Come In, and Bring Them With You

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

The Chalisa began with two dohas and ends with one, and the form is the point of the arrangement: the forty caupāīs between them are the body, and the couplets are the doorposts. A doha is a self-contained rhyming couplet that can stand alone, which is why so many of them are remembered by people who could not recite the text they came from. This one is said on its own more than any other line in the poem.

Maṃgala mūrati rūpa deserves to be kept whole rather than smoothed. Maṅgala is the auspicious — the quality of a thing going well, the same family of meaning as śrī. Mūrti is form, shape, the visible figure. The compound does not say he brings auspiciousness or bestows it. It says that is what his shape is made of: to look at him is to be looking at a good thing happening.

Sura bhūpa, king among the gods, is a title devotional poetry hands to whoever it is addressing at the time, and stuti moves between that register and the intimate one without any sense of strain — a king of gods in one half of the line, and a request to come and stay indoors in the other.

Which is the doha's real surprise. The last thing the poem asks for is not passage anywhere. It is hṛdaya basahu — dwell in the heart — and not alone: rāma lakhana sītā sahita, with Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā along. The whole company, invited in. Tulsīdās ends elsewhere the same way, asking Rāma to make his dwelling in the lotus of the poet's heart, and Diwali's lamps are lit for a homecoming to a city; here the direction reverses and the arrival is asked for indoors. The exile ends in the one place the singer can actually offer.

One editorial note on the couplet: a common printed setting places a comma at each caesura, which is the page's own layout rather than anything in the text, and it is not carried here.