The Hanuman Chalisa by Tulsidas is one of the best-known and best-loved poems in the world. Tens of millions of people can recite it by heart, and chant it daily. [It is] a magical and joyful work, impressed in the memories and affections of millions, which encapsulates a whole culture in fewer than ninety lines.”
Anyone who makes such celebratory sweeping statements runs the risk in our embattled times of being instantly branded as a Hindu chauvinist. But this is Vikram Seth who boldly says so in his Introduction to this work. In self-referential meta-play, he dedicates his translation of the Hanuman Chalisa to Bhaskar, a minor character in his magnum opus, A Suitable Boy (1993), who had the hymn by heart before he was five years old. Seth surmises that Bhaskar now would be “fighting the chauvinism and the intolerance” which has weaponised texts like the Chalisa. Seth thus walks the tightrope between aligning himself with this iconic Hindu text and repudiating its misuse at the same time.
Seth makes his difficult task much harder by seeking to match his version with the original text not only semantically but also metre by metre, cadence by cadence, and rhyme by rhyme. He has been a virtuoso rhymester and prosodist ever since his first break-out work, the rhymed verse-novel The Golden Gate (1986). Later, he exploited the comic potential of rhymes in his Beastly Tales from Here & There (1992), a collection of fables meant primarily for children, where a weak or patently forced rhyme could only add to the fun.
Capturing the true spirit
But with the Chalisa, a work widely regarded as sacrosanct, there is not much elbow room for departure or manoeuvre. What Seth chooses to do, nevertheless, is to rush in like a jousting cavalier, hacking his path through the thickets of this allusive text deeply embedded in mythology. He goes weeding the text here and pruning it there, now explicating and now just omitting, until he can cut a clear and smooth swathe for the English-language reader to tread on. What matters most to him, and probably to the common reader as well, is the spirit of the text, and Seth certainly makes a spirited attempt to capture it.
School children recite the ‘Hanuman Chalisa’ in Bhopal. | Photo Credit: A.M. Faruqui
But ultimately, the spirit and the letter are inseparable — like the arddhanarishwar Shiva and Parvati, as Kalidasa said. The book provides the Hindi original in both the Devanagari and the Roman scripts, and bilingual readers would relish an extra layer of literary pleasure in comparing the Hindi with Seth’s renderings. The very first verse reads:
Hail Hanuman, great wisdom’s ocean,
The three worlds glow with your light and devotion.
This sounds just fine on its own. But in the original Hindi, both the lines begin with the invocatory ‘jaya’ (hail). The first line says “gyaana guna saagar” but Seth leaves out “guna” (virtue), as he also leaves out the appellation “kapeesa” (lord of monkeys) in the second line. In Hindi, the three worlds are not already aglow but it is Hanuman who lights them up (ujaagar). And that last word, “devotion”, is added on by Seth, not because he is more devout than the original author (who is not Tulsidas, contrary to popular belief), but simply because he needs a word to rhyme with “ocean”.
Secular devotion
Altogether, the standout quality of Seth’s version of the Hanuman Chalisa is that it is eminently readable on its own, and it goes with a swing. It can even be chanted, if any Anglophone reader is so uninhibited as to wish to do so. It is a Chalisa-like poem in its total effect, which is a virtuoso feat that only Seth of all our English-language writers could have pulled off. In the many interviews he has recently given, he can be heard reciting lines from the Hindi original, impromptu with fluent native inwardness. And Hanuman seems to have blessed him already for his act of secular devotion — for Seth is back in the limelight after a decade-long lull.
The reviewer taught English at Delhi University.
The Hanuman Chalisa
Trs Vikram Seth
Speaking Tiger
₹399
Published - August 09, 2024 09:30 am IST
