A kirtan is a sung devotional gathering in which a leader calls out a sacred phrase and a room full of people answers it back, over and over, until the repetition itself becomes the practice. On March 20, 2020, Govind Das and Radha held one from their home in Los Angeles, and Bhakti Yoga Shala posted the recording five days later as a 52-minute live stream. The chants named in the listing are "Shri Ram Jay Ram Jaya Jaya Ram" and "Om Namah Shivayah," two of the most widely sung names in modern devotional practice. What makes the recording worth a closer look is not a single revelation but the setting: a sacred, participatory form of music, built for a crowded room, carried into the most private space most people had. This piece explains what kirtan is, what those mantras say, and why a small home stream from the first weeks of the 2020 lockdown still tells us something about how devotional music survives a change of venue.
The listing is brief. It describes a live kirtan with Govind Das and Radha "from their home in Los Angeles, California," and it lists the two chants. It does not give a setlist beyond those names, a running order, or an account of what was said between songs. The transcript for the video was not available when this piece was prepared, so this article does not claim to describe moments from the recording itself. What can be said with confidence is the form. A kirtan of this length is a long run of repetition, with the leader setting the melody and the group joining in, returning to the same phrase, and gradually letting it settle into the body.
That form is worth taking seriously, because it asks something unusual of the listener. Western pop structure rewards arrival: a verse, a chorus, a bridge, a resolution. Kirtan rewards staying. The same two or three phrases can run for many minutes, and the shift that happens is often in the singer rather than in the song. Anyone who has sat through a long kirtan knows the moment when the chant stops feeling like something you are doing and starts feeling like something that is happening, with your voice simply part of it.
The video is labeled 3/20/20, and it went up on March 25, 2020. That was the early stretch of the global shutdown, when studios, temples, and community halls were closing and many spiritual teachers were moving their regular gatherings onto laptops and phones within days. The recording's own description puts the emphasis on the home: the stream came from a living room or similar domestic space rather than a purpose-built hall. That detail is easy to skim past, but it changes the meaning of the event. A kirtan has always depended on people in the same space hearing each other's voices. When that room disappears, the practice either adapts or pauses, and this video is an early example of the first option.
The reach is modest by any internet standard. At the time of this writing the video shows 3,128 views. That is a small number for a platform where a single clip can run into the millions, and it is worth saying plainly. A live devotional stream rarely travels the way a viral performance does. Its audience tends to be people who already know the teachers, who already chant, or who are searching for exactly this kind of sound during a hard week. The numbers describe a niche that found what it needed, not a mass audience being pitched a product.
The word kirtan comes from a root meaning to recite or to proclaim, and in practice it refers to congregational singing of sacred names and stories. The most common structure is call-and-response. The leader sings a line, often accompanied by a harmonium, hand drums such as the mridangam or dholak, and small hand cymbals called kartals, and the group repeats it back. Then the leader adds a variation, the melody climbs or softens, and the group answers again. Over time the lines become familiar enough that people stop reading them and simply sing.
The harmonium deserves particular attention, because it is the instrument most people associate with the form. It is a hand-pumped reed instrument that sustains a drone under the melody, which is why it anchors so much devotional singing. The drone works the way a tanpura works in Indian classical music: it gives the voice a fixed point to return to. Players who take the instrument seriously think about bellows pressure, the evenness of the pump, and how a sustained chord sits under a line of text. A good harmonium does not compete with the singer. It holds the room in one key while the voices move through it.
Call-and-response also changes who is responsible for the sound. In a concert, a performer carries the music and the audience receives it. In kirtan, the audience is part of the instrument. A weak answer leaves a gap in the room; a confident answer fills it. This is one reason the form translates so well to small rooms and seems strange on a stage. It depends on everyone being able to hear everyone else, which is exactly what a home stream strains to reproduce.
The two chants named in the listing come from different roots, and it helps to know both.
"Shri Ram Jay Ram Jaya Jaya Ram" is a chant of Rama, the figure at the center of the Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic that is central to much of Hindu devotional life. The phrase is built from names and acclamations. "Shri" is a title of honor. "Ram" is the name of the deity, and "Jay" or "Jaya" means victory or glory. In practice the chant reads roughly as a cry of honor to Rama, repeated until the name itself becomes the object of attention. Many devotees take up Ram naam, the practice of chanting the divine name, as a way of keeping the mind turned toward something larger than daily concerns.
