Gaura Mani Devi Dasi

Gaura Mani Devi Dasi leads Hare Krishna kirtan, the call-and-response chanting of the maha-mantra, and she is one of the best-known women kirtan singers in the Hare Krishna movement. She was born in the Chicago ISKCON temple in the late 1970s and raised in ISKCON gurukulas, where she spent much of her time singing kirtan and chanting Sanskrit verses.

In 2000 she moved to Vrindavan, India, where she formed Vrajavadhus Kirtan. The group sang outside Srila Prabhupada's Samadhi Mandir every weekend for pilgrims and tourists, and in 2008 it launched officially as a band named after the gopis of Vrindavan. Gaura Mani sings lead and plays the harmonium.

Vrajavadhus describe their sound as a fusion of Indian and Western music. Alongside mridanga and harmonium they have used bass guitar, flute, violin and keyboards. Their first album, Take Me Home, was released at a Delhi event in 2012 that drew about 35,000 people.

The group has chanted at ISKCON Rathayatras across India, including Ludhiana, and at Janmashtami and Radhashtami festivals, where crowds run to tens of thousands. At Rathayatras they have often chanted for nine hours without a break. In the West, they have led kirtan at Bhakti Fest, the 24-hour kirtan at New Vrindaban, and the Toronto Kirtan Mela. She has also sung at the Mayapur Kirtan Mela in 2020, 2023 and 2025.

She is just as active online. ISKCON News reported over a million followers on her Facebook page in 2019, where she went live every day. Her YouTube channel, Gaura Mani Devi Ji, has about 12,000 subscribers, and her kirtans from Vrindavan and elsewhere are posted regularly. A recent upload, from August 2026, is a Harinam Utsav kirtan.

A kirtan with Gaura Mani is lively and sung together. She leads from the harmonium at the microphone, often smiling, and calls out the mantra line by line so that everyone, from children to elders, sings it back. Her band adds mridanga and other instruments, and the music builds in pace and volume. She calls it a slightly Western style of kirtan, and in India her village programmes have drawn crowds who answered her call of "Repeat after us". Expect a joyful, singing evening rather than a quiet one.