As Dear to Me as Bharat

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

This is the only speech the poem gives Rāma, and it does not end with the chaupai: it runs on into the first half of the next one, which asa kahi, "having said so," closes. What he says is a comparison, so the person he picks to compare with is doing a great deal of work.

He does not say as dear as Lakṣmaṇa, the brother who came along, fought beside him and had just nearly died. He says Bharat. Bharat is the brother who stayed: offered the throne of Ayodhyā and refusing it, he set Rāma's sandals on the seat and governed for fourteen years from beside them, waiting. Tulsīdās cares about Bharat more than most tellings do, and in the Rāmcaritmānas he is the standard by which love is measured. To be told you are loved as Bharat is loved is to be told that service done at a distance, unwitnessed and unpaid, counts as much as service done at his shoulder.

Baṛāī is from baṛā, big: praise as an act of enlargement, making somebody bigger by saying so in front of others. And the last word leaves a small looseness that singers take both ways — bharatahi sama bhāī can be heard as "dear as my brother Bharat" or as "you are a brother to me, like Bharat". Little turns on it, and the warmth is the same in both.