Chalisas

A chalisa is a devotional hymn of about forty verses, written for one deity or one revered figure and meant to be recited or sung aloud. The word comes from the Hindi chalis, "forty", which in turn goes back to the Sanskrit for forty. Each verse is a short, rhymed unit that stands on its own, so a chalisa is easy to learn by heart, and many devotees say one daily. This page gathers twelve of them and arranges them by the deity each one praises, so that a reader who wants the hymn to Ganesha or to the Goddess can go straight to it.

Most chalisas are built from two verse forms. The chaupai is the main line of the hymn: our glossary explains that strictly it is a stanza of four lines of sixteen beats each, but in the Hanuman Chalisa each numbered verse is a two-line half, and the tradition counts each as one chaupai. The doha is a rhymed couplet. Hymns usually open with a doha or two, which state the prayer or invoke a guide, and close with a doha that gathers the blessing. The forty chaupais come between.

The number forty is the name of the form more than a count, and the pages show it. The Hanuman Chalisa has two opening dohas, forty chaupais and a closing doha, forty-three verses in all. The Krishna Chalisa has the same plan. Others differ, as the table shows. The Lakshmi Chalisa carries its forty lines in twenty couplets, and the Sai Chalisa runs to 101 entries because it tells a life.

One entry in the table needs a word. The Bajrang Baan is not called a chalisa and does not have forty verses, but it is recited in the same way and belongs to the same family of Hanuman hymns, so it sits here.

A chalisa is read aloud or sung, alone or in a group, and the pages record the days and festivals on which each is customary. The Hanuman and Rama hymns are said on Tuesdays and Saturdays, the Shani Chalisa on Saturdays, and the Shiv Chalisa on Mondays and in the month of Shravan. The Durga Chalisa belongs to Navaratri, the Lakshmi Chalisa to Fridays and Diwali, the Saraswati Chalisa to Vasant Panchami, the Krishna Chalisa to Janmashtami and the Ganesh Chalisa to Ganesh Chaturthi. The Sai Chalisa is sung at prayer gatherings. Many hymns close with the fruit that follows recitation. We report those words as the hymn's own and make no promise of any result.

The groups follow the deity, because that is how most readers come looking: Hanuman and Rama; Krishna and Khatu Shyam; Shiva, Ganesha and Shani; the Goddess as Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati; and the revered saint Sai Baba. Within a group the hymns are in alphabetical order, and each row says in a line what the hymn is. The best known, the Hanuman Chalisa, is in Awadhi and is traditionally attributed to the sixteenth-century poet Tulsidas. The account of how it came to be written is on the page Hanuman Chalisa Origin, where it is presented as tradition, not as recorded history.

A chalisa is a hymn of about forty verses. A chaupai is the main verse line of a chalisa, and a doha is a rhymed couplet that opens or closes it. A soratha, also written sortha, is a variant of the couplet. Awadhi is the eastern Hindi language of Tulsidas and of the Ramcharitmanas. Tulsidas is the sixteenth-century poet-saint of Rama. Navaratri is the nine nights of the Goddess, and Vasant Panchami is the spring festival of Saraswati.