In a thirty-second clip, kirtan artist Adam Bauer carries one small moment from the Ramayana tradition into song: the monkey-general Hanuman meeting the exiled Rama in the forest and falling at his feet. The clip is brief, but the scene it draws on, and the language its poet chose to tell it in, hold more than the runtime suggests.
According to the video's description, the scene takes place during Rama's fourteen-year exile from the court at Ayodhya. Rama wanders the forests of southern India with his brother Lakshmana, and upon meeting this royal party, Hanuman prostrates himself. The moment comes from a couplet in the Ramacharitmanas, the sixteenth-century epic by the devotee Tulsidas. The verse, as the description renders it, reads: "On recognizing his Lord, he fell at His feet. The bliss that he felt, Uma, is indescribable!"
What matters in that line is recognition. Nothing is argued and no battle is fought. Hanuman sees who Rama is, and the response is to bow. In the wider bhakti tradition, devotion often works this way: the heart knows its Lord before the mind can explain it, and the bliss described is the kind that words cannot hold. Kirtan, the call-and-response singing of names and melodies, is one of the practices built around that same experience. Bauer's short sets the verse to music, so the listener gets the bow before the explanation.
The description also points to a choice that deserves attention. Tulsidas wrote in Awadhi, the language of Rama's home state of Uttar Pradesh and of Ayodhya itself, rather than in Sanskrit, which was expected of a man of high learning. Writing in the local tongue placed the sacred story in the speech of ordinary households. The divine became something a neighbor could sing, not only a scholar could read.
To hear more of Adam Bauer's devotional music, explore the album Life + Death
