The Bene Israel kirtan tradition began long before television or radio reached the villages of the Konkan coast, when the Bene Israel Jews of Maharashtra had already found a way to keep their history alive through song. Every year, in synagogue halls and family courtyards, a performer known as a kirtankar would sing, chant, and act out episodes from the Torah in the Marathi language, weaving Hebrew phrases into melodies borrowed from their Hindu neighbors. This tradition, called the kirtan, remains one of the most distinctive performance arts to emerge from India’s Jewish communities, and it offers a window into how faith, language, and local culture blended together over centuries.
Interior of the Magen David Synagogue in Byculla, Mumbai, a historic Bene Israel synagogue where community festivals and performances such as the Purim kirtan have traditionally taken place. Photo by Rangan Datta Wiki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
What Is a Bene Israel Kirtan?
A kirtan is a devotional musical performance that combines singing, spoken narration, and dramatic gesture into a single storytelling event. The form was borrowed directly from Marathi Hindu devotional practice, where a kirtankar leads an audience through a religious story using verse, prose commentary, and audience call and response. Bene Israel families living among Marathi-speaking Hindu neighbors adopted this same structure to teach their own children about biblical history, since many community members were more comfortable in Marathi than in Hebrew.
A typical performance features a lead singer supported by a small chorus and a handful of musicians playing instruments such as the harmonium, tabla, and the twanging bulbul tarang. The kirtankar alternates between sung verses and spoken explanation, often pausing to translate or elaborate on a Hebrew word or biblical reference for the audience. The result is neither a Hindu kirtan nor a conventional synagogue service, but something distinctly Bene Israel: a performance tradition built at the meeting point of two civilizations.
The Pioneer Behind the Tradition
Historical accounts credit Bene Israel scholar Eliazer Jacob Ashtamkar with composing the first Jewish kirtan in Marathi around 1882. His work, known as Abraham Charitra, retold the story of the patriarch Abraham using the meter and melodic style of traditional kirtan performance. It was a practical solution to a real problem faced by community elders at the time, who wanted young Bene Israel to know their scriptural heritage but found that many could not follow services conducted purely in Hebrew.
Ashtamkar’s innovation caught on. Other community members went on to compose kirtans about additional biblical figures and events, and the performances became a regular feature of festival celebrations, life-cycle events, and communal gatherings among the Bene Israel of Bombay, Pune, and the surrounding Konkan villages. Community organizations such as the Kirtan Tejak Mandal formed specifically to encourage and preserve the practice, training new performers and keeping the repertoire alive from one generation to the next.
Esther Ranichi Katha: The Purim Kirtan
Among the many kirtans composed over the decades, none is more beloved than the one performed for Purim. Known as Esther Ranichi Katha, meaning the story of Queen Esther, this kirtan recounts the biblical Book of Esther in verse, describing the plot of Haman against the Jews of Persia, the courage of Queen Esther, and the eventual deliverance of her people. The song follows the familiar rhythm of the biblical narrative, moving through Haman’s scheme, Mordechai’s refusal to bow, Esther’s intervention with the king, and the community’s joy at their rescue, all set to a repeating refrain celebrating that Israel rejoiced.
The Purim kirtan was traditionally sung the night before or during the Purim holiday, often by a woman elder of the community known for her voice and memory of the verses. Unlike a private prayer, it was a communal and often theatrical event, performed for an audience that already knew the story but came together each year to hear it retold in the familiar cadences of Marathi song. Recordings and transcriptions preserved by organizations such as the Jewish Language Project have helped ensure that these verses, once passed down only through memory and oral performance, now survive in written and audio form for future generations.
Instruments and Performance Style
The musical backbone of a Bene Israel kirtan reflects its Maharashtrian origins. The harmonium provides the melodic foundation, while hand-played drums such as the tabla or dholki keep rhythm beneath the kirtankar’s voice. Some performances also feature the bulbul tarang, a stringed instrument played somewhat like a small piano, whose bright timbre gives the music its recognizable character. A chorus of family members or fellow congregants often joins in on the refrain, turning what begins as a solo performance into a shared communal expression.
Performances typically unfold in a call-and-response style. The kirtankar sings a verse, then may pause to explain its meaning in plain conversational Marathi before continuing, a technique that made the kirtan as much an educational tool as a form of entertainment. Children who might never sit through a lengthy Hebrew service could nonetheless follow along with a kirtan, absorbing biblical stories through melody and repetition in a language they used every day.
Flora Samuel and the Twentieth-Century Revival
By the mid-twentieth century, as many Bene Israel families emigrated to Israel, there was concern that the kirtan tradition would fade along with the community’s presence in India. Educator Flora Samuel, born Manik Ashtamkar, played a significant role in keeping the practice alive after her own move to Israel in 1964. Fluent in Marathi, Hebrew, English, and Sanskrit, Samuel revived performances of the old Bene Israel kirtans through the Women’s Organization of Lydda, which she led, staging them for audiences of Indian Jewish immigrants who wanted to keep their Marathi culture close even in their new homeland.
Samuel’s efforts extended well beyond the kirtan itself. She edited a Marathi-language quarterly called Mai Boli that reached Bene Israel readers in both India and Israel, and she worked with Israeli museums on exhibitions documenting Indian Jewish culture. Her career reflects a broader pattern within the Bene Israel community, where women were often the primary keepers of cultural memory, teaching songs, recipes, and rituals to the next generation even as the community scattered across continents.
A New Generation Keeps Singing
The kirtan tradition has continued to find new life among Bene Israel elders in Mumbai. In recent years, a group of kirtankars, mostly elderly women from the community, have worked to revive interest in these century-old Marathi-Hebrew performances, teaching younger relatives the verses and performing at Purim gatherings for a new generation that grew up more familiar with English than with Marathi. Their efforts highlight how a performance art that began as a practical teaching tool has become something more: a living link to a Jewish community whose roots in India stretch back many centuries, even as most of its members now live thousands of miles away in Israel.
What makes the kirtan remarkable is not just its survival, but the way it embodies the Bene Israel experience as a whole. It is neither purely Jewish nor purely Indian, but a genuine fusion built from both traditions, sung in the mother tongue of Maharashtra about the sacred stories of Israel. As long as kirtankars keep teaching the verses to their children and grandchildren, this small but resilient performance tradition will keep carrying that dual heritage forward.
Sources: reporting on the Bene Israel kirtan revival and the Purim kirtan tradition draws on coverage from the Jewish Women’s Archive, which documents Flora Samuel’s role in reviving the kirtans through the Women’s Organization of Lydda, along with lyrics and background preserved by the Jewish Language Project. For more on India’s Bene Israel community, see our complete community overview, and for more on devotional music traditions across Indian Jewish communities, see our article on Indian Jewish liturgical music.