From Bengali Kirtan to a Global Movement

Sankirtana has roots in the devotional kirtan practice of medieval Bengal, and the Encyclopedia of Hinduism traces the specific theological claim that it is the appointed practice for the present age to the teaching of Chaitanya, the sixteenth century Bengali teacher whose own life is remembered as centered on public chanting and ecstatic congregational singing rather than temple ritual or philosophical debate. The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements records how the practice travelled far beyond its Bengali origin in the twentieth century, when A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada brought the teaching to the West and founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, whose public chanting in city streets became, for many outside observers, the most visible and recognizable feature of the movement, more so than any of its other doctrines. That visibility carried a cost as much as a benefit, since street chanting drew curiosity and occasional hostility in equal measure during the movement's early decades in Western countries unfamiliar with the practice, but it also carried the doctrine's central claim directly into public space in a way a temple bound practice could not have, sankirtana functioning simultaneously as devotional exercise and as public proclamation of the tradition's own understanding of what this age requires.