qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
Whoever sings this lamp-song of great Mother Lakshmi —
gladness fills their heart and fits there at last, and the wrong they have done gets down off them and goes.
This is a phala-śruti — a "fruit-hearing," the closing stanza that tells you what comes of reciting a text. Almost every Sanskrit and Hindi devotional piece has one, and they are the stanzas modern readers trip over hardest.
Report it plainly first, because that is what the text says: sing this, and joy fills the heart and wrongdoing falls away.
Then notice the verbs, because they are not the verbs of a transaction. Ura ānanda samātā — joy is contained in the chest; samānā is to be held, to fit inside, the way a thing finally goes into a container that was made for it. And pāpa utara jātā — utarnā is what you do getting off a bus, or what a load does coming off a shoulder. Not cancelled, not paid off. Set down.
The honest thing is to leave it there: the text makes a claim; the claim is about what the practice does to the person doing it; a reader can hold it and see.
The closing stanza is also where the aarti names itself — mahālakṣmījī kī āratī — which is how these songs end: the singers say out loud what they have just done. And its last line names the oldest reason anyone sings anything with other people — that you might set something down.
Some sung texts read jo koī nara gātā, "whoever, being a man, sings it," for jana, "whoever, being a person." Both are widely sung; jana is the reading used here, and it is the one that matches who is actually in the room.
What is something you have been carrying that you could put down tonight, even for an hour?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made