Kirtan

Kirtan is congregational devotional singing, the collective chanting of divine names, praises and sacred verses, usually in a call-and-response form in which a leader sings a line and the gathering answers it. Central to the bhakti devotional movements of Hinduism and equally to the Sikh tradition, kirtan turns worship into a shared musical act in which repetition, melody and rhythm carry the participants into an absorbed remembrance of the divine. It is typically accompanied by instruments, in the North Indian form the harmonium and the two-headed drum, hand cymbals keeping time, and it builds characteristically from slow beginnings to a fast, ecstatic climax.

In the Hindu bhakti traditions kirtan was championed by the medieval saints as a path of salvation suited to a fallen age, open to everyone regardless of caste, literacy or ritual purity, requiring only a voice and devotion. The sixteenth-century Bengali saint Chaitanya made the congregational singing of Krishna's names the centre of a whole movement, and the practice of processional street-singing spread widely from it.

In Sikhism, kirtan, properly shabad kirtan, the singing of the sacred word, is the principal form of worship in the gurdwara. The hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib were composed to specific musical measures, the ragas, and their singing by trained musicians is understood not as accompaniment to worship but as worship itself, the word of the Gurus sounded aloud. The tradition regards the singing of the shabad as a direct means of stilling the mind and uniting it with the divine Name.

Beyond its home traditions, kirtan has travelled widely in the modern period. Carried abroad by devotional movements in the twentieth century, the call-and-response chanting of Sanskrit names has been taken up in yoga studios and concert halls far from its origins, sometimes retaining and sometimes shedding its theological content. The practice's portability rests on the same feature that made it a mass movement in medieval India: it requires no qualification but participation, and its effect is produced by the doing.