Nobody Else in Mind

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

This is the line in the Chalisa a modern reader is likeliest to trip on, and the trip is a category mistake about what kind of sentence it is.

Start with citta. It is not belief and not doctrine; it is the mind as the place where attention sits — what is being held, right now, in the front of it. Citta nā dharaī says nothing else is being held there. That is a statement about the field of attention during an act of devotion, not a census of who exists.

The technical term for the convention is iṣṭa-devatā, the chosen form: the deity a devotee's practice is addressed to, who occupies the whole field for the duration. It does not mean the others are held to be lesser, and it does not mean they are held not to be there. It means that for the length of a song a devotee does not divide their attention, and Sanskrit and vernacular devotional poetry says so in exactly these absolute-sounding terms whoever it is addressing. A Śiva stuti says the same of Śiva; a Devī stuti says it of the Goddess. It is a grammar of love, not a claim filed against anyone.

The poem settles the point itself, four verses later, by calling on Śiva as the witness to its own promise — and Tulsīdās opens the Rāmcaritmānas by saluting Vāṇī and Vināyaka, Sarasvatī and Gaṇeśa, in its first Sanskrit śloka. A poet who thought other deities were not to be held in mind does not begin his largest work by bowing to two of them.

Sei is from sevā, service — serving, attending on. Placed against dharaī it completes the couplet's logic: attention given wholly in one direction, and then what the verse says comes of it. It says that much about the undivided attention and nothing further.

Printed editions divide on the negative particle: some set citta na dharaī, others citta nā dharaī, with na the commoner printing and metrically the tighter of the two. The sense is identical and nā is followed here.