Geeta Rabari: the girl from Tappar who became Kutchi Koyal

Geeta Rabari was born on 31 December 1996 in Tappar, a village in the Anjar taluka of Kutch, the wide western district of Gujarat that runs out into the salt flats of the Rann. She grew up in a Rabari family, one of the pastoral Maldhari communities of Kutch, known across the region for their herding life and their embroidery.

Kutch is as much a country of songs as of desert: bhajans, wedding songs, and the all-night lok dayro, where singers and storytellers hold an audience until the small hours. That is the world her voice grew up in.

She studied up to Class 8 in Tappar and completed Classes 9 and 10 in nearby Bhimasar. She has said her father enrolled her in school after a government campaign for girls' education reached the family.

She began singing in Class 5. School functions came first; then neighbours started inviting her to sing at village fairs, local programmes and weddings. By her own account, she never had formal musical training.

As a schoolgirl she sang in front of Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, who gave her a prize of ₹250 and told her to keep practising. She would meet him again years later, by then one of Gujarat's best-known folk voices.

In March 2017 the Gujarati label Raghav Digital released "Eklo Rabari". A month later came "Rona Ser Ma", written by Manu Rabari and Deepak Purohit with music by Mayur Nadiya. It became her breakthrough: her own artist biography credits it with bringing her into the spotlight.

The years that followed moved quickly. Studio Saraswati released "Mahadev" and "Koni Pade Entry" in 2018, and in June that year she started the YouTube channel that has since become her own label, Geeta Rabari Official.

By July 2019 the reach of "Rona Ser Ma" was news in itself: Gujarati television reported that the song had passed 25 crore (250 million) views on YouTube.

On 8 July 2019 she met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Parliament in New Delhi and sang a song for him. The same day he posted photographs of the meeting, praising her for carrying Gujarati folk music to younger listeners and recalling that he had encouraged her as a child.

On 24 February 2020 she was among the Gujarati singers, with Kirtidan Gadhvi and Kinjal Dave, who performed for the crowd at Motera stadium in Ahmedabad ahead of the "Namaste Trump" event.

Her catalogue widened in every direction. In 2021 she released a Hindi "Hanuman Chalisa" on her own channel, alongside music videos such as "Valamiya 2.0", directed by Dhwani Gautam with Puja Joshi on screen, and "Saiyar Mori" for Jhankar Music.

For Navratri she began the "Taal" series of nonstop garba albums in 2021, followed by "Taal 2.0" in 2022, "Taal 3.0" in 2023 and "Taal 4.0" in 2025, with the "Zankaar" albums running alongside from 2023.

In 2022 she sang "Yaad Satave", composed by Rahul Munjariya, for the Gujarati film "Hoon Tari Heer", released on 7 October that year. In September 2023 she performed at a cultural programme at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi during the G20 Summit.

As 2023 turned into 2024, weeks before the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, she released "Shree Ram Ghar Aaye", a Hindi bhajan with music by Maulik Mehta and words and composition by Sunita Joshi (Pandya).

On 7 January 2024 Prime Minister Modi shared the bhajan on X under #ShriRamBhajan and called it deeply moving. She thanked him, saying his post had carried the song across the country.

Much of her year follows the festival calendar: lok dayro evenings in Gujarat, and Navratri garba that now reaches from Mumbai to North America. She toured London and Leicester in June 2022, and her official channel streamed her Navratri 2025 nights live from Borivali in Mumbai.

The releases keep coming through the season: "Zankaar 4.0" on 23 September 2026, and "Kum Kum" with Umesh Barot for Zee Music Gujarati two days later.