jaya bhāratamātā nīrāñjanā āratī

A lamp-song to Bharat Mata composed in Sanskrit rather than in a modern language, and built almost entirely from compounds: wet with the nectar of affection, bearing the wealth of every good quality, her feet worshipped by seers and sages, teacher of peace to the world, the sun of knowledge that takes away grief. The verse worth pausing on is the fifth, which is about people rather than about the country — those who laid their bodies at your feet and left their own clean houses behind, swollen with the nectar of revolution; how many of them were not carried to heaven. The verse after it names both sides of that inheritance in successive lines, saluted by revolutionaries and welcomed by those devoted to peace. It is a twentieth-century composition in an old form, and its politics are on the surface.