Mohammad Sadiqਮੁਹੰਮਦ ਸਾਦਿਕ

Early life

Mohammad Sadiq was born in 1939 into a Punjabi Muslim family in the village of Kup Kalan, then in British Punjab and now in Malerkotla district. His father Walayat Ali and mother Parsinni raised him in a household where music was never far away — his uncle was a folk singer who inspired him deeply. He began singing as a child, absorbing the duet tradition that would define his career.

Kup Kalan in the 1940s was a village where music was a working art, and the young Sadiq absorbed it from his folk-singer uncle. He has said he belongs to the Doom community, a Marasi sub-caste traditionally associated with singing — music was not just his passion but his inheritance. Partition came when he was a child; his family, uniquely, stayed in Malerkotla, the one region where Muslims survived the violence, and the story goes that he missed the train that would have taken them to Pakistan.

Career

Sadiq's career took off in the golden age of Punjabi duet singing. He recorded with many of the era's leading female voices — Surinder Kaur, Narinder Biba, Rajinder Rajan and Swaran Lata among them — but his defining partnership was with Ranjit Kaur, with whom he sang for roughly four decades. Most of his songs were written by the celebrated folk lyricist Babu Singh Maan, with early material from Inderjeet Hasanpuri and his friend Didar Sandhu.

His tumbi-driven duets became the soundtrack of Punjabi village life, and he carried the folk idiom into cinema as well, acting and singing in films such as Putt Jattan De (1981), Rano (1982), Patola (1987), Saida Jogan (1979) and Jatt Jeona Maur (1991). His rendition of 'Heer' at the Professor Mohan Singh Mela in 1992 is remembered as a landmark performance of the epic.

The duet era of the 1970s and 1980s was Punjabi music's golden age, and Sadiq was one of its kings. His partnership with Ranjit Kaur — some four decades of recording and live performance — produced songs that played at every village fair and wedding in Punjab. The lyrics, most famously by Babu Singh Maan, gave voice to rural life with wit and pathos, and Sadiq's tumbi-backed delivery made them unforgettable.

Cinema gave him a second stage. Films like Putt Jattan De, Rano and Jatt Jeona Maur used his earthy persona, and his live rendition of 'Heer' at the 1992 Professor Mohan Singh Mela is still talked about as a definitive performance of Waris Shah's epic.

Major works

Decades of duets with Ranjit Kaur form the core of his recorded legacy, alongside his film songs and his live performances of Heer. The partnership with lyricist Babu Singh Maan produced some of the most quoted lines in modern Punjabi folk.

The Ranjit Kaur duets are his monument — decades of recordings that defined the genre — alongside his film songs and his celebrated performances of Heer.

Personal life

Sadiq entered politics with the Congress party, winning the Bhadaur assembly seat in 2012 and serving as an MLA until 2017. In 2019 he was elected to the Lok Sabha from Faridkot, serving as a Member of Parliament until 2024. He has spoken openly about caste discrimination he faced growing up, and about his conversion to Sikhism in 2006.

Sadiq's political career brought its own drama: his 2012 assembly election victory was challenged on caste grounds, and the Supreme Court's 2016 verdict in his favour — holding that caste follows birth, not conversion — became a landmark judgment. He has spoken candidly about facing caste discrimination as a child in both Muslim and Sikh settings.

Legacy

For over five decades Mohammad Sadiq has been one of the most beloved voices in Punjab, popular across communities. His duets with Ranjit Kaur set the standard for an entire genre, and his journey from village singer to Parliament is one of the most remarkable in Punjabi public life.

Five decades on, Mohammad Sadiq remains the voice of an era — the singer whose duets taught Punjab how to sing about love, and whose life story, from village stage to Parliament, mirrors the journey of Punjabi folk music itself.