About
Gaudiya Kirtan is a songbook for the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition — the kīrtanas, bhajanas and prayers of Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura, Śrīla Narottama dāsa Ṭhākura, Śrīla Rūpa Gosvāmī and the ācāryas in their line.
Every song is presented in its original script alongside romanized transliteration, word-by-word meanings, and full translation, so a reader can follow the sound and the sense at once. The whole collection is bundled with the app and works without a network connection.
The collection
Songs are in Bengali, Sanskrit, Hindi, Assamese and Odia. Each can be displayed in Latin (IAST / ISO 15919), Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Odia or Cyrillic script.
How the text is prepared
One romanized master text is held for every verse, in the ISO 15919 standard, and every other script is generated from it. That way a correction made once propagates to all ten scripts, and the scripts can never silently disagree with one another.
Transliteration is a genuinely lossy business — inherent vowels, compound joins and the B/V and J/Y distinctions all differ by language and script — so the master text carries explicit marks for those cases rather than guessing at rendering time. If a rendering still looks wrong to you, please tell us — corrections from readers who know the songs are the most valuable thing we receive.
Guides to pronunciation, diacritics and verse meters are included for readers new to the transliteration.
Sources and acknowledgements
The songs, their arrangement into books and topics, and the English translations follow Śrī Gauḍīya Gīti-guccha — An Anthology of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Songs (Abridged Edition, 7th ed., February 2016), compiled under the guidance of Śrī Śrīmad Bhaktivedānta Nārāyaṇa Gosvāmī Mahārāja and published by Gaudiya Vedanta Publications.
Except where otherwise noted, the text of that book is made available by its publishers under a Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. Design, photographs and artwork from the book are not included under that licence and are not reproduced here.
Our gratitude to the reciters whose recordings accompany these songs, and to the devotees who have sent corrections. Any errors introduced in preparing this edition are ours, not the publishers’.
This edition
This is an actively developed rebuild, available on the web, iOS and Android from a single shared collection of songs. Features are still landing and some songs are still missing translations or word-by-word meanings — those gaps are shown honestly rather than filled with placeholder text.
More at gaudiyakirtan.com, or get in touch.