Chanted in 40 chaupais with introductory and closing dohas, the Hanuman Chalisa is among the most popular and beloved of Hindi prayers. It is reputedly also authored and signed by Tulsidas of the great Ramcharitmanas, and while it cannot match the Manas in the range of that epic’s imagery or the fineness of its emotional nuances, the Chalisa is first of all an ecstasy in sound, as Vikram Seth suggests in the introduction to his translation in this generously bilingual and gorgeously produced new Speaking Tiger edition. This is so in ways an ear like Seth’s is perfectly equipped to capture: “the repeated nasal vowels of the 23rd chaupai or the repeated retroflex sounds of the 36th chaupai”.
Each of us may have encountered this living sonic organism of the Hanuman Chalisa in a different, very specific, way or place. My own most intense memory of its recital is from a visit to Ayodhya in December 2019. The town was utterly wretched, utterly neglected, over-surveilled, and hate-destroyed, but my one bright spot was on the ghat each morning when a young bodybuilder lost himself in the chant of the prayer, deeply immersed in the sound, in the trust of his self-performance. I could see in him the sense of succour and possibility that Hanuman seems to provide.
The Hanuman Chalisa
Speaking Tiger
Pages: 103
Price: Rs.399
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Hanuman as a whole, then, is that he means something different to each of us. For Seth, the connection is so deep that it manifests, at least according to his introduction, in a charming dedication to a character from his novel A Suitable Boy: to Bhaskar, the young mathematician genius, who, according to possibly new details revealed by Seth in the introduction, has learned and loved the Hanuman Chalisa as part of his practice for the Ramlila (is Seth quietly revealing part of the plot of his unfinished sequel to A Suitable Boy here?). True to the dreamiest relations of the authorial mind, Seth dedicates his own Hanuman Chalisa translation “to Bhaskar, who learned the poem before he was five, but who spent his fifties fighting the chauvinism and intolerance to which this and many other well-beloved religious texts and rituals have been put”.
Translating sound
The Hindi text and the diacritics-free Roman transliteration then, lest we forget, provide a vital entry point for any reader to experience the sound in the original alongside the translation. But the question remains, if the qualities of the poem in the original are deeply and crucially sound-dependent, can it be translated into a distinctly foreign language like English? There are two categories of possible answers: 1) No and 2) Maybe.
Seth can only be commended for making himself metrically vulnerable in this way as he is exploring a set of important possibilities for South Asian poetry in English. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
Count me in the realms of Maybe: no one translation need aspire to do it all, but the pressure of translation even when wrong or inaccurate can exert an interesting innovative pressure on the language it is written in. Most of all, a sonic pressure.
Moreover, I am much of a believer (hoper) that translators of poetry ought to be a practising poets themselves, with both the understanding from the inside of what it means to write a poem, and the immersion in the past and contemporary poetry of the language they are translating the poem into.
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Seth seems qualified: at his best he can write ingenious verse with a simple and profound sonic imagination and an unerring sense for “traditional” English iambic metres; google his poem “Dubious” to see it all come together. Seth also has a gift for intricate end-rhymes (those that come at the end of the line) and—unlike much Sanskrit verse, for instance—Tulsidas’ rooted Awadhi verse does indeed achieve glory in a full range of lovely and sonorous end-rhymes.
Translating metre, however, is a thornier matter. A wide range of classical and traditional metres, including Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and most Indian languages, primarily measure and add together “quantity”—or syllable/vowel length; for chaupais, this is calculated by the mātrā. Early English metre, by contrast, like other Germanic and Northern European metres, marks and counts the “stresses” (stressed syllables/accented syllables) and later the “unstressed syllables” between them. In other words, in the Northern European system, the metrical foot can be understood as a counting of beats and/or pulse, whereas the classical “quantity” is more a measure of time.
The attempts from the 16th century onwards to force Greek quantitative metrical language onto English/Anglo-Saxon stress-based metre and Latinate syllable-counting metre did result in a new approach to English metre that would dominate the scene for the next 400 years or so—what we call the English “accentual-syllabic” metrical system—but it also caused, and continues to cause, a great deal of confusion, even for young poets scratching their heads over English metre today.
In fact, the Greek nomenclature was never particularly helpful or appropriate to English because of the essential difference between quantity and stress. Most complex Greek metres and feet cannot be duplicated with great and reliable accuracy into English stressed lines. This leaves us, on most days, with more or less just one kind of very reliable “traditional” English foot—the iambic (te-tum), with the possibility of reversal in a trochee (tum-te).
