Naqqals enact ballads, sing, dance and lampoon whoever is in power, under something like a clown's licence. The performance uses improvisation, female impersonation, and the animating of objects to carry a narration. Named performers include Prem Chand, whose family came to Patiala at the Maharaja's invitation; Mundri Lal of Maloya, a tumbi player who died around 2020; Bahadur Chand, a female impersonator; and Harpal, who plays algoza and tumbi.
They now mostly do disco numbers at weddings.
Mirasis are the hereditary genealogists and musicians. Desraj Lachkani, born Taj Mohammad, migrated from Lahore in 1947 and settled in a Patiala village; his Jugni is the one used in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. His grandson Armaan, 32 and a graduate, performs with the family dhad jatha. Khushi Mohammad leads a twelve-member Naqqal group at Ghanaur near Dhuri, and his son Salim books around ninety shows a year.
The economics: ₹10,000 to ₹15,000 an event, with four-month gaps, and daily wage work in between.
Mirasis concentrate in Malwa and Doaba. Muslim Mirasis stayed at Malerkotla in 1947 under royal patronage. Dhadi and kirtan institutions cluster in Majha around Amritsar. That is a real regional division and a more useful one than the usual generalisations about Punjabi folk dance.
The naqqals were the comic performers, working in pairs with a drummer, doing sketches at weddings and fairs that mocked the officials, the pious and the rich.
It was licensed insult. The naqqal could say things in performance that nobody in the village could say directly, which is exactly what the form was for.
Both the naqqals and the mirasis were largely Muslim and largely left in 1947. The comic tradition that survived in Punjab is a stage and television version with none of the licence.