Devotional Music of India: Bhajan, Kirtan and Qawwali

Devotional music is bhakti and Sufi worship in sung form, and it is one of the most dependable scoring areas of Indian art and culture. Papers rarely ask what a form sounds like; they ask which region it belongs to, which saint or poet shaped it, which instrument goes with it and which tradition carries a UNESCO listing. This note takes each major form in turn and states those facts plainly.

Bhajan: devotion in a simple song

A bhajan is a devotional song with no fixed metre or structure, named from the Sanskrit root bhaj, to adore or to share. Nirguna bhajans address a formless God and come from Kabir, Guru Nanak and Ravidas. Saguna bhajans address God with form: Mirabai sang for Krishna, Tulsidas for Rama, and Surdas composed pads on Krishna's childhood. The Pushtimarg sect of Vallabhacharya developed haveli sangeet, sung before Shrinathji at Nathdwara in Rajasthan, and the eight poet-singers of that sect are remembered as the Ashtachhap, of whom Surdas is the best known. A bhajan is usually accompanied by the manjira or cymbals, the dholak and the harmonium.

Kirtan: devotion sung together

Kirtan is congregational music built on call and response, from the root kirt, to recount or praise. Nagar kirtan of Bengal was made popular by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in the sixteenth century, sung with the khol drum and the kartal. Maharashtra has the Naradiya and Harikatha kirtan, in which a performer narrates and sings. The Sankirtana of Manipur, the ritual singing, drumming and dancing of the Vaishnavas with the barrel drum called pung, was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013. The Sikh form is shabad kirtan, the hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib sung in prescribed ragas; Bhai Mardana accompanied Guru Nanak on the rabab, and the taus, dilruba and saranda belong to the same tradition.

Qawwali: the Sufi devotional form

Qawwali grew in the Chishti hospices of the Delhi Sultanate. Amir Khusrau, the disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, is credited with shaping it by joining Persian and Arabic verse to Indian melody, and it is still sung at dargahs such as Nizamuddin in Delhi and Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan. A qawwali party, the humnawa, has a lead singer, side singers who repeat lines, hand clapping, the harmonium, the dholak and the tabla. Its forms are fixed and often asked: hamd praises God, naat praises the Prophet, manqabat praises Ali or a Sufi saint, and marsiya is an elegy. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers, Aziz Mian, the Warsi Brothers and the Nizami Bandhu are the names worth remembering.

Abhang and Baul

Abhang is Marathi devotional verse of the Varkari sect, sung for Vithoba of Pandharpur; the word means unbroken. Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath, Chokhamela and Tukaram composed abhangs, and Tukaram belongs to the seventeenth century, a contemporary of Chhatrapati Shivaji. Pilgrims sing them on the Pandharpur wari with the taal and the ektari. Baul singers are the wandering mystics of Bengal, whose songs blend Vaishnava Sahajiya and Sufi ideas and whose best known figure is Lalon Fakir. They play the ektara, dotara, khamak and duggi, and UNESCO proclaimed Baul songs a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005.

Temple and classical devotional traditions

South India preserves the oldest hymn collections. The Thevaram hymns for Shiva were composed by the Nayanar saints Appar, Sundarar and Sambandar, and are sung in Tamil temples by the Odhuvars. The Nalayira Divya Prabandham, four thousand verses for Vishnu, came from the twelve Alvars. Kerala has sopana sangeetam, sung on the steps of the sanctum to the hourglass drum called edakka. In Carnatic music, Purandara Dasa, who composed devaranamas in Kannada, is honoured as the Pitamaha, and Annamacharya of Tallapaka composed sankirtanas for Venkateshwara at Tirumala.

Forms at a glance