“Śrīla Prabhupāda’s Kīrtana Standards,” installment 44
Not merely expertise
During Śrīla Prabhupāda’s last weeks in Vrindāvan, as I recall, Bhavānanda Swami brought a group of six or ten Bengali devotees from ISKCON Mayapur who were expert kīrtana men to sing for Śrīla Prabhupāda. The men all came by train. But when they arrived, Śrīla Prabhupāda showed no interest in them. He heard their kīrtana once or not at all, and so they occupied themselves in chanting for the Deities, while Śrīla Prabhupāda listened to the rank-and-file devotees who chanted for him in his room and to his preferred kīrtanīyas, close devotees such as Baradarāja Dāsa, Haṁsadūta Swami, and Yaśodānanda Swami and Guru-kṛpa Swami.
Once during those days, Tamal Krishna Goswami relates, Śrīla Prabhupāda asked for kīrtana in his room. But when two local devotees thought to be good singers came and chanted, “Prabhupāda had them stop and leave, saying their kīrtana was dead. He then called for Lokanātha Mahārāja, whose kīrtana he enjoyed very much.”1
At the time of Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura’s disappearance—the story is well known— Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta asked that someone sing Śrī Rūpa Mañjarī Pada. So a devotee who was considered a good kīrtana singer began to chant. But Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura interrupted him and asked that the singing be done by Śrīla B. R. Śrīdhara Mahārāja, who was not especially noted for expertise in kīrtana.
Style is not the thing
As shown above, Śrīla Prabhupāda emphasized purity over professionalism, feeling over style. As late as 1976 he wrote:
With regard to your question about Bengali style kirtana and mrdanga playing, one or two styles is best. To introduce more styles is not good. It will become an encumbrance… If we introduce so much emphasis on style of kirtana, then simply imitation will go on. Devotional emotion is the main thing. If we give stress to instrument and style then attention will be diverted to the style. That will be spiritual loss.2
Satsvarūpa Dāsa Goswami tells of an instructive incident:
At one of the ISKCON international festivals in Vṛndāvana, Prabhupāda rejected the singing of one of his disciples. The devotee had previously been a singer in a band, and his kīrtanas were much appreciated by some devotees, especially those from his home temple. But when, with showy professionalism, he began leading the guru-pūjā in Prabhupāda’s presence, making the tune sound like a rock’n’roll ballad, Prabhupāda didn’t like it. He shook his head and indicated that someone else lead. The “great” kīrtana singer was devastated by the rejection, another form of Prabhupāda’s mercy.3
Remembering that same incident, Lakṣmī-Nṛsiṁhadeva Dāsa recalled:
What I took away from that experience. . . was that Śrīla Prabhupāda first of all was very particular about our mood in leading kirtan. It is a “yajña saṅkīrtan prayer.” It is our sacrifice to please the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Prabhupāda was particular about the mood in which we were approaching glorification of guru, glorification of the holy name. . . . I could see that Prabhupāda did not like any trace of pride or any kind of orchestration or seeing it as a musical performance. He wanted it as an act of devotion.4
Śrīla Prabhupāda showed this by his personal example. Yamunā Devī has said:
Srila Prabhupada’s kirtana had no tinge of being a performance. It was purely for the pleasure of Krsna. It allowed the chanters access to the fact that the Lord’s holy name and the Lord are nondifferent. He said that the key to anartha-free kirtana rests in hearing and studying our literature, and gradually rising to the platform of pure devotional service.5
As Śrīla Prabhupāda once said, this “does not require any artificial musical knowledge or dancing knowledge.” He explained:
Out of your own ecstasy, you will dance, you’ll chant. You don’t require to study. Just like our playing of mṛdaṅga. Nobody has gone to an expert mṛdaṅga player to learn it. Whatever I play, I sing, I never studied under some expert teacher. But by practice. Chanting–it may be melodious, it may be very nice or not. That doesn’t matter. We are not concerned about that, whether it is appealing to the people or not. It will appeal; there is no doubt about it. But we don’t require to divert our attention on these things. Simply because there is glorification of the Lord, it will be palatable.6
Not art but ecstasy
Sometimes we want to give more importance to the “art” of kīrtana—to the tunes, the instruments, the vocal ornaments and style. We want to delve into recordings of renowned Indian classical singers, master things they do in their alaps, and bring what we’ve learned into our kīrtana. In this regard, we can learn from instructions Śrīla Prabhupāda gave to his visual artists—those he engaged in painting.
In 1967 in Montreal, Śrīla Prabhupāda’s fledgling artist Jadurānī Dāsī, to whom Śrīla Prabhupāda had given much praise and encouragement, did a large painting copied from a small, stylized Indian print of Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs, but Śrīla Prabhupāda rejected it.
Śrīla Prabhupāda took a quiet look at my large painting and then turned away. “Their features aren’t delicate,” he said. “They’re ugly.”
Jadurānī continues:
I was learning about Kṛṣṇa conscious art—the hard way.
Just because a style is Indian and decorative, it doesn’t mean that it is bona fide Vaiṣṇava art, that art which is authorized by the disciplic succession of pure Vaiṣṇavas. It doesn’t mean that it properly glorifies Kṛṣṇa.7
The same principle applies to kīrtana.
In 1976 Śrīla Prabhupāda wrote:
In India the system is that people go to see the Jagannatha Deity. The Deity is not very beautiful from the artistic point of view, but still people attend by the thousands. That sentiment is required. Similarly with our kirtana we are only using drums and karatalas, but people come to the point of ecstasy. It is not the ornamentation, it is the ecstasy. This ecstasy is awakened by sravanam kirtanam by devotees. I hope this makes everything clear.8
Notes:
1TKG’s Diary, Sept 16, 1977. Giriraj Swami tells of the same incident. Let There Be a Temple, p. 553.
2Letter to Satsvarūpa, June 30, 1976.
3 Prabhupada Nectar, Volume 1, 18.
4 Video: “Laksmi Nṛsiṁhadev das Remembers Śrīla Prabhupāda.” https://vanipedia.org/wiki/Laksmi_Nrsimhadev_das_Remembers_Srila_Prabhupada.
5 Letter to Akiñcana Kṛṣṇa Dāsa, quoted by Dhanurdhara Swami in The Kirtan Sutras, p. 22. In the same letter, Yamunā Devī wrote, “Great kirtana is experienced by the mercy of the holy name itself. No matter what the style of kīrtana, a great kīrtanīya at the least knows that there is no difference between the Lord’s holy name and the Lord Himself. This is a kīrtanīya who closes the distance between a gross and subtle sound experience and the manifest presence of the pure holy name. Old or young, a great kīrtanīya has tasted the mercy of service to the holy name and therefore overflows with the desire to share that with others.” (Ibid, p. 22‒23.)
6 Lecture, June 10, 1969, New Vrindāvan.
7 The Art of Spiritual Life, p. 68‒69.
8 Letter to Dr. Wolf, January 29, 1976.
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