Living Songs of Kabir: Priyal Maheshwari’s Journey into Music and Mysticism of the Poet-Saint
- Now touring the United States, the musician and yoga teacher is sharing India’s living song traditions while shaping a wider vision through Living Songs Foundation.
For Priyal Maheshwari, the journey from engineering to music unfolded through a growing desire to bring his work closer to the questions that mattered most to him.
A graduate of IIT Kharagpur, Maheshwari spent six years in the IT industry before stepping away from the corporate path. Music, yoga and meditation gradually became central to his life, offering ways to explore the relationship between outward achievement and inner fulfillment.
Today, that search takes him into concert spaces, community gatherings and intimate satsangs, where he sings the poetry of Kabir and other saint poets, shares its meanings and invites conversation. He is currently touring the United States, bringing these songs to audiences across the country.
His gatherings combine performance with reflection. A bhajan becomes an opening into questions that remain close to everyday life: How do we live with greater awareness? What keeps us divided from one another? What does it mean to look within?
For listeners unfamiliar with the language, Maheshwari offers English explanations and translations, helping them enter the poetry while retaining its connection to the tradition in which it is sung.
Learning from a Living Tradition
A defining influence on Maheshwari’s journey has been his teacher, Padma Shri-award winner Prahlad Singh Tipanya, a celebrated bearer of Kabir’s singing tradition from the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh.
Learning directly from Tipanya has brought Maheshwari into contact with an oral tradition carried through voices, relationships and shared gatherings. Here, poetry lives through the people who sing it, listen to it and return to it across generations.
Alongside his training in classical music, Maheshwari has immersed himself in the songs of Kabir, Nanak, Meera and other saint poets. His work draws on their expressions of devotion and their searching questions about identity, attachment and the ways people relate to one another.
Through his performances and the developing work of Living Songs Foundation, Maheshwari hopes to help them find new listeners.
The influence of this learning extends beyond his repertoire. It has shaped his approach to sharing music: with simplicity, attention to meaning and room for listeners to bring their own questions.
Maheshwari also teaches yoga and meditation. Across these practices, his work centers on cultivating awareness and helping people reconnect with their own experience. Singing, listening, movement and stillness offer different entrances into that exploration.
How Living Songs Foundation Took Shape
As Maheshwari began organizing gatherings, retreats and collaborative events with Tipanya and his ensemble, his personal musical journey opened into a broader concern: how could living song traditions be supported, and how could more people encounter the wisdom they carry?
Living Songs Foundation grew out of that question.
The initiative’s vision is to preserve, celebrate and respectfully share the world’s living contemplative song traditions, while supporting the tradition-bearers who sustain them. Its starting point is the recognition that preserving a song also involves caring for the people, communities and relationships through which it continues to live.
Rooted in Maheshwari’s experience of India’s saint-poetry traditions, the vision reaches towards other cultures where song carries spiritual inquiry, collective memory and ways of understanding life.
Gatherings, collaborations and opportunities for learning form part of this emerging work. The intention is to create spaces in which audiences can meet these traditions through their practitioners and develop a deeper relationship with what they hear.
Carrying the Songs Across Borders
Maheshwari’s current U.S. tour is one expression of that vision. Traveling with his music, he is sharing bhajans alongside their meanings, allowing audiences to encounter poetry that can be both unfamiliar in language and recognizable in its human concerns.
His own journey connects several worlds: an engineering education, years in technology, the discipline of yoga and the ongoing apprenticeship of music. Each now contributes to a life organized around learning and sharing.
At the center of that life are songs that have travelled from voice to voice. Through his performances and the developing work of Living Songs Foundation, Maheshwari hopes to help them find new listeners—and spaces where their questions can continue to be heard.
For public performances, intimate home concerts, workshops and private gatherings on the Living Songs tour: https://living-songs.org/programs
Lalithashree Rajesh is a yoga and meditation teacher who has spent over two decades exploring diverse paths to self-realization. She holds certifications in Hatha Yoga, Yin Yoga, and meditation. She is also certified to teach remedial dance movement to neurodivergent individuals, underserved communities, and children undergoing cancer treatment. She is currently traveling with musician Priyal Maheshwari as he shares the spiritual wisdom of India’s saint-poets, including Kabir, Meera, and Guru Nanak, through music.