Aarti
Quick answer: Aarti is the Hindu lamp ritual and the praise song sung during it. Learn how aarti poems are built, who wrote the famous ones and how to craft a litany.
An aarti is both a Hindu ritual, the waving of a lighted lamp before a deity, and the song of praise sung while the lamp circles. The two meanings travel together: the poem exists to fill the exact minutes of the rite, and the rite gives the poem its rhythm, punctuated by bells, claps and the drone of a conch. As a literary form, an aarti is a praise litany, a stanzaic hymn with a fixed refrain that lists the deity's names, deeds and mercies in singable, strongly rhymed lines.
Poets and students should care about aarti because it is probably the most widely performed poetic form in India today. Every evening, in temples and kitchens across the country and the diaspora, people who would never call themselves poetry readers sing stanzas from memory, on pitch, in metre. Whoever wants to understand how verse embeds itself in daily life, or how a refrain really works under performance pressure, will find aarti a perfect small laboratory.
One Name for a Rite and a Genre
The word derives from the Sanskrit aratrika, the light waved before an image at night. In the ceremony, a lamp of ghee or camphor wicks is moved in circles before the deity while the gathered household or congregation sings. The song sung at that moment came to be called by the ritual's own name, and so aarti became a genre label the way, in English, carol did.
Because the song must last the length of the rite and hold a mixed crowd of children, elders and visitors, the genre developed tight practical conventions: a refrain everyone knows, stanzas short enough to relearn on the spot, and a beat you can clap. Nothing about an aarti is accidental; it is verse engineered for a specific five minutes of communal attention.
How an Aarti Poem Is Built
The skeleton is refrain plus stanzas. The refrain, usually the opening line, is a direct address of praise, and it returns after every stanza. Each stanza then performs one job: naming the deity's attributes, recalling a famous deed, describing the deity's appearance from crown to feet, or asking protection for the singer. The rhymes are emphatic, often on matching verb endings, and the metre is matra based and even, because the clapping congregation is the real metronome.
Two devices dominate the texture. The first is the epithet chain: strings of names and titles, each a compressed story, so that a single line can carry an entire myth for a listener who knows the reference. The second is anaphora, the repeated line opening, which lets new singers predict the shape of a line before they know its words. An original micro-example of the shape, secular on purpose: 'Keeper of the morning kettle, hail; keeper of the darned grey sock, hail', and so on, each line adding one homely glory before the refrain returns.
The Famous Aartis and Their Authors
The best known Hindi aarti, sung across sect and region, is 'Om Jai Jagdish Hare', composed in the 1870s by Shardha Ram Phillauri, a Punjabi writer also remembered for early Hindi fiction. Its universal address to Jagdish, Lord of the World, rather than to one specific deity helps explain its reach: it can close almost any puja. The tune and refrain are so widely known that the opening three words function as shorthand for the whole rite.
Marathi tradition treasures 'Sukhkarta Dukhharta', the Ganesh aarti attributed to the seventeenth century saint poet Samarth Ramdas, sung with special fervour during the Ganeshotsav festival. Most major deities have a canonical aarti, and regional languages hold their own bodies of them. The grandest public staging of the form is the river aarti, such as the Ganga aarti at Varanasi and Haridwar, where teams of priests wave tiered flame lamps in synchronised arcs while the sung litany carries over the water.
A Poet's Reimagining: Guru Nanak's Aarti
One of the most striking moments in the history of the genre is Guru Nanak's hymn known as Aarti, preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib. Visiting the temple at Puri, tradition says, Nanak watched the lamp ceremony and responded with a hymn that relocates the whole rite to the cosmos: the sky becomes the platter, the sun and moon become the lamps, the stars are the pearls strewn on the tray, and the sandalwood scent is the wind from the hills. Creation itself, the hymn argues, is already performing the aarti; no human lamp is needed.
For writers, this is a masterclass in transformation: take a familiar form, keep its structure and gestures, and swap its scale. The hymn works because it honours the ritual's grammar while overturning its premise. Rabindranath Tagore admired the composition, and it is still sung. When you want to subvert a form, Nanak's method is the one to study: subversion from deep inside the form's own logic, not mockery from outside.
Why the Litany Still Works
Praise poems risk monotony, and the aarti's answers to that risk are worth stealing. Variation inside repetition is the core trick: the refrain never changes, but each stanza shifts the camera, from the deity's appearance to a rescue story to the singer's own plea. The form also builds in escalation, typically ending with the stanza that promises benefit to the one who sings, a closing turn toward the audience that modern poets would recognise as breaking the fourth wall.
The litany also survives because it is communal property. An aarti has an author, but performance sands away ownership; verses get added, localised, swapped. That is worth remembering when you polish a poem toward perfection: forms built for many mouths stay a little loose on purpose, leaving room for the crowd.
Writing Your Own Praise Litany
Choose a subject that deserves extravagant praise but never receives it: a grandmother, a bus route, a public library. Write a one line refrain of direct address. Then draft five stanzas, each with a single job, on the aarti pattern: appearance, great deeds, names and titles, a hard time survived, and a final blessing on whoever reads the poem aloud.
Keep the metre steady enough to clap. Read it aloud and mark every line where your breath or the beat stumbles, then cut or recast those lines. A litany succeeds or fails entirely in the mouth. The strange thing you will discover is that mock heroic praise, done with a straight face and real detail, tips over into genuine tenderness, which is why the exercise produces more moving poems than it has any right to.
What poets can take from this
- In exams, define aarti as both the lamp ritual and its accompanying praise song, and mention the refrain plus stanza structure.
- Credit 'Om Jai Jagdish Hare' to Shardha Ram Phillauri, a fact frequently asked and frequently missed.
- Give every stanza of a litany one distinct job to avoid the list feeling static.
- End a praise litany with a turn toward the listener or singer, the traditional closing move of the form.
- Test litanies by clapping the beat as you read; wherever the clap and the syllables fight, revise.
- Study Guru Nanak's cosmic Aarti as the model for reinventing a form from inside its own logic.
Try it yourself
Write an aarti for something unglamorous that keeps your household running: the water pump, the pressure cooker, the ceiling fan. Use a fixed refrain of direct address, five stanzas each praising one aspect (appearance, deeds, names, endurance, blessing), and a steady clappable beat throughout.
Questions
What is the difference between an aarti and a bhajan?
An aarti is tied to the lamp ritual and follows a strict litany structure with a fixed refrain, sung at a set moment of worship. A bhajan is any devotional song, free in form and occasion. Every aarti could loosely be called devotional song, but not every bhajan can serve as an aarti.
Who wrote Om Jai Jagdish Hare?
It was composed in the 1870s by Shardha Ram Phillauri, a writer from Punjab also known for early Hindi prose fiction. Its address to a universal Lord of the World rather than one sect's deity helped it become the default closing hymn of pujas across India.
Does the word aarti mean the song or the ceremony?
Both, and context decides. Originally it named the ritual of waving the lit lamp, from the Sanskrit aratrika. The songs sung during that rite took on the ritual's name, so aarti now also labels a recognisable poetic genre: the stanzaic praise litany with a refrain.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.