Om Jai Jagdish Hare lives inside a ritual. Aarti is the offering of light, the moment at the close of worship when a tray of lamps is circled clockwise before the image of the deity, bells ringing, and the congregation stands to sing. The hymn's slow, swinging melody is built for exactly this, simple enough for a whole temple to carry, long enough to cover the circling of the flame, with a refrain that returns often enough for latecomers to join. After the singing the lamp is carried through the gathering and worshippers pass their hands over the flame and touch their eyes, receiving the light that has been offered, and prasad is distributed. In homes the same hymn accompanies the household's own evening or festival aarti, which is where most Hindu children learn it, long before they can read its words.
The Hindi cinema fixed the hymn's national standing when it was sung in the 1970 film Purab Aur Paschim, and countless recordings, from temple ensembles to film playback singers, keep it in circulation, while diaspora temples from Leicester to New Jersey close their services with it. Its universality has a quietly instructive side, a modern authored text has become anonymous ritual within living memory, the process by which most liturgy was probably always made, observable this once at close range.