Song as Worship

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.