Every Hanuman temple in north India runs the same ten minutes on a Tuesday evening: the Hanuman Chalisa first — forty verses that most of the crowd knows without a book — and then the aarti to close. The aarti is Aarti Kije Hanuman Lala Ki, and it is one of the strangest texts in the Hindi devotional canon, because it does not describe a god. It tells a war story.
This is a guide to when it is sung, why those days, and what the eleven couplets are actually saying.
Tuesday and Saturday
Tuesday is Hanuman's day by long tradition — the day of Mangal, the planet Mars, whose difficult influence Hanuman is held to soften. Saturday is Shani's day, and the connection there is a story: Hanuman is said to have rescued Shani from Ravana's captivity, and Shani in return promised to spare Hanuman's devotees. So both days belong to him, and on both the temple evening follows the same shape: Chalisa, then aarti, then prasad, usually boondi or laddoo.
At home the sequence is the same but shorter. Many people sing only the aarti on an ordinary Tuesday, and the Chalisa as well when there is something to be afraid of. Hanuman is the deity people go to for courage, and the aarti is short enough to sing in a hospital corridor.
What makes this aarti different
A standard aarti is a list of attributes — the crown, the weapons, the mount, the favours granted. Aarti Kije Hanuman Lala Ki gives one verse to that and then spends the rest narrating the Sundara Kanda and the war of Lanka, compressed to eight lines:
- Rama hands him the beera, the betel leaf a king gives a champion who accepts an impossible task.
- He crosses the ocean — "a fortress like Lanka, a moat like the sea" — and takes no time at all.
- He burns the city and brings back news of Sita.
- Lakshmana lies unconscious at dawn; he brings the Sanjeevani herb and saves him.
- He enters the underworld and tears the arms from Ahiravana.
An aarti normally describes a god standing still in front of the lamp. This one describes what he did, in order.
The verse everyone remembers
Bayen bhuja asurdal maare, dahine bhuja santjan taare — with his left arm he killed the demon armies, with his right he carried the good across.
That couplet is the clearest statement in devotional Hindi of what Hanuman is for. The point is not strength; every demon in the Ramayana has strength. The point is strength sorted correctly, by hand. It is why the aarti is sung by people facing something they cannot fight themselves.
The ending
After the wars, the camera pulls back. Gods, men and sages perform the aarti and shout jai jai jai Hanuman. Then the last image: a golden plate, the camphor flame spreading its light, and the person circling the lamp is his mother, Anjana.
The fiercest figure in the pantheon, and the aarti ends with his mother holding the lamp. The refrain has been calling him lala — beloved child — the whole way through; the ending explains why.
Who wrote it
Most printed versions end with a signature couplet crediting Tulsidas, the sixteenth-century poet of the Ramcharitmanas and the Hanuman Chalisa. The Gita Press edition, which is the text on our page, does not carry that line. Whether Tulsidas wrote the aarti or it was written in his voice by someone who sang his Chalisa, it is in his Awadhi and it is centuries old. Either way it is in the public domain, which is why the full text can be published here complete, with the romanisation and what each couplet means, and with the source scan cited.
A note for anyone learning it
The aarti is easier to learn than the Chalisa because it is a story: once you know the sequence of events — commission, crossing, burning, herb, underworld — the couplets fall into place. Sing it after the Chalisa if you know the Chalisa, and on its own if you do not. Nobody at a Hanuman temple minds.
