About
Shabnam Virmani is a documentary filmmaker, writer, artist and singer of Kabir folk songs, and the founder of the Kabir Project, housed at the Srishti Institute in Bengaluru where she is artist-in-residence. A former journalist, she set out in 2002, in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, on a long quest into the poetry of the fifteenth-century mystic Kabir and its living oral traditions across India and Pakistan.
Over two decades the Kabir Project has produced four documentary films, the Ajab Shahar web archive, books, urban festivals and rural yatras. Her film Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein won the Special Jury Prize at the National Film Awards, and she learned to sing Kabir from the Malwi master Prahlad Tipanya. She performs and gives lecture-performances of Kabir and other Bhakti, Sufi and Baul poetry, often with Vipul Rikhi, and has co-authored books on Kabir and Shah Abdul Latif.
The artistry
Virmani sings Kabir in an unadorned, folk-rooted voice and pairs each song with its meaning, telling stories and drawing out the poetry's social and spiritual resonance. Her performances blend music, film and dialogue rather than pure recital.
Shabnam Virmani connects on the Culture Atlas graph to the Bhajan artform profile (Kabir's tradition), to the Sufi Music artform (through the Kabir Sufi connection), and to the Bengaluru destination profile. Her Kabir Project institution deserves its own profile as a significant cultural documentation and advocacy organisation.
Shabnam Virmani's Kabir Project represents one of the most sustained and methodologically rigorous efforts to document and transmit India's living folk devotional traditions in the contemporary period. Her work bridges the gap between academic documentation and performance advocacy, creating both an archive and a living practice.