Giddha is the women's dance. A ring is formed, two women dance in the middle, and the rest clap the beat and sing boliyan, short rhymed couplets shouted one at a time and then taken up by everybody at the last line.
The boliyan are the reason it matters. They are composed and improvised by women, and their subject is the husband, the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law, the absent migrant, sex, money and everything else that could not be said anywhere else in a Punjabi village.
They are frequently obscene and often savage. Collections of giddha boliyan made by folklorists are noticeably cleaner than what is actually sung, because the collectors were men.
Giddha needs no instrument. The clap and the voice carry it, and sometimes a dholki or a ghara played with rings on the fingers.
It is the largest body of women's oral literature in Punjabi and it has never been collected properly by anyone with the standing to be told the real ones.
Giddha is danced by women in a ring with clapping, and the boliyan, the couplets, are called out by one woman at a time while the ring answers.
The boliyan are the content. They are about husbands, mothers-in-law, work, absence and money, and they are frank in a way that women's public speech in Punjab otherwise is not.
Almost none has been collected with attribution. The couplets are improvised and inherited together and each village's stock is its own.