Om Jai Shri Ramade Swami ॐ जय श्री रामादे स्वामी

Overview

Om Jai Shri Ramade Swami is a short Hindi aarti — a five-stanza song of praise — offered to Baba Ramdev Pir, the medieval Rajasthani folk saint whose principal shrine stands at Ramdevra (Runicha), near Pokhran in Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer district. He is not the contemporary yoga teacher who also carries the name and title Baba Ramdev; the two are unrelated figures separated by centuries, sharing only a name and honorific. The aarti opens by naming Ramdev Pir’s parents, Ajmal and Menade, describes his handsome form mounted on horseback with a lance and pearls, and identifies him as an incarnation of Vishnu in the Kali Yuga. Its closing stanzas briefly recall a few of his parcha (miracles) — turning away the sorrow of a devotee called Dalji, restoring one named Bhāṇ to life, carrying a merchant’s boat across and turning a lake’s water salt — several of which are recounted at much greater length in the separate, forty-verse Baba Ramdev Chalisa already on this site. The aarti and the chalisa are distinct compositions within the same devotional tradition, not two versions of the same text.

Origin and source

No author is named within the aarti itself, and — as with the Baba Ramdev Chalisa — this page treats it as an anonymous composition from the oral and print tradition surrounding Ramdev Pir’s worship. Hindi devotional-lyrics collections carry the aarti with only minor wording differences between printings (for instance, some print टारा where others print तारा in the line about the devotee Dalji’s sorrow), consistent with a text that has circulated mainly by recitation and reprinting rather than from one fixed edition. The aarti’s brief references to a boat rescue and to a lake turned salt echo parcha recounted in full in the chalisa, suggesting the two compositions draw on the same body of oral narrative about Ramdev Pir even though their wording is unrelated line for line. Ramdev Pir’s own dating is treated variously across sources, and this page does not attempt to adjudicate between them.

The English meanings printed with the verses were made for this page from the Devanagari above; none of the six published versions consulted carries a gloss of its own. Compared verse by verse, one of the six prints all five stanzas exactly as this page prints them; three differ only in spelling and in dropping पल from “पल भर में”, two of those writing the refrain ओउम जय for ॐ जय. The remaining two differ in wording as well: one prints मीनलदे for the mother’s name मेनादे and तारा for टारा, and the other rewrites a line in each of Stanzas 3 and 4 and prints ताड़ी and किया in Stanza 5. One line needed a grammatical decision rather than a source. In Stanza 4 — सरजीवन भाण को तुमने कर डारा — the object marked by को is भाण, so सरजीवन is what is done to him, “restored to life,” and not his name, as an earlier version of this page stated. The Baba Ramdev Chalisa uses the word the same way in its own account of the twentieth parcha, where the merchant is made सरजीवण. Who Bhāṇ was is not identified in any of the sources consulted, and the English leaves the name as it stands. The chalisa does name a Dal ji, who receives a son in its nineteenth parcha; whether the aarti’s Dalji is the same devotee is not stated in either text.

How it is recited

Like the Baba Ramdev Chalisa, this aarti is sung by devotees at Ramdevra and at other shrines to Ramdev Pir across Rajasthan, as well as at home, with its opening refrain repeated by everyone present after each stanza. It is heard most widely during the Ramdevra Mela, the major annual fair held at his samadhi shrine in the Hindu month of Bhadrapada, when pilgrims travel to Ramdevra from across Rajasthan and neighboring states, alongside the region’s other aartis and chalisas to Ramdev Pir.