qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
Above everyone stands Ram, a king who lived like a hermit — matted hair, bark for clothes, nothing of his own.
And every piece of his work was put in order by your hands.
Tapasvī is one who does tapas, and tapas is heat before it is anything else — the heat that comes off a practice hard enough to burn something away. Set beside rājā it makes a contradiction that Tulsīdās holds on purpose. The man with the best claim to a throne in the world spends fourteen years without one, in matted hair and bark, and the same half-line calls him king and ascetic without choosing.
Sājā is from sājnā: to arrange, to fit out, to set in order — what you do to a room before guests, or to a cart before a journey. The couplet does not say Hanumān won Rāma's war or that the victory was his. It says he arranged Rāma's work. That is a steward's verb, and it is the register the whole Chalisa keeps him in.
Which makes this couplet the hinge of the poem. Eleven chaupais have just gone by on what this one figure can do: swallow the sun, step over an ocean, shake the three worlds, keep ghosts off, undo illness, get a person out of a tight place. Then, without any softening, the poem puts somebody above him — saba para, above all — and in the very next breath says that everything that somebody did was set in order by his hands. Neither half takes anything from the other.
The mood has a name of its own — dāsya, service — and the Chalisa reaches for the word itself a few chaupais further on, where he is Raghupati's dāsa, his servant, always. The greatness is not in spite of the service. It is the same thing, seen from the two ends.
Who at home or at school makes somebody else's work possible? Does anyone say so out loud?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made