In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores Vimalananda’s favorite bhajans and the role of devotional music in supporting awareness and spiritual practice.

Vimalananda was an excellent musician, both vocally and instrumentally. He mostly played the harmonium, but he was also a very skilled tabla player. I would like to share a quote that appears in Living with Reality: “The right kind of music acts as a way of bringing light into one’s consciousness.” Music is a manifestation of sound, and sound exists wherever there is energy, which means heat and light.

Vimalananda would often sing complex songs as bhajans, and sometimes he was even very fond of certain film songs from the Bombay film industry. However, the two traditional bhajans that he loved most were Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram, which remains very popular both inside and outside India, and Ramakrishna Hari, which has not yet become as widely known outside India and especially outside western India.

Ramakrishna Hari is particularly popular among the Varkaris. Many people may know of the Dabbawalas in Mumbai, the men who deliver freshly prepared lunches to hundreds of thousands of office workers every day. The Varkari tradition is a devotional community centered around devotion to Vittala, a form of Vishnu established in the city of Pandharpur in southeastern Maharashtra.

The Varkaris frequently sing Ramakrishna Hari, and it was one of the bhajans that Vimalananda especially enjoyed. Like Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram, it has many different melodies, but this is the tune that he particularly loved.