The clink of hand cymbals, beats of dholak and singers caught in a trance come to mind when we think of kirtans, be it to invoke the blessings of Sherawali Mata or Sai Baba. But in the 1880s, long after the ship-wrecked Bene Israelis had put down roots in the Konkan soil, kirtans were giving voice to the stories of creation, Noah, Abraham and Moses. Composed by a new breed of kirtankars, who were Bene Israelis, the devotional songs — primarily in Marathi then — were being sung to not just invoke the almighty, but to also preserve the history of the community. “Our ancestors had lost everything in the shipwreck. In the villages where they resided, kirtans were a major form of religious discourse among Maharashtrians. To keep the Biblical traditions of Judaism and what happened to our forefathers alive, they adopted kirtans, using drama, narration and music to impart knowledge,” shares Elijah Samson Jacob,  a member of the Orot Ha Tanakh kirtan group. Jacob, along with the group, will open up about the history of this syncretic tradition at a lecture-performance hosted by the Mumbai Research Centre of The Asiatic Society of Mumbai.

Benjamin Shimshon Ashtamkar, the first Bene Israeli kirtankar