Posham Pa

Two children link hands overhead to make an arch. Everybody else files underneath in a line while the whole group chants, and on the last word the arch drops and traps whoever is standing under it. English children play the same game to "London Bridge Is Falling Down". In North India the words are about a postman who stole a watch, and the trapped player is the one going to jail.

Origins

No author and no date. "Posham Pa" is a playground rhyme, which means it belongs to whoever is chanting it, and the wording shifts from street to street. It is recorded as traditional by Mama Lisa's World, which collects children's songs with contributor credits and lists no writer for this one, and it is taught as a standard Hindi children's rhyme in the University of Texas at Austin's Hindi programme, where it comes with vocabulary and grammar notes for learners.

This page carries no year for the same reason it carries no author. Nobody has produced a printed source old enough to date the rhyme, and an oral game chant of this kind rarely leaves one.

What does "Posham Pa" actually mean?

Nothing, as far as anyone can demonstrate. The opening line is rhythmic nonsense, the Hindi equivalent of "eeny, meeny, miny, moe", and its job is to set the beat for the marching line. Several confident etymologies circulate online, usually deriving the words from an English phrase misheard during the colonial period. None of them is supported by a source, so treat them as guesses rather than history.

The भई (bhai, brother) in the middle of the line is a filler used to fill out the metre, the same way an English chant might slip in "oh".

How do you play Posham Pa?

Two children face each other, join both hands and raise them to make an arch. The rest form a line and walk under the arch in a loop while everyone sings. On the final "जाना पड़ेगा" the arch comes down and whoever is underneath is caught.

What happens next varies. In the simplest version the caught player is out and the game restarts with a shorter line. In another, each caught child quietly picks one of the two arch-makers and stands behind them, and once everyone has been caught the two teams pull against each other in a tug of war.

Why is the rhyme about a postman?

The postman was the government official a child was most likely to see, so he is the one the rhyme puts on trial. Beyond that, the verse is less interested in the crime than in the sentence. Three of its seven lines are about jail food, jail water and having to go to jail, and each one repeats the same drumbeat ending, पड़ेगा. Children chant the consequences with obvious relish.

Variants swap the culprit and the loot. A thief takes the place of the postman in some versions, and the stolen watch becomes a hundred rupees in cash. Mama Lisa's World also records an extra line in which the offender still has no regrets. The core stays fixed: somebody stole something and somebody is going to jail.

Cultural Significance

The rhyme survives because the game does. Posham Pa needs no equipment, works with any number of players above three, and can be started in a corridor or a courtyard in the time it takes to say the first line. It is one of the handful of chants that Hindi speaking adults can still produce from memory decades later, usually complete with the arm movement.

For learners it doubles as a grammar drill. The rhyme repeats one Hindi construction, the "will have to" of obligation, four times in five lines with three different verbs, which is exactly why teaching programmes keep reaching for it.