The Call and the Room's Answer

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

Jagadīśa is jagat plus īśa. Jagat is a fine word for "world": it is built from the root for going, so what it names is not a place but everything-that-moves — the whole shifting business of things. Īśa is the one with power over that. And hare is the vocative of Hari, among the commonest names of Viṣṇu; traditional glosses read it two ways, as the tawny or golden one, and, from hṛ-, as the one who carries things off. Which of the two is in play here the next line settles, since carrying something off is exactly what it describes.

The name matters for how far this song travels. Jagadīśa is a name of Viṣṇu and is used that way here, and it is also a description broad enough to fit whatever a household keeps in its own shrine. This is the aarti sung in front of images of many different deities, in homes of very different persuasions, and the width of the name it opens with is a large part of why.

Now look at the printed shape of the stanzas that follow, because the performance is written into it. Each has three lines, and the second is a short echo of the first, opening with svāmī — master. That is not a poet repeating himself. It is a transcript of two voices: someone leads the line, the room sings the back half of it to him, and then the leader finishes the thought. The refrain already carries the pattern in miniature — oṃ jaya jagadīśa hare, then the vocative svāmī!, then the line again. It comes back between the stanzas and again at the end, so a room that has sung the whole aarti has been round that one line eight times. Read silently, the repetitions look like padding. Sung, they are the whole mechanism, and they are why a room that does not know the words can still join in on half of them.

Bhakta janoṃ ke saṃkaṭa, kṣaṇa meṃ dūra kare. A kṣaṇa is an instant, the smallest slice of time the language bothers to keep. Notice that the line is in the third person: it is not a request put to him but a statement made about him, which is what praise is. And notice who it names — bhakta jana, the devotee-folk, the people who love him, which in practice means the people standing in the room.

One thing this aarti has that the others sung on the same evening mostly do not is an author with a name and a decade. Pandit Shardha Ram Phillauri, a Punjabi writer, composed it around 1870 — recently enough that the attribution is a matter of record rather than of tradition, and he wrote it in Hindi, to be sung, rather than in Sanskrit, to be recited. What is worth noticing is that almost nobody who sings it weekly knows any of that. The song went the way anonymous songs go: into everybody's mouth and out of anybody's keeping.

One of the printings adds a further line to the refrain, dāsa janoṃ ke saṃkaṭa, alongside bhakta janoṃ — very common in group singing, and not quite a synonym, since a bhakta is one who loves and a dāsa is one who serves.