The Poet Signs, and Asks

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

The poet steps into his own poem and puts his name in it. The device is the chāp or bhaṇitā, the signature-line, and it is standard across north Indian devotional verse — Sūrdās, Mīrā and Kabīr all sign their poems this way, in the third person, in the last stanza. Before print and before authorship was a matter of a title page, the signature travelled inside the song, which is how a poem sung from memory for four hundred years keeps hold of who made it.

What he signs himself is hari cerā. Cerā is a servant, a disciple, one attached to a household — and the name he attaches himself to is Hari's, not Hanumān's, in the fortieth verse of a poem in praise of Hanumān. It is the same movement as the verse eight stanzas back that wished Hanumān a permanent servant of Raghupati. The servant names his master, and his master is named a servant, and the poem's whole traffic runs in that direction.

Then ḍerā. A ḍerā is a camp — a tent pitched, an encampment made by somebody travelling, a thing set up rather than built and capable of being struck again. Not mandira, not ghara. To ask for a ḍerā in the heart is to ask on the terms of someone who moves: stop here, stay here, make this the place you are camped. It is a more provisional and more affectionate request than a house would have been.

Who nātha addresses in that line is genuinely open. Read one way it is Hanumān, the figure the whole poem has been speaking to; read another it is Hari, named in the same breath in the line before. Both are current among reciters, and nothing in the Awadhi decides it.

Editions differ on the nasal in mahã: one prints the candrabindu form, another the anusvāra mahaṃ, and a third drops the nasal mark altogether. The candrabindu is followed here; the unmarked form is a printing slip rather than a reading.