North Indian Bhakti Kirtan

When most Westerners picture a Kirtan — a leader behind a harmonium, a tabla keeping the cycle, a room singing the names of Ram or Krishna back in call-and-response — they are picturing the North Indian, or Hindustani, stream of Bhakti music. It is less a single school than a vast river system: the medieval sant poets singing in the languages ordinary people actually spoke, the temple songs of the Braj country where Krishna spent his childhood, and the raga-based art music of North India all feed into it.

Its saints are some of the most beloved figures in Indian devotional history. Mirabai sang her love for Krishna in defiance of royal convention; Tulsidas retold the story of Ram in verses still sung in temples every day; Surdas poured out songs to the child Krishna; and Kabir and Ravidas sang of a God beyond form altogether. In Vrindavan, Swami Haridas offered dhrupad — the oldest surviving Hindustani vocal style — to God alone, while Vallabhacharya's Pushtimarg temples raised devotional song into a round-the-clock musical offering. Centuries later, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar carried Ram bhajan onto the public concert stage and into India's independence movement.

The chants of this stream lean toward Ram, Sita, Hanuman, and Krishna: Sri Ram Jai Ram, Sita Ram, the Hanuman Chalisa, and Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram — the bhajan Gandhi's prayer meetings made world-famous.

This is also the stream that most directly seeded Western Kirtan. The devotees who gathered around Neem Karoli Baba in the Himalayan foothills — among them the young Americans who became Krishna Das, Jai Uttal, and Bhagavan Das — learned Ram bhajan and Hanuman chalisa in this idiom and carried its harmonium-led, call-and-response form home, where it became the template for the Western chant gathering — a story told in full on the Western Kirtan page.