Bhajan & the Bhajan–Kirtan Relationship

Ask what the difference is between a bhajan and a kirtan and you touch one of the most useful distinctions in Indian devotional music. Both are bhakti — music offered to the Divine — but they move differently. A kirtan is congregational call-and-response: a leader sings a line of the divine names and the room sings it back, and the repetition itself is the practice. A bhajan is a song: a composed devotional piece with verses, usually carried by a single voice, in which melody and poetry do the devotional work. In a kirtan everyone is the choir; in a bhajan the room mostly listens, hearts following the singer. In practice the two forms flow into each other constantly — a bhajan's refrain can open out into call-and-response, and many gatherings hold both.

The bhajan's great age was the medieval Bhakti movement, when the sant poets set devotion in the languages people actually spoke. Mirabai's songs to Krishna, Surdas's padas of the child Krishna, Tulsidas's Ram verses, and Kabir's nirguna songs of a formless God are still the heart of the repertoire five centuries on. In Gujarat, Narsinh Mehta wrote "Vaishnava Jana To" — the bhajan Gandhi loved above all others — while Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram, sung at Gandhi's prayer meetings, shows how porous the line is: a bhajan by form, chanted by whole crowds like a kirtan. In the twentieth century, singers like Anup Jalota carried the bhajan onto the concert stage and into millions of homes.

Related but distinct is the Sufi stream of Islamic devotional song — the ecstatic qawwali of South Asia and the remembrance practice of zikr — which shares the bhajan's devotional intensity while belonging to its own tradition and repertoire.

For Western chanters the distinction matters mostly as orientation: most of what happens at a Western chant gathering is kirtan, but the melodies, the dhuns, and much of the poetry flow straight out of the bhajan tradition — especially the North Indian Bhakti stream whose saints wrote the songs. The gentle repetition of Twameva Mata or Hari Om at the close of an evening is the bhajan spirit at work inside a kirtan room.