सनातन पुस्तकालय Sanatan Cultural Library

Tradition remembers Tulsidas's beginnings as harsh: born under an inauspicious star (by one account with the word "Rama" as his first sound, hence the childhood name Rambola), abandoned in infancy, raised by a wandering sadhu of the Ramanandi order who fed him on the story of Rama. The hinge of his life is a story every Manas reciter knows: passionately attached to his young wife Ratnavali, he once followed her to her father's house through a stormy night; she met him with a verse — were your love for Rama half your love for this body of flesh and bone, you would be free. The words broke and remade him. He renounced, settled between Varanasi and Ayodhya, and turned the longing wholly to Rama. Tradition adds the marvellous: guided by a spirit to Hanuman, present in disguise wherever the Manas is sung, and through Hanuman granted darshan of Rama himself at Chitrakoot — 'chitrakūṭa ke ghāṭ para, bhaī santana kī bhīra' — the couplet pilgrims still quote on that ghat.

In 1574 at Ayodhya, Tulsidas began the work that made him immortal: the Ramcharitmanas, "the lake of the deeds of Rama" — the whole Ramayana retold not in Sanskrit but in Awadhi, the language of the villages of the Gangetic plain. The pandits of Kashi were scandalised; tradition says the dispute was settled when the Manas was placed overnight beneath the scriptures in the Vishwanath temple and was found at dawn on top. The people needed no miracle to decide: the Manas became — and remains — the most read, recited, sung and staged book of North India, its seven kandas structured as a conversation between tellers, its chaupais worn smooth by four centuries of daily paath. Its theology is bhakti at full depth — Rama as the supreme Brahman walking in ayodhya's lanes — and its ethics gave the culture its byword for the ideal order, Ram Rajya. Every autumn Ramlila, from village square to Ramnagar's month-long spectacle, is the Manas walking.

Tulsidas's shorter masterpiece is, by reach, the most recited Hindi poem in existence: the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses of praise begging strength, protection and nearness to Rama. Tradition places its composition in Mughal custody — sung, the story goes, until Hanuman's monkeys had the last word and the poet the door. Whatever the occasion, the poem distils his lifelong intimacy with Rama's perfect servant: for Tulsidas, Hanuman is the door through which ordinary strugglers reach a Lord who might otherwise feel too high. His other works complete the portrait — the Vinaya Patrika, a petition of songs filed in Rama's own court, humble and psychologically piercing; Kavitavali and Dohavali flashing with observation of his turbulent century; Gitavali cradling Rama's childhood. He died at Assi Ghat, Varanasi, in 1623. It is fair arithmetic that more people speak Tulsidas's lines aloud every single day — in the Chalisa alone — than read most of the world's classics in a year.