Om Jai Jagdish Hare

Few singers of Om Jai Jagdish Hare could name its author, which is itself the measure of the hymn's success. It was composed in the 1870s by Shardha Ram Phillauri, a Punjabi writer, preacher and reformer remembered otherwise as an early figure of modern Punjabi and Hindi prose, and within a few generations his aarti had shed his name and become simply what one sings when the lamp is lit. The text is a chain of petitions to Jagdish, the Lord of the universe, each verse closing into the refrain of victory, jai Jagdish hare. It asks that the sufferings of devotees be removed in an instant, confesses that the worshipper comes filled with desire for refuge, names God as mother and father, friend of the friendless and remover of sorrow, and ends by asking that faith be increased and the mind be turned to service.

The theology is deliberately broad. Though Jagdish and Hari are names of Vishnu, the hymn names no sectarian marks, no avatar stories, no specific shrine, and that generality is why it travels, sung to Vishnu, to Krishna, to Shiva and to the Goddess with the necessary substitutions, in temples of nearly every North Indian tradition. It is the closest thing modern Hinduism has to a universal congregational hymn, and it is barely a century and a half old.

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.