Kirtanਕੀਰਤਨ

Walk into any gurdwara at almost any hour and the first thing you hear is music. Kirtan is the singing of the Shabad, the sacred hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, and for most Sikhs it is the favourite part of the service: the moment when scripture stops being only a book and becomes a voice in the room. The tradition is five hundred years old, and it has been sung without a break from the days of Guru Nanak Dev Ji to this morning's diwan.

What is kirtan?

Kirtan is devotional singing in praise of the Divine. In the Sikh tradition its full name is shabad kirtan, the singing of the Shabad, the Word, and its musical system is called Gurmat Sangeet, music according to the Guru's teaching. Only sacred song may be sung as kirtan: hymns from the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, compositions from the Dasam Granth, and the works of Bhai Gurdas Ji and Bhai Nand Lal Ji. The singing is deliberately calm. Sikh kirtan avoids frenzy, clapping and dancing; the praise is offered to Nirankar, the formless One, and everything in the performance, the raag, the voice, the instruments, is kept in service of the words, so that the sangat hears the meaning and not only the melody.

How did kirtan begin?

Kirtan began with the founder. Guru Nanak Dev Ji (1469 to 1539) sang his revealed hymns on his journeys, accompanied by his lifelong companion Bhai Mardana, a Muslim musician who played the rabab, a plucked lute. The janamsakhis, the traditional life stories, preserve his call at moments of revelation: Mardana, play the rabab, bani has come. When the Guru settled at Kartarpur, kirtan settled with him: Bhai Gurdas Ji records that Sodar and Arti were sung there and Jap recited in the early morning, and that every house had become a dharamsal with constant kirtan. Hymn singing was the earliest form of Sikh devotion, and the succeeding Gurus all sang, composed and organised it.

A scripture arranged as music

No other scripture is organised like the Guru Granth Sahib Ji. When Guru Arjan Dev Ji compiled the Adi Granth in 1604, he arranged its hymns not by author or subject but by raag, the melodic framework of Indian classical music: the main body of the Granth is set in 31 raags, and each shabad's heading carries its musical instructions, the raag, the ghar or tala, the poetic form, and the rahaao, the refrain line that holds the shabad's central thought and is sung again and again like a chorus. The Granth holds some 5,700 hymns, by six of the Gurus and by the Hindu bhagats and Muslim Sufi saints whose words the Gurus included. A ragi does not choose a tune freely: the heading tells him the raag in which the Guru set the words, and the discipline of Gurmat Sangeet is to sing them there.

The chaunkis of Harmandir Sahib

At Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, kirtan is organised into chaunkis, sittings that follow the day. Tradition credits Guru Arjan Dev Ji with starting five daily chaunkis there: Asa ki Var in the early morning, Anand at mid morning, Charan Kanwal at midday, Sodar in the evening and Kalyan at night. Guru Angad Dev Ji had already institutionalised the early morning singing of Asa ki Var, and Guru Amar Das Ji's composition Anand became the standard closing piece of a kirtan sitting, as it still is: almost every diwan ends with Anand Sahib, Ardas and the hukamnama. The chaunki pattern spread from Amritsar to gurdwaras everywhere, where relays of ragi jathas keep the singing going through the hours of the diwan.

Rababis, ragis and dhadis

Three kinds of professional musicians grew up around kirtan. The rababis were hereditary Muslim musicians descended, tradition says, from the companions of Bhai Mardana himself: Satta and Balwand sang in the courts of Guru Ram Das Ji and Guru Arjan Dev Ji, and rababi jathas, honoured as Babe ke, Baba Nanak's own, sang at Harmandir Sahib into the twentieth century. The Partition of 1947 broke the tradition in India, when the Muslim rababis migrated to Pakistan. Alongside them grew the ragis, Sikh professional singers patronised by the Gurus and later by the Sikh princely states of Patiala, Nabha and Kapurthala, whose lineages of ustads preserved the old raag based compositions. The third stream, the dhadis, sing heroic ballads to the dhadd drum and sarangi; Guru Hargobind Ji encouraged them, but because their songs are of valour rather than scripture, dhadi singing is not counted as shabad kirtan, and a dhadi jatha stands to perform where a ragi jatha sits.

What instruments are used in kirtan?

The first kirtan instrument was Bhai Mardana's rabab. Tradition credits Guru Arjan Dev Ji with the saranda, a bowed lute, and with developing the jori, the upright pair of drums, from the mridang. String instruments, the taus, the dilruba and the sarangi, carried the melody for centuries, and a few master ragis still play them: Bhai Avtar Singh, of an eleventh generation ragi family, was famed for the taus. In the modern gurdwara the standard jatha is three musicians: a lead singer at the harmonium, a second singer also on harmonium, and a tabla player, though a revival movement is bringing the string instruments of the Gurus' courts back into the diwan hall.

Why does kirtan matter?

Gurbani itself gives kirtan the highest place: Kaljug meh kirtan pardhana, in this dark age kirtan is supreme, and another hymn calls kirtan an invaluable jewel, deep with bliss and noble qualities. The reason is built into the form. A sermon can be argued with and a book can be closed, but a shabad sung in its raag enters through the ear and stays in the memory; generations of Sikhs who could not read have carried the Guru's words in their hearts as songs. That is why the performer is kept deliberately in the background: in kirtan the singer is a servant of the Shabad, and the sangat, listening, repeating the rahaao, sometimes singing along, is not an audience but a participant. When the sitting ends, Anand Sahib is sung, the congregation stands for Ardas, and the music gives way to the spoken hukamnama, the Guru's order for the day.