Bhajan

A bhajan is a Hindu devotional song, a hymn of love and praise addressed to a deity, and by extension the practice of singing such songs, whether alone or in a gathering. Where the related kirtan is characteristically the responsive chanting of divine names, the bhajan is more often a composed song with verses, expressing longing, surrender, praise or the poet-saint's intimate relationship with the divine. Bhajans are typically simple in melody and open in form, admitting improvisation and the free addition of verses, and they are sung in the languages of the people rather than in Sanskrit, which is central to their character and their reach.

The bhajan is the everyday music of Hindu devotion, sung in homes, at roadside shrines, in temples and at communal gatherings, requiring neither priest nor prescribed ritual. Its purpose is to cultivate bhakti, loving devotion, and to draw the singer and hearers into the felt presence of the deity through the emotion of the song.

The great body of bhajan poetry was composed by the devotional saints of medieval and early-modern India, whose songs remain the living repertoire today. Mirabai's songs of longing for Krishna, the verses of Surdas, Tulsidas and Kabir, the Marathi abhangas of the Varkari saints, and the Tamil and Kannada devotional poetry of the south are sung across the subcontinent centuries after their composition. Because many of these saints came from outside the priestly and learned elite, some from low castes, some women, one at least a Muslim weaver by tradition, the bhajan carried an implicit levelling: devotion, not birth or Sanskrit learning, was made the measure of a worshipper.

Sung communally the practice is often called a satsang, a gathering in the company of truth, and it may run for hours, building through repetition toward an absorbed collective feeling. The tradition holds that the divine name and praise, sung with love, purifies the singer and is itself a form of the presence it invokes.