Sagun Nirgun

A musical journey from form to the formless through songs of Meerabai, Kabir, Sufi songs, Vachanas and Bhavageethe.

This evening brings together three voices from very different corners of India's devotional music traditions.

MD Pallavi is a Bangalore-based singer, composer and actor with a degree in Hindustani classical music from Benares Hindu University. She has spent close to three decades performing Kannada Bhavageethe and Vachanas, the poetry of saints like Akka Mahadevi and Basavanna, carrying their words into contemporary musical spaces.

Vedanth Bharadwaj, trained in Carnatic, Hindustani and Western classical traditions, specialises in the songs of saint-poets from the Bhakti and Sufi lineages, moving fluidly between Kabir, Meera and the mystic poets on either side of that divide.

Mir Rajak carries forward the Sufiyana Qalam tradition of the Mirasi community of Pugal, Rajasthan: hereditary singers who have, for generations, rendered the kalams of Sufi mystics and the bhajans of Kabir and Meera in the same breath, treating devotion as one continuous, borderless song.