🙏Chalisa

About Chalisa

A chalisa is a devotional poem of forty verses in a spoken North Indian language — Awadhi, Braj or Hindi rather than Sanskrit — addressed to a single deity and built on the same metre as Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas. The name simply counts: chālīs is forty. The form has an archetype rather than a founder's manifesto. Tulsidas's Hanuman Chalisa, composed in the sixteenth century, became so widely known that it effectively created the genre behind it, and the great majority of the other chalisas now in circulation — Shiv, Durga, Ganesh, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Shani, and dozens more — are considerably later, often nineteenth or twentieth century, and frequently anonymous. Recognising this matters for reading them. It also explains a feature that surprises people: nearly every chalisa contains a passage near its end stating what reciting it will do for you. That passage, the phalashruti, is a genre convention inherited from the archetype, not forty independent claims arrived at separately.