kafi tradition of existential questioning rather than a cover or direct reuse of any specific historical verse. Released on 19 August 2022 via Zee Music Company, a week ahead of the film's 26 August release, it is important to distinguish this Bulleya from the unrelated, much better-known 'Bulleya' from the 2019 film Romeo Akbar Walter (RAW), sung by Rabbi Shergill and Shahid Mallya — a different song, from a different film, sung by a different (if similarly named) artist. Within Holy Cow's modest, limited-release footprint, this Bulleya serves as the soundtrack's spiritual closing note, echoing Bulleh Shah's timeless question of identity against the film's own comic search for a missing cow.

Rev Shergill, who composed and sang the track, keeps the arrangement restrained and meditative — a slow-tempo bed built to foreground the Sufi vocal tradition the song draws on, rather than the fuller folk-rock energy of the album's Madari. The mood favours a contemplative, almost devotional register, in keeping with the kafi form's traditional function as a vehicle for spiritual questioning rather than filmi spectacle.

The song's lyric credit to Bulleh Shah alongside Rev Shergill signals its debt to the kafi tradition most famously associated with the question 'who am I' — a lineage the same source material has fed into other well-known film adaptations over the decades. Rather than reproducing a specific historical verse verbatim, Holy Cow's Bulleya is an original composition that channels that same spirit of self-questioning and searching, giving the film's soundtrack a reflective, spiritually searching bookend to sit alongside the more grounded, folk-rooted Gaiya Kahaan and Madari.

Holy Cow follows Salim (Sanjay Mishra) and a cast including Tigmanshu Dhulia and Sadiya Siddiqui, with Nawazuddin Siddiqui in a cameo, through a single night's search for a missing cow — produced by K Sera Sera Limited, Y S Entertainment, Sukh Sagar Films and Reltic Pictures for a 26 August 2022 release. As the soundtrack's closing track, Bulleya's Sufi questioning of identity and belonging offers a reflective counterpoint to the film's comic surface, suggesting — in keeping with the film's satirical intent — that the night-long search for a cow doubles as a broader, gentler search for meaning and place in a chaotic, small-town world.

Bulleya did not chart or draw significant press coverage, consistent with Holy Cow's limited theatrical release, and its official video sits well below Madari's viewership among the album's three tracks. Its most notable legacy point is definitional rather than commercial: distinguishing it clearly from the far more prominent, unrelated 'Bulleya' from Romeo Akbar Walter (2019) — a distinction worth preserving for anyone searching for the song, given the shared title and the overlapping Shergill surname between the two songs' otherwise separate artists (Rev/Revant Shergill here, versus Rabbi Shergill on the RAW song).