Soratha
Quick answer: Soratha is a Hindi couplet form that reverses the doha, placing 11 beats before 13 with rhyme at the pause. Learn how it works and when poets choose it.
A soratha is a couplet form in Hindi and related languages that mirrors the doha in reverse: each line carries twenty-four matras, metrical beats, but divided eleven then thirteen, and the rhyme falls at the pause in the middle of the lines rather than at their ends. Take a doha, swap the halves of each line, and you have the soratha's skeleton. Small change, different creature.
That relocation of the rhyme transforms the couplet's temperament. Where the doha saves its weight for the line's end and closes like a verdict, the soratha chimes early and then opens outward, ending on the unrhymed longer half. Poets choose it when they want the couplet to feel like an address or an invocation rather than a settled conclusion.
How It Works
Each line of a soratha totals twenty-four matras, short syllables counting one and long syllables two, with the first half holding eleven beats and the second thirteen. The rhyme links the eleven-beat halves, so the echo arrives mid-line, and the lines close without rhyme. The form is still self-contained: one complete thought per couplet remains the rule.
An English shadow of the shape, mine: 'Come sit beside the door, the night has questions for us both; / the lamp will keep the score, and neither one of us need answer.' Hear the early chime of door and score, and the deliberately open endings.
Where You Will See It
The soratha thrives wherever the doha does, and often in the same works. Tulsidas opens sections of the Ramcharitmanas with sorathas of invocation, and uses them among his dohas as a change of cadence; Kabir and other sant poets left sorathas among their couplets as well. Traditional poetics treats doha and soratha as a matched pair, and old manuals teach them together, one the mirror of the other, so reciters learn to hear which is which by where the rhyme lands.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Practise the pair as a single exercise: write a couplet with end-rhyme and a settled close, then rewrite it with internal rhyme early in each line and an unrhymed ending. Notice how the second version leans forward, asking to be continued or answered. Use soratha-style couplets for openings, prayers, and questions, and doha-style ones for verdicts. Knowing why a rhyme's position changes a poem's posture is exactly the kind of structural awareness that separates a competent stanza from a memorable one.
What poets can take from this
- Place the rhyme at the mid-line pause and let line endings stay open.
- Keep each couplet one complete thought, as with the doha.
- Use the soratha for invocation, address, and questions rather than final judgements.
- Write doha and soratha versions of the same idea to learn what rhyme position does.
- Recite aloud with a clear pause after the shorter half so the internal rhyme registers.
Try it yourself
Write three couplets addressed to the first light of morning, rhyming the halves of each line at the mid-line pause and leaving every line ending unrhymed and open.
Questions
What is the difference between soratha and doha?
They are mirror twins. The doha divides its twenty-four-beat lines thirteen then eleven and rhymes at line end, while the soratha divides them eleven then thirteen and rhymes at the mid-line pause.
Where is the soratha used?
Throughout Hindi devotional and didactic literature, notably in the Ramcharitmanas, where Tulsidas uses sorathas for invocations and as rhythmic variation among dohas and chaupais.
Can I write a soratha in English?
You can honour its logic: two balanced lines, an internal rhyme placed early in each, and endings left unrhymed. Exact matra counting does not carry over, but the posture of the form does.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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