Whose Child He Is

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

This is the sthāyī, the standing line: sung first, sung again after every stanza, sung last. It is also the part of the aarti that people who know none of the rest can still sing from memory.

Read it as grammar and something odd surfaces. There is no verb in it anywhere. Four lines, a shout repeated three times, and then two noun-phrases naming a mother and a father. Nothing is asked for and nothing is described. The refrain is a name and a lineage, and that is all it is.

Jākī is Braj — "whose" — and it does the work of the whole second half. It hands Gaṇeśa over to his parents rather than the other way round. In a world where a person is placed by whose household they belong to, this is the ordinary way you would tell somebody who somebody is, and the aarti uses it unchanged.

Pārvatī comes first. That may be no more than the line's metre, and it would be overreading to build much on it, but it is what a room sings, and the effect on a singer is the same: the mother is named before the father in a song about a son.

His parentage is also his story. The best-known telling, in the Śiva Purāṇa, has Pārvatī form a boy from the substance of her own body and set him to guard her door; Śiva, returning and not knowing him, strikes off his head; an elephant's head is brought and fixed on, and Śiva takes him as his son. Other Purāṇas tell it very differently — the Brahmavaivarta has the head lost to Śani's glance at the infant's birth-celebration. Both endings leave him with a father who had to accept him and a mother who made him, which is worth holding onto when the refrain names them.

Devā is the Braj form of deva, lengthened at the end for singing; it rhymes with mahādevā, and that rhyme is why the pair of lines has stayed so fixed while other stanzas of the aarti have drifted.