“Hattimatim tim
Tara mathe pare dim
Tader khara duto shing
Tara Hattimatim tim”
(Hattimatim tim
They lay eggs on the field
They have two straight horns
They are Hattimatim tim)
A chhora most Bengalis grew up reciting is having a moment on Instagram, thanks to a reel by tabla player Ratul Basak.
Set to infectious beats, the rhyme Hattimatim Tim quickly travelled beyond Bengal, inspiring dance reels from creators across India and abroad. The comment sections filled with dancing GIFs and claims that any step seemed to fit the rhythm perfectly.
But as the audio went viral, so did misinformation. Several posts began crediting the rhyme to Sukumar Ray, the iconic writer known for his nonsense verse. The claim spread rapidly, amplified by reposts and algorithm-driven visibility, prompting concern among Bengal-forward creators and scholars.
Instagram storyteller and content creator Arpan Nandi addressed the error in a reel. “I came across a reel that said it was written by Sukumar Ray. When I commented with facts, the person showed me screenshots of ChatGPT. The wrong information has been spread so widely, that AI will show it,” he said, highlighting how false information can be believed to be true by AI bots if it is repetitively fed into a system.
But Hattimatim Tim is not an authored poem at all. It is a folk rhyme, passed down orally across generations. “These are various folk poems that we see in Jogindranath Sarkar’s ‘Kukumoni chhora’. Hattimatim Tim, Takbak Takbak Takbak Takbak Ghorachutiye, Ikir Mikir Cham, Chikir Cham. These are all chhora like Gumparani Mashi Pishi. No one knows who has written these because these were folk verses that people have been using for ages,” said author Tridib Chatterjee, general secretary of the Publishers and Booksellers Guild in Kolkata. He added that the rhyme “is not written by Sukumar Ray at all” and expressed surprise at the misinformation resurfacing now.
The collection, compiled by Jogindranath Sarkar, documents several such children’s rhymes Wikimedia commons
One of its earliest recorded appearances is in Khukumanir Chhara, published by the Kolkata City Book Society in 1899. The collection, compiled by Jogindranath Sarkar, documents several such children’s rhymes. Variations of Hattimatim Tim appeared later in children’s books, including the 1950 publication Chharar Chhobi by Shishu Shahito Shongshad and in a 1952 short story by Narayan Gangopadhyay.
Jinia Ray, professor and head of the Bengali department at Women’s Christian College, University of Calcutta, said the episode highlights a larger digital problem. “With the boom of social media, there is a lot of information available. However, the source and attribution are often incorrect, resulting in a lot of misleading information,” she said, stressing the need for fact-checking before sharing.