Seth himself in his earlier poetry has shown he can handle iambs with great subtlety and wit, and at first I expected him, along with rhyming his couplets, to play his Hanuman Chalisa chaupais in standard iambic tetrametre (four-foot) or pentametre (five-foot) couplets or quatrains. However, he has instead attempted, notably, something far more risky and vulnerable: to try to cast the Awadhi metre, sound, and cadence into the English.
He does this in a very formalised way: reversing the iambic foot and bending it towards “falling metres” (trochaic, dactylic, tum-te, tum-te-te, etc.) to match a performative Indian-language poetry that might highlight a line’s penultimate or antepenultimate syllable instead of its last syllable. For instance, Seth’s version of the fourth chaupai goes: “Golden-bodied—in fine robes appearing, / Curly-haired—on each side an earring”— with both lines ending on the unstressed syllable “ing”.
Vikram Seth in New Delhi in 2013. | Photo Credit: MEETA AHLAWAT
Seth can only be commended for making himself metrically vulnerable in this way as he is exploring a set of important possibilities for South Asian poetry in English. One can even hear in one’s mind, perhaps, a recitation, even singing, of the English lines given above to the cadence, rhythm of their original Hindi/Awadhi lines: “kanchana barana biraaja subsesaa / kaanana kunDala kunchita kesaa”.
And, of course, by putting the verb last, Seth has also bent standard English syntax further towards Indian expectations. Could a devotee one day then recite Seth’s English version of the Hanuman Chalisa with the same verve, and devotion, and relish for sound and word that the Hindi receives? This is a question time will answer.
Unfortunately, to my ear, the current versions of Seth’s metrical experiment often failed to convince. Part of the problem could be that he does not push himself far enough. For his final unstressed syllable, Seth too often relies on gerund-ish “-ing” endings (as in the quote from his translation above) or on latinate “-tion” endings; both moves can get metrically weak in English and begin to sound monotonous in the best of circumstances. In Seth’s translation of the first five chaupais, for instance, three verses rely on rhyming words with “-ing” endings, although he is careful to also rhyme the penultimate syllables: “towering / overpowering”, “telling / dispelling”, “appearing / earring”. Compare that narrow, repeated closure of sound with the wonderfully wide range in the original Hindi rhyme pairs: “dhaamaa / naamaa”, “bajarangee / sumati ke sangee”, “biraaja subesa / kunchita kesaa”.
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When Seth does manage to break free of “-ing” or “-tion” or other formulaic endings while keeping the falling metre, the sound effects can be delightful: “beholder / shoulder” (5th chaupai). This does not happen often enough in the current translation for my taste, but it does suggest that Seth might in future be able to keep the metre while revising his version of the poem, as is always worthwhile to do, to make the vocabulary fresher and the sound more varied. The syntax of Seth’s translation, interesting for the reasons I have suggested above, can similarly at times strain comprehension too far in a way that undercuts both emotion and rhythm.
Throughout, Seth’s own devotion to and knowledge of the Hanuman Chalisa remain unquestionable. One wishes indeed that he will eventually write the longer apparatus he mentions in the introduction but abandons, in a long essay with a detailed analysis of the prosody and rhythm of the original and perhaps his own history with the poem. My critical audition of Seth’s translation is subjective, determined inevitably by what I have learned to expect in an English poem and even the moment in which I am reading it. Future South Asian readers might easily learn better to tolerate and feel syntactic strain, more “Indian English” moves, even in their translations. And, above all, such experiments remind us that we are no longer translating our poetry just for an imagined “Western” audience but for each other as multilingual South Asians.
Hanuman’s enduring appeal
What remains also is the enduring mystery of Hanuman’s appeal beyond the militaristic appropriations and dominant strains of recent right-wing Hindu authoritarianism. While we are often ambivalent about Ram’s role in the Ramayana, other characters take foreground: Ravan, the noble and alluring anti-hero; Sita, for some the epic’s true emotional centre; or this simian god whom so many, believers and unbelievers, keep the closest, more than any humanoid deity.
Why do we love Hanuman so? It is an almost impossible question to answer, for which one would have to travel deep in our subconscious and sense of relation—think of Jeffrey Masson’s Hanuman as an imaginary friend—through reams and reams of philosophy, Hanuman’s role as the ultimate devotee, and also the long legacy of the “monkey mind”, which is our human mind, in thought and epic all across Asia. Hanuman may be strong, but ultimately we may love him the most because he is vulnerable, like us.
Vivek Narayanan’s most recent books of poems are The Kuruntokai and its Mirror (Hanuman Editions, 2024) and After (HarperCollins, 2022). He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at George Mason University.
