![]() ![]() ![]() The mahamantra is one that our kirtan band-which, except for me, consisted of Vaishnav musicians-performed at every single one of our yoga-studio concerts. Inspired by the eleventh-century theologian Anantanand Ramanuja, and the sixteenth-century Bengali saint Chaitanya, Prabhupada taught his New York City followers to chant the mahamantra (or “great mantra”) daily as “one of the essential practices of discipleship” in doing so, he “introduced a distinctive form of Hinduism to the American religious landscape” (Rambachan 393). In this article, I explore this question via one particular mantra called the mahamantra that will be familiar to any readers who have attended kirtan, been to a Vaishnav temple, or heard popular songs like George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” 2: In these performance contexts, I often puzzled over a question that I now see as a space of cultural rhetorical inquiry- what, exactly, was happening when our band performed bhajans-devotional Hindu songs that repeat the names of gods and goddesses over and over-in a “nondenominational,” “secular” 1 space? Audience members were not simply consuming kirtan, but actively co-constructing it with their voices and bodies, as they swayed, clapped, and danced to the music. Although I first encountered kirtan in temple settings (where I participated as a flutist), I spent four years playing flute in a kirtan band that predominantly performed in yoga studios. For this reason, perhaps kirtan attracts audiences-and musicians-who are hungry for a musical experience different from the one offered by the performer/audience binary. ![]() Likened to a theatrical folk song in performance, kirtan doesn’t belong to the musician-the songs are co-constructed through call-and-response. Since then, kirtan has taken off in the U.S., particularly in yoga studios. After traveling to New York in the 1960s, Prabhupada quickly gathered a following that became popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. In the U.S., kirtan is popularly associated with Gaudiya Vaishnavism and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), which was founded by a Hindu man named A.C. Kirtan, by definition call-and-response singing of devotional songs or mantras, has a rich and multifaceted history, and is practiced within various religions, such as Hinduism, Sikhhism, and Buddhism, as well as secular popular music venues and community contexts. ![]()
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