A short recording from a Rishikesh workshop, filmed in early March 2015, captures a singer, a soul friend and a tabla player sharing one chant to Shiva. The clip is about six minutes long and comes from a session called "Mantra for the Modern Yogi," run by Anandra George at the International Yoga Festival at Parmarth Niketan. The video's description is the only written context available, so this piece stays close to what the record actually holds: a title, a setting, a line-up, and a name that tells you a good deal about the song before a note is sung.
The description places the performance on 3 March 2015, during the International Yoga Festival at Parmarth Niketan in Rishikesh, the riverside ashram town in the Himalayan foothills that has long drawn yoga students from around the world. The event was a workshop, not a concert. That distinction matters for how the clip should be heard. A workshop is a place where a chant is taught, sung back, and tested in the body, so a recording from one tends to sound like a group learning a phrase rather than a stage act polishing one.
The credits list three people. Anandra George sings the song. Daphne Tse is described as Anandra's "soul friend," and the description gives her a place in the performance. RishiKumar, identified as being of Parmarth Niketan, plays tabla. The tabla is the paired hand drum of North Indian classical and devotional music, and in a chant setting it does structural work: it marks the cycle, holds the tempo and lets the voice float above a steady pulse. The pairing of a Western-trained voice with a tabla player from the ashram itself is a small, telling detail about how these sessions were built.
The title does most of the explaining. Mahadev is one of the principal names of Shiva, usually rendered as "great god." Maheshwara is another form of the same divine name, roughly "great lord." Stacked together, the phrase is a direct address, the kind of invocation that Sanskrit devotional singing has used for centuries: a list of names, sung until the names stop being words and start being an address to someone present. That is the essential mechanism of the form. A devotional chant is not a description of the divine. It calls the divine into the room.
Shiva, in the Hindu tradition, is often approached through repetition of his names, and a chant built on his epithets is among the most common shapes that practice takes. The title alone places this song firmly in that lineage, whatever melody Anandra George chose to carry it.
The workshop title suggests an attempt to bring mantra practice to people who now come to it from yoga studios rather than temples or family traditions. The description does not spell out the workshop's method, and we have not seen its materials, so anything more specific would be speculation. What the title does establish is the framing: mantra is presented as a working tool for a contemporary practitioner, not a relic, and a clip like this one shows the framing in action. Students hear the phrase, join the voice, and leave with a line they can repeat alone.
There is no transcript for this video, so this article cannot quote Anandra George or describe the teaching that surrounded the song. The lyrics are not in the description, and the melody, tempo and arrangement can only be heard, not transcribed from text. Anyone wanting to understand the workshop's method should treat this as a sample of its sound and sentiment rather than a full account of its teaching. The view count of 706 suggests the clip has been seen by a small, focused audience, which is consistent with a recording of a single session shared mainly among those who were there or who follow the teachers involved.
If the clip has you wanting to sing the chant yourself, the most useful next step is to learn it from a living teacher who can correct your pronunciation and pacing, since a recording can show the shape of a chant but not its breath. To go deeper into the material, search the workshop name and the festival together, and look for other recordings from the same event at Parmarth Niketan. For the Shiva names themselves, a Sanskrit-literate teacher or a printed devotional songbook will give you the text, the meaning of each epithet, and the traditional order of the verses, none of which are available from this description alone.
