qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
You made yourself tiny, and let Sita see you.
You made yourself terrible, and burned Lanka, the island city, to the ground.
Two half-lines, and the whole of the Sundar Kāṇḍ is inside them.
The book those two events come from exists in more than one version, and they are not one book: Vālmīki's Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and Tulsīdās's Awadhi Rāmcaritmānas tell this stretch differently in detail, and the Chalisa is Tulsīdās's. In both, Hanumān crosses the water alone, shrinks himself to move through Laṅkā unnoticed, and finds Sītā held in a grove of aśoka trees. He stays small when he speaks to her. A woman held prisoner for months, approached at night by an enormous stranger, would have had one more terror added to the pile; so the size is a courtesy.
Then he is caught, and his tail is wrapped and lit, and he takes the fire with him through the city.
What the verse sets side by side is one power used two ways. Hanumān's standing gift is kāma-rūpa, form at will — he can be any size he likes. Sūkṣma is the fine, the subtle, the almost-not-there. Bikaṭa is grim, misshapen, the thing you do not want to meet. Nothing changed about him between the two lines except who was standing in front of him.
Have you ever made yourself quieter or smaller so that you would not scare somebody? When?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made