Tulsidas Began the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi on Ram Navami 1574, and Gita Press Has Printed Over 108 Million Copies of His Works

Tulsidas wrote the starting date of the Ramcharitmanas into the poem. In the prologue to the first book he says he began it in the Samvat year 1631, on a Tuesday, the ninth of the month of Chait, at Ayodhya, on the day the scriptures give as Rama’s birthday. The Encyclopedia of Religion and the columnist Pavan K. Varma both give the year as 1574. The University of California Press, publisher of Philip Lutgendorf’s study of the poem, calls it the most popular and influential text in Hindi-speaking North India. In March 2019 Gita Press of Gorakhpur counted 108.7 million copies of the Ramcharitmanas and Tulsidas’s other works among the books it had produced.

A poem that names its own lake

The title means the pure lake of Rama’s deeds, which is how F. S. Growse, the British civil servant who translated it into English in the 1870s, renders the name. Inside the poem the story reaches the reader through a chain of tellers. Shiva recites it to Parvati as the crow Bhusundi once told it to Garuda, the king of birds. Tulsidas then adds his own place in the chain: he heard it as a very small child from his teacher at Sukarkhet, which Growse identifies as the town now called Soron, and the teacher repeated it until he understood.

There are seven books, called kands. In his introduction Growse noted that Tulsidas’s first book, which carries the story from Rama’s birth to his marriage with Sita, is much the longest of the seven. In Valmiki’s Sanskrit epic, he wrote, the first book is the shortest but one. The childhood and the marriage of Rama, the subject of Rama and the price of being the ideal man, therefore take up far more of the poem in Awadhi than in Sanskrit.

Written in the speech people used

Awadhi, the language of the Ramcharitmanas, is a literary dialect of Hindi. Harvard’s Murty Classical Library of India, in its edition of Lutgendorf’s translation, describes the poem as the most beloved retelling of the Ramayana across northern India, and UNESCO’s entry on Ramlila says he wrote it so that ordinary people could reach the Sanskrit epic.

He says as much himself. In the prologue he bows to earlier poets who had written in Prakrit, the old spoken languages, and in what Growse translates as “the vulgar tongue,” a phrase that in Growse’s English means the common tongue. Then he says he is setting the story down in it so that it can be understood more easily. He called himself an uncultivated poet, the Encyclopedia of Religion records, and by the scholarly standards of his day his language belonged to the village. It adds that the Ramcharitmanas nonetheless became the most revered of all Hindi texts among scholars and ordinary readers alike.

Growse, writing in the late 1870s, put the result this way: the book was “in every one’s hands, from the court to the cottage.” The same page records that professional Sanskrit pandits of his day still looked down on the choice of a vernacular. He also notes that the government made the poem the principal text in its examinations for high proficiency and a degree of honour, and that he had urged the Education Department to use extracts in primary schools, which was done.

Varma, in a 2020 column for Scroll, retells a Varanasi tradition about the poet’s critics. A copy of the poem was kept under a pile of Sanskrit texts in the locked sanctum of the Kashi Vishwanath temple, and in the morning it lay on top, inscribed with the words satyam, shivam, sundaram (truth, auspiciousness, beauty) and Shiva’s signature. Varma calls it a popular tradition, not a record.

Print runs and a verdict from Gandhi

No manuscript in the poet’s own hand is certain to survive. Growse was told that a complete autograph copy had been kept at Rajapur until about 1800, when a devotee stole it and threw it into a river. It was recovered with a net, and only the Ayodhya book stayed legible. According to Growse’s informant, that fragment still sat in the temple, wrapped in some fifty covers offered by pilgrims.

The printed record is much larger. By March 2019, according to Hinduism Today, Gita Press in Gorakhpur (founded on 29 April 1923) had produced 108.7 million copies of the Ramcharitmanas plus other works by Tulsidas. Alongside that figure the magazine lists 141.3 million copies of the Bhagavad Gita and five million of the Hanuman Chalisa. It does not split the Ramcharitmanas from the rest of the Tulsidas total, so 108.7 million covers all of his works the press has produced.

