South African Indian-origin singer Vandana Naran is being appreciated worldwide after the launch of a CD featuring the Hanuman Chalisa in six different musical variations.
Naran performed some of the items at the annual United Hanuman Chalisa held in Lenasia, an Indian township in Johannesburg, where bhajan groups from across the country rotated in 20-minute sessions for non-stop chant of the devotional prayer over 12 hours.
The Hanuman Chalisa is a 40-verse devotional composition by Goswami Tulsidas, better known as the author of the mythological epic Ramcharitmanas, in praise of Lord Hanuman.
“We decided to put together this CD in different versions of the Hanuman Chalisa so that it would find appeal to different age groups,” Naran told PTI.
“There are traditional versions that will appeal more to the elderly group, and then there are more modernised music versions for the younger group, using electronic music as background. The words of course stay exactly the same, but the renditions are in different tunes,” the singer added.
Naran and her sister Jagruthi are trained Indian classical musicians. Her family also ran musical lessons online for a few years. Their father assists with technical studio recordings.
Only last year, at the 150th birth anniversary of Nelson Mandela, the trio produced the world’s first South African national anthem translation into Hindi, adapting lyrics composed by a schoolteacher from Pietermaritzburg where Gandhi’s path to Satyagraha was paved 125 years ago after he was thrown off a train reserved for whites.