"Om Namah Shivayah" is a five-syllable mantra addressed to Shiva. "Namah" means something like "I bow to" or "I offer homage," and the chant is often used in Shaiva traditions as a way of acknowledging the divine within and beyond the self. Its brevity is part of its appeal. Five syllables can be sung in one breath, repeated for an hour, and carried in memory without a book. That portability matters in a practice that was never meant to live only in a hall.
Putting the two chants in one session is typical of contemporary kirtan, which often draws from several devotional streams at once. The listing does not say how the evening was structured, so this article does not describe the transitions. The point is simply that the chants share a function: each gives the group a name to hold and a rhythm to repeat until the mind has less to do.
Repetition is the central technology of kirtan, and it is easy to misunderstand from the outside. Repeating a phrase for a long time is not a failure to say something new. In the devotional view, the phrase is not a message to be decoded but a presence to be entered. The same logic appears in japa, the practice of silently or quietly repeating a mantra, often with a string of prayer beads. Kirtan is japa made social. Instead of one person counting alone, a room counts together, and the sound carries the attention that a single practitioner has to generate by will.
There is also a practical reason the form lasts. Repetition is memorable, portable, and forgiving. A newcomer who does not know the words can still join the second time through a line. A tired singer can drop to a murmur and rejoin the next cycle. The structure absorbs variation in skill and energy without falling apart, which is why kirtan has survived in so many settings, from temple courtyards to city apartments to, in March 2020, the front-facing camera of a laptop.
A stream removes most of what makes kirtan physically communal. People cannot hear the room's answer; they hear a mix. Latency, audio compression, and the limits of a single microphone flatten the layered sound that a crowded space produces. What a stream keeps is the thing the form most depends on: a leader who chooses the melody, a set of phrases everyone can learn, and an invitation to answer. Viewers who sing along at home are doing something quieter than a room full of voices, but they are still doing the call-and-response, and the repetition still works on the one singing.
For the teachers, the stream does a second job. Bhakti Yoga Shala's listing points viewers toward an online membership, and the posting includes links to the teachers' own Instagram accounts and to a Facebook page under a Santa Monica name. A recorded or live kirtan like this one doubles as an entry point into an ongoing community, a way for people who cannot attend in person to keep a regular practice. Whether that model suits every practitioner is a fair question, but the arrangement is at least transparent in the listing: the chant is offered freely in the video, and the membership is presented as a separate, optional step.
If you are new to kirtan, a recording like this one is a useful place to start, even without the setlist or the spoken framing. Some practical ways to get more from it:
- Listen first without singing. Notice where the leader's line begins and where the group answers, and how long each cycle lasts.
- Learn one phrase at a time. "Om Namah Shivayah" is short enough to memorize in an afternoon, and singing it with the group is a good test of how the call-and-response feels.
- Pay attention to the drone. Even on a recording, the harmonium or other sustained tone is the floor the voices stand on; hearing it clearly makes the singing easier to settle into.
- Stay past the first ten minutes. The shift that makes kirtan worth doing usually comes after the initial effort has passed, when the phrase has stopped being new.
- Sing quietly if you must. A murmur that stays in the pattern does more than a loud voice that loses the thread.
The recording also shows something about the form's resilience. It was made in the first days when many people were learning to be in their homes differently, and it was shared as a way to keep a sacred sound in circulation. That is the lasting lesson: kirtan is not tied to a single venue. It needs a leader, a phrase, and people willing to answer, and those can exist in a living room as well as a temple.
Start with the two mantras, "Shri Ram Jay Ram Jaya Jaya Ram" and "Om Namah Shivayah," and learn them away from any recording so that you can sing them without needing a screen. Then listen to a full kirtan the way this article suggests, letting the repetition do its slow work. If you want to follow the teachers, the listing links to Bhakti Yoga Shala's website, its Instagram account, and the Instagram accounts of Radha and Govind Das. For deeper context on the two traditions behind these chants, the Ramayana and the Shaiva devotional texts are the natural next reads. The recording itself is short enough to return to, and its meaning deepens on each listen.
