Bhajan

A bhajan has no single fixed musical form, and one text can take several melodies. Singers may use a tune popular among other singers, compose their own or improvise one. Settings run from chanted mantra to classical treatments in dhrupad and the Carnatic kriti, which work within a raga and tala. Deepak Raja's glossary, as Cynthia Snodgrass reports it, describes bhajans set to folk tunes or to a few classical ragas. The printed anthologies in Takako Tanaka's study give at most a raga and tala name for each text, with no record of who added it. A 1950 Navajivan anthology heads one Kabir text with raga Bhairavi and the eight-beat kaharva tala, yet two singers recorded in Lucknow sang it to entirely different melodies. Aneesh Pradhan notes several moments when Hindustani vocalists, interpreting devotional texts, borrow from neighbouring forms such as thumri, dadra and tappa. Accompaniment varies. A tanpura drone, tabla and harmonium are typical in North Indian performance; bhajan groups in Trinidad play dholak, manjira (hand cymbals) and harmonium.

In Tanaka's analysis of her recordings, the short opening line of a bhajan, called the tek or dhruva, works as its refrain. It carries the theme on a melody that is easy to remember, makes up for lines that fall short of the metre, and returns to close each full line. A single singer performed most of the bhajans she studied, in strophic form: two or three melodic lines repeat many times, in patterns such as A A A or A B A C A, with no fixed rules. Writers use the words bhajan and kirtan inconsistently. Cynthia Snodgrass notes that common speech often treats them as one, while finer usage separates two genres. In Edward Henry's fieldwork in Bhojpuri-speaking villages, as she reports it, kirtan meant chant-like, participatory group singing, and the local harikirtan counted as a kind of bhajan. Mendicant singers there performed longer Kabir bhajans alone for listeners.

The same words can sit in different talas, and the number of syllable-units (matras) in a sung line does not map one-to-one onto the beats. Singers keep most of the long and short syllable weights of the verse and stress its rhymes in melody and rhythm. When a line has fewer syllable-units than the cycle needs, they repeat words or fill the rhythm. In Tanaka's recording collection the commonest talas were kaharva (also keherwa), eight beats as 4+4; dadra, six beats as 3+3; and tintal (also teentaal), sixteen beats as 4+4+4+4. Some songs used free rhythm. A commentary on D. V. Paluskar's recorded bhajans finds the same three cycle lengths.