Hindu texts in English

Hinduism has no single book that every Hindu holds in the way some faiths do. It has instead a great library of sacred texts, from the hymns of the Rigveda, which most scholars date to the second millennium BCE, to devotional poems of the last few centuries. Tradition sorts them into two kinds. Shruti, what was heard, means the Vedas with their Upanishads, held to have been revealed to ancient seers. Smriti, what is remembered, means works composed by sages and handed down in tradition, among them the law books, the Puranas, and the two great epics.

The epics are the Ramayana, the story of Prince Rama, and the Mahabharata, the story of a great war between cousins, which contains the Bhagavad Gita. Tradition calls them itihasa, roughly "so it was," and for many Hindus they are both sacred history and a guide to dharma, the right way to live.

Alongside the Sanskrit classics stands a vast body of devotional poetry in the languages people speak. From around the sixth century, poet-saints in Tamil, and later in Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Awadhi, Braj, and many other languages, sang of their love for God. This movement is called bhakti, devotion, and the Hanuman Chalisa belongs to it.

Most Hindu scripture lives in the voice rather than on the page. The Vedas were passed down by memory for many centuries, with elaborate methods for preserving every syllable, and they are still learned by heart in traditional schools. Hymns such as the Hanuman Chalisa are recited daily at home shrines and in temples, and many devotees learn them as children long before they understand every word.

The epics are told as well as read. A storyteller may spend an evening expounding a few verses of the Ramayana in a form called katha. In northern India, Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas is often recited in full by relays of readers, and every autumn towns and villages stage the Ram Lila, a dramatic retelling of Rama's life that ends at the festival of Dussehra. In the Caribbean, Fiji, and other places where Indian communities settled, group singing of the Ramayana has long been a central part of religious life.

Sanskrit is the classical language of Hindu scripture. The Vedas, the Upanishads, the epics, and the Puranas were composed in it, and it remains the language of temple ritual. Valmiki's Ramayana, which tradition honors as the adi kavya, the first poem, is written mostly in the shloka, the two-line verse of Sanskrit storytelling.

Awadhi, the language of the country around Ayodhya, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, is closely related to Hindi. In the sixteenth century Tulsidas chose it over Sanskrit for his Ramcharitmanas, which carried Rama's story to millions who knew no Sanskrit, and the Hanuman Chalisa, which tradition also credits to him, is in Awadhi too. Every Hindu text in this collection is printed in Devanagari, the script of Sanskrit and Hindi, with a Roman transliteration beneath each line.

Two readings are published so far, and they belong together. The first is the Ramayana. Its page gives the first five verses of Valmiki's Sanskrit, in which the poet asks the sage Narada whether any man alive has every virtue, and then the whole first canto in Griffith's English verse, in which Narada answers by telling Rama's story from his exile to his return as king.

The second is the Hanuman Chalisa, the hymn of forty verses to Hanuman, the devoted servant of Rama who leaps across the sea to find Sita. Its page gives all 43 stanzas, the two opening couplets, the forty chaupais, and the closing couplet, with an explanation of each. Many of its verses recall episodes from the Ramayana, so reading Narada's summary first makes the hymn easier to follow. Both readings are listed below.

If you already know a text by heart, read along in Devanagari or in the transliteration and stop at any line you want to understand; its explanation sits directly beneath it. If the text is new to you, read the explanation first, then say the line aloud.

The transliteration follows IAST, the standard scholarly system for writing Sanskrit in Roman letters. In verse it writes every short a that the meter counts, so words can look longer than they sound in everyday Hindi. A few marks are worth learning.

English translation of Hindu scripture began in the eighteenth century, when Charles Wilkins published the first English Bhagavad Gita in 1785. In the nineteenth century scholars such as Griffith translated the Ramayana and the Vedas. Their English is old-fashioned and their outlook belongs to their time, but their care with the texts was real, and their work, now in the public domain, is still widely read.

Today English is an everyday language for Hindus in Britain, North America, the Caribbean, Fiji, and East and South Africa, and for many families in India itself. Many young people learn their prayers in Sanskrit or Awadhi from their elders and turn to English to understand them. These pages are meant to help with exactly that: keeping the original words on the tongue while making their meaning clear.