2009-10. I was striving to re-open Jessop and Dunlop with the help of the Government of West Bengal and was visiting Writers Building every other day. I was meeting Ardhendu Sen, first as the Principal Secretary: Industrial Reconstruction and then as the Chief Secretary. During my many discussions with him on varied topics he mentioned Kali Kirtan and that in the weekend he will be going to the Sunderbans to join the villagers to listen to devotional songs in praise of Goddess Kali. In passing he invited me to join him and thus began my deep interest on the subject. I realized that Kali Kirtan is a separate genre of a musical form of narration devoted to Goddess Kali, not be mixed up with Shyma Sangeet. I have written on it earlier and had posted in facebook but this goes beyond.
I have found the iconic representation of Kali Kirtan in form and substance much beyond my highest imagination, sitting in my mind as we Bengalis say : ভর করা (to fill one’s mind).
Kali Kirtan in Bengal is a fascinating example of how devotional practices evolve, borrow, and transform across sectarian lines. The practice did not arise in isolation within Shakta traditions but rather as an adaptation of Vaishnava kirtan, the communal singing style that had swept across Bengal with the movement of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in the sixteenth century. Chaitanya and his followers had turned the act of singing into worship, dance into prayer, and the very breath into mantra. Their songs, centered on Radha and Krishna, were charged with bhakti in its sweetest and most intimate form. Love, longing, and surrender defined the atmosphere, and kirtan became an immensely popular mode of devotion across villages and towns.
At the same time, Bengal nurtured a deep current of Shakta worship, where Kali was not only feared as the destroyer but embraced as the mother who both terrifies and protects. By the eighteenth century, poets such as Ramprasad Sen and Kamalakanta Bhattacharya were giving shape to what came to be known as Shyama Sangeet, lyrical songs steeped in emotional surrender to Kali. These were not sung in the communal style of kirtan but rather carried the intimacy of prayer and the poignancy of private conversation with the Mother. Their tone was meditative, often solitary, as the devotee poured out love, anguish, or playful complaint to the goddess.
Kirtan, Sanskrit: कीर्तन; is a Sanskrit word that means "narrating, reciting, telling, describing" of an idea or story. It also refers to a genre of religious performance arts, connoting a musical form of narration or shared recitation, particularly of spiritual or religious ideas. With roots in the Vedic Anukirtana tradition, a kirtan is a call-and-response style song or chant, set to music, wherein multiple singers recite or describe a legend, or express loving devotion to a deity, or discuss spiritual ideas. It may include dancing or direct expression of bhavas (emotive states) by the singer. Many kirtan performances are structured to engage the audience where they either repeat the chant or reply to the call of the singer.
The growing popularity of kirtan, however, meant that its form could not remain confined to Vaishnava circles. The rhythmic call-and-response, the repetition of refrains, the ecstatic energy of voices rising together with cymbals and drums—all of this proved irresistible to Shakta devotees. The credit for religious devotional song offering to Goddess Kali known as Kali Kirtan is attributed to Sadhak Ramprasad Sen 1723 – c. 1775. He was a Hindu Shakta poet and saint of eighteenth-century Bengal.
It is said that Ramprasad was born into a Tantric family and showed an inclination towards poetry from an early age. He became a disciple of Krishnananda Agamavagisha, a Tantric scholar and yogi. Ramprasad became well known for his devotional songs, eventually becoming the court poet of Raja Krishnachandra of Nadia. His life has been the subject of many stories depicting his devotion to, and relationship with, Kali. Ramprasad's literary works include Vidyasundar, Kali -kirtana, Krishna-kirtana and Shaktigiti.
Ramprasad is credited with creating a new compositional form that combined the Bengali folk style of Baul music with classical melodies to kirtan. The themes were no longer Radha’s yearning for Krishna or the divine play of Vrindavan, but the dark, majestic, paradoxical presence of Kali—she who is terrible and tender, who liberates even as she destroys.
In aesthetic mood, Kali Kirtan differs from Vaishnava kirtan. Where Krishna songs lean towards sweetness, romance, and gentle yearning, Kali Kirtan embodies a wider range of emotions—maternal love, servitude, awe, and sometimes sheer fear. Yet the musical fervour is similar: the rising pitch of repetition, the infectious rhythm of mridangam and kartal, the communal catharsis of singing through the night. For rural Bengal especially, this form of worship brought Shakta devotion into the public square, creating a participatory practice that went beyond the sanctum of temple ritual or the solitude of individual prayer.
It was in the nineteenth century that this fusion found its most powerful champion in Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Ramakrishna, though a lifelong worshipper of Kali, had also immersed himself in Vaishnava bhakti. He would often slip into samadhi during Vaishnava kirtans, overcome by the name of Krishna, and then return to the Mother with the same devotional intensity. To him, there was no real division: Radha’s yearning and the devotee’s cry to Kali were but two currents flowing into the same ocean of divine love. Within the precincts of Dakshineswar temple, Vaishnava and Shakta singers would often perform side by side, and Ramakrishna himself encouraged Kali Kirtan as a natural expression of devotion to the Mother.
This reconciliation of streams did not remain in music alone. In Bengal’s folk imagination, the Divine itself took on a composite form, worshipped in some shrines as Kali Krishna. In this icon, the playful flute of Krishna (check image) and the dark majesty of Kali meet in a single figure. Sometimes he appears as Krishna darkened into Kali’s midnight hue, adorned with her ornaments; sometimes she appears as Kali softened by Krishna’s peacock feather and flute. This blending, like Kali Kirtan itself, declares that love and fear, beauty and terror, tenderness and awe, are not opposites but complements. Kali Krishna is the sculptural counterpart of Kali Kirtan: the song made visible in form, the reconciliation of Vaishnava and Shakta devotion embodied in an idol.
Through Ramakrishna’s vision and the creativity of Bengal’s devotees, both Kali Kirtan and Kali Krishna gained dignity and legitimacy. What might have seemed deviations became revelations, proofs that devotion does not divide but unites. In their swelling refrains and composite forms, one hears the genius of Bengal—the ability to weave sweetness and terror, romance and surrender, solitude and community, into a single tapestry of love. Kali Kirtan is not merely song, and Kali Krishna not merely image: both are living bridges between two great streams of bhakti, carrying forward the truth that the Divine wears many masks but is ever one.
Even today, when the night of Kali Puja comes alive with voices, cymbals, and drums, and when villagers bow before an idol that is at once Krishna and Kali, one can feel the same truth that Ramakrishna knew: that whether one sings of Krishna or of Kali, bows to Radha or to Shyama, it is the same eternal presence—dark, radiant, mother and lover—who receives the offering of the heart.