Person · Awadhi poet-saint · India
Tulsīdās
Also known as Tulsidas
The 16-century Awadhi bhakti poet Tulsidas (1532-1623), author of the Ramcharitmanas (The Lake of Rama's Deeds, 1574) — the Awadhi (Hindi) retelling of the Ramayana that became the most-recited religious text in North India. Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitmanas at Ayodhya and Varanasi over a two-year period, drawing on Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana, Adhyatma Ramayana, and his own devotional vision. The text's seven kandas (books) are structured around the dialogues of Shiva and Parvati, Yajnavalkya and Bharadvaj, and Kakbhushundi (the crow). Tulsidas's twelve works also include the Vinaya Patrika, Kavitavali, Dohavali, and Hanuman