qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
Your colour is gold. You shine, and you are beautifully dressed.
There are rings in your ears, and your hair falls in curls.
Nothing happens in these two lines. They are a dhyāna — a portrait held steady in the mind, the picture a singer is meant to be looking at while the rest of the words go by.
Kañcana, gold, is the colour given. Su-veṣa is well-turned-out, properly dressed — a courtier's word, not a wild creature's. Kuṇḍala are the hooped earrings that gods and kings wear all through Indian sculpture, and kuñcita kesa is hair that curls. A reader who has only ever met Hanumān as muscle should stop here: what the verse gives is not a warrior, it is someone you are glad to look at.
Worth knowing, because it produces a small collision in any household that sings this: the colour in the words is gold, while the images of him in shrines and on roadside walls across north India are very often vermilion, thick with sindūr. The verse is not describing a painted stone. It is describing him.
Who in your family takes the most care getting ready to go out? What do they always put on?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made