Gandhi wrote about the poem more than once. Recalling a reading of the Ramayana he heard at about the age of thirteen, in which the reader sang the dohas and chaupais (couplets and quatrains), he wrote that he now regarded Tulsidas’s Ramayana as the greatest book in all devotional literature. In Harijan on 17 August 1934 he wrote that in the spiritual literature of the world the Ramayana of Tulsidas takes a foremost place, with charms he missed in the Mahabharata and in Valmiki’s Ramayana.

The poem on its feet

Lutgendorf’s book The Life of a Text (1991) draws on fieldwork in Banaras, and its publisher says the poem has always reached its largely illiterate audiences mainly through oral performance. That covers ceremonial recitation, folk singing, spoken exposition and theatre.

The theatre is Ramlila. UNESCO inscribed Ramlila on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, and its entry says most Ramlilas recount episodes from the Ramcharitmanas. Most run ten to twelve days around the autumn festival of Dussehra, in hundreds of towns and villages, with local people making masks, costumes and effigies and the audience invited to sing along.

Ramnagar’s runs a whole month. Richard Schechner, writing in the New York Times in 2000, described 31 daily episodes under the patronage of the Maharajas of Benares, with crowds from a few thousand to about 100,000, and twelve men chanting the full Ramcharitmanas each night in a circle near the Maharaja. The Sanskrit text, he noted, is never spoken. Hinduism Today puts the run at 31 days from Anant Chaturdashi to a full moon night, with permanent structures in the town named after places in the epic. Schechner dates the tradition to the early 1800s, and Hinduism Today calls it nearly 200 years old.

Carried overseas, and listed by UNESCO

Peter Meel of Leiden University, writing in a 2023 volume published by Manohar, notes that the Ramcharitmanas was one of the few books indentured labourers took with them from India to the Caribbean. In Suriname, he adds, it is known as the Hindi Ramayan or the Ramayana of Tulsidas, and it was sung and staged in the annual Ramlila.

The Memory of the World Committee for Asia and the Pacific met in Ulaanbaatar on 7 and 8 May 2024 and accepted three Indian nominations in one cycle, the Ramcharitmanas, the Panchatantra and the Sahrdayaloka-Locana. The UN in India notice on the decision lists the Ramcharitmanas entry as the illustrated manuscripts of Tulsidas’s text. The Press Information Bureau, on 13 May 2024, credited the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts with presenting the nominations in Mongolia.

What the record gives of his life

Tulsidas died in 1623, a date generally agreed, and the Encyclopedia of Religion places him in Banaras, today’s Varanasi, until his death. Growse gave the Samvat year 1680 as 1624 and the start of the poem as 1575, one year later than the encyclopedia’s 1623 and 1574.

His birth year is less settled. The Encyclopedia of Religion says the traditional date is 1503, which would have made him 120, and that modern scholars consider 1532 more probable. The Murty Classical Library gives 1543, and Meel writes c. 1511. The same encyclopedia says abundant hagiography exists about him, accounts that establish his sanctity and do not record the events of his life. Growse made a similar judgement of the commentary on the Bhakt-Mal, written less than a century after Tulsidas died, which he found gave little trustworthy information.

Those traditional accounts, as Growse summarises them, say a ghost led him to Hanuman and that through Hanuman he saw Rama and Lakshmana. Soron, Ayodhya, Chitrakut, Allahabad and Vrindavan are among the places Growse lists him as visiting, and most of his life, Growse says, was spent at Benares. At least ten other works can be attributed to Tulsidas with certainty, the Encyclopedia of Religion says, including the Kavitavali, the Vinay-patrika, the Dohavali and the Gitavali.

The forty-verse Hanuman Chalisa is also ascribed to him. The ascription is traditional and rests on the closing couplet, where a speaker named Tulsidas asks Hanuman to live in his heart. The list of his works in Growse’s introduction does not name it.

The English translations

Growse’s English translation, published in parts from the late 1870s, was by his own account the first of the whole poem, since only a single book had been translated before. Lutgendorf’s seven-volume translation for the Murty Classical Library of India began with two volumes covering the first book, which appeared in December 2015, according to a post by Nityanand Misra on the Indology mailing list.