Who composed Badrinath aarti? Mystery deepens
The age-old belief that aarti or invocation of the famed Badrinath temple was written by a Muslim devotee Badruddin has got a counter from a government official, who claimed to have found the original manuscript of the invocation reportedly written by a local, Dhan Singh Bartwal. He said Badruddin could be mere singer of the invocation and not the original author.
The Badri Kedar Temple Committee (BKTC), which manages the shrine, does not have any manuscript of the invocation sung in the temple. A copy of the aarti is part of a book reportedly written by Badruddin in 1867 and is kept at a museum being run by writer Jugal Kishore Petshali near Almora.
Director of state run Uttarakhand Space Application Centre, MPS Bisht, claimed to have discovered the original manuscript after he was apprised of its presence in Rudraprayag by his student doing doctorate under his guidance. “I asked him to provide me with all the details and he promptly sent me the copy of the manuscript after which I realized that there may be truth in his contention. I would now be taking the manuscript of the aarti to the secretary tourism, officials of the culture department and the state archives so that they can scrutinize it and bring the real facts to light,”he said. He also said locals in Rudraparayag believe that Badruddin could have been a “mere singer” of Bartwal’s version.
According to Bartwal’s family, the manuscript was written by Dhan Singh Bartwal, a village revenue collector, in 1880. “We had always heard from our ancestors that he (Dhan Singh) had written the aarti of Badrinath temple that is sung to this day. The manuscript was kept in our family home for centuries and it mentions the year when it was written,” said 87-year-old Avtar Singh Bartwal, who is the fifth generation after Dhan
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