The Sacred Lake of the Deeds of Ram

Tulsidas's 'Ramcharitmanas'

We continue our discussion on the Bhakti Ramayanas with a brief look at Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas.

Tulsidas, amongst the most important of the saint-poets of the medieval Bhakti movement in northern India, is also Hindi’s most renowned poet. In 1574, he commenced the composition of his Ramcharitmanas. Tulsi’s epic poem, which tells the of the story of Ram in Awadhi, is unanimously regarded as the greatest achievement of Hindi literature and is a significant addition to the Ramayana corpus. The work consists of 12,800 lines, divided into 1073 stanzas, mainly in the chaupaai and doha metres, and set in seven ‘kands’ or cantos.

From Tulsi’s own writings we infer that his poem, written in the spoken tongue rather than in the sacred Sanskrit, was criticized and ridiculed by the religious establishment of his times. Despite this initial disapproval by the Brahmins (ironically complicated by the fact that the Ramcharitmanas itself is so pro-Brahmin), it became hugely popular amongst other groups, especially the merchant caste and lower orders of society, and soon acquired the status and religious authority usually enjoyed only by Sanskrit texts. Within a very short time, carried by wandering sadhus, recited and performed by travelling bards and musicians across towns and villages, it had spread across northern India, from Tulsi’s native Banaras in the east to the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan in the west. Such was the rapid spread and influence of Tulsi’s poem that his contemporary, the poet Nabhadas, declares Tulsi to be Valmiki himself, born again to bring his epic once more to the world.

The influence of Valmiki’s epic upon Tulsi cannot be denied: in the beginning verses of the Ramcharitmanas, Tulsi salutes Valmiki as the author of the Ramayana, thus acknowledging him as one of the important sources for his own poem. But Tulsi’s epic differs from Valmiki’s in one very important particular—Valmiki’s Ramayana was a secular text, whilst Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas is, without question, a devotional text. Tulsi’s Ram is unequivocally divine. He is also Tulsi’s chosen god, in whose worship the poet is totally, completely, and blissfully immersed—as he tells us in the invocatory verses of the first book, he composed this story of Ram for ‘his own delight and satisfaction’.

Today, known to its audience as Tulsi’s Ramayan, or simply the Manas, Tulsi’s great poem is sung, recited, read, and retold in almost every Hindu household in northern India as the accepted and dominant version of the story of Ram. It is also the basis of the Ram Lila—a tradition believed to have been started in Banaras almost 500 years ago by Tulsidas himself and still enthusiastically observed.

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EXCERPT

The following excerpt is from ‘Childhood’, the first canto of the Ramcharitmanas. It describes the princess Sita’s first encounter with Ram—they run into each other, by accident, in the king’s flower garden, where Ram and his younger brother Lakshman have gone to admire the garden and collect flowers for their morning worship, and where Sita has come, accompanied by her companions, to offer worship at the temple of the goddess Girija. Sita, hearing that the two princes are in the garden, and having heard of their great fame and beauty, goes with her friends to steal a look at the princes. Seeing Ram, Sita is overcome by love and shuts her eyes, and one of her companions, bolder than the rest, then describes the two brothers to her.

Sita, bewildered, was looking all around herc
“Where have the young princes gone?” she worried.
Wherever the fawn-eyed Sita turned her glance,
Quantities of shining white lotuses rained down.
Her companions then pointed out, hidden behind some vines
The handsome youths, one dark, the other fair.
Seeing his beauty, her eyes were filled with longing,
And she rejoiced as though she had found her own treasure.
With unwavering gaze she looked upon Raghupati’s radiance,
Her very eyelids forgot to blink.
In the intensity of her love, she lost all sense and awareness of her body
Like a chakor bird gazing at the autumn moon.
Through the pathway of her eyes she took Ram into her heart
Then wisely shut the doors of her eyelids.
When her companions realised that Sita was overcome by love,
They were abashed and could not say a word.

From the arbour of creepers and vines,
Emerged at that very moment, the two brothers,
Like two radiant moons
Through a curtain of clouds.                                                                                      

“The two handsome brothers are the very pinnacles of beauty,
Their bodies are as bright and splendid as the blue lotus and the golden.
Elegant peacock feathers, entwined with bunches of flowerbuds here and there
Adorn their heads.
Upon their foreheads gleam their tilaks and drops of perspiration,
Their ears are adorned with beautiful ornaments,
With curving eyebrows, and curly hair,
And eyes as bright as new lotus buds,
And handsome chin and nose and cheeks
And charming smiles that captivate the heart—
The radiance of their faces is such that I cannot describe it:
Beholding them puts innumerable gods of love to shame.
Jewelled necklaces upon their breasts, conch-like necks
And arms strong and powerful, like the trunk of Love’s young elephant.
And the one with the cup of leaves full of flowers in his left hand—
The dark prince, my dear—is utterly enchanting.

Slim-waisted as a lion, clad in yellow garments,
He is the abode of beauty and grace.”
Beholding the jewel of the solar dynasty,
Sita’s companions forgot themselves completely.

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TULSIDAS

We know very little about Tulsidas himself, except what can be pieced together from autobiographical references in his own writings and some contemporary and later, not entirely reliable, accounts of his life. His date and place of birth are uncertain—though it is now generally accepted that he was born in 1532, possibly in the town of Sukarkhet in the present-day state of Uttar Pradesh. From some of his later works, we know that Tulsidas was abandoned in childhood by his parents, and that he was rescued and looked after by sadhus who introduced him to the worship of Ram. Some scholars believe that Tulsidas then took up the life of a sadhu. It is probable, though, that Tulsidas did not become a sadhu at once, but went to Banaras and acquired the traditional Sanskrit education of a Brahmin. He then returned to the village of his birth, where he married. He began to live as a householder, but an altercation with his wife caused him to renounce home and family and take up the wandering life of a sadhu. He lived for a while in Ayodhya, where he composed the earlier parts of his Ramcharitmanas. Tulsi later settled in Banaras where he wrote most of his other major works; there, he also instituted the Ram Lila. He died in Banaras, probably in 1632.

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COPYRIGHT and PERMISSIONS

Rohini Chowdhury’s complete translation of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas (in 3 volumes) was published by Penguin Random House India in 2019; in addition to the excerpt from Balkand from her translation, the above article is based on extracts from her Introduction to the translation. All passages have been used with the publisher’s permission. This article may not be copied or reproduced in any manner.

Copyright © Rohini Chowdhury 2019

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Rohini Chowdhury’s translation is available on Amazon worldwide; it may also be purchased from major booksellers in India.

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FURTHER SOURCES

For a detailed discussion on the spread and circulation of the Ramcharitmanas and on available biographies of Tulsidas, see Lutgendorf, Philip, ‘The Quest for the Legendary Tulsidas,’ According to Tradition: Hagiographical writing in India, edited by Winand M. Callewaert and Rupert Snell.