śrī rāmāyaṇa jī kī āratī

An arati addressed to a book. What the lamps are turned for here is the Ramayana itself, hailed in the first line as the fair and lovely fame of Sita's husband — the story rather than the person, treated as the object of worship. The verses that follow name its reciters instead of its subject: Brahma and the sages sing it, Narada sings it, and Valmiki, master of the knowledge, is named as the one through whom it came. Fourteen short lines in Hindi. A handful of texts in this corpus do the same thing for other scriptures, and they raise a question the corpus has not settled, which is where a hymn belongs when its deity is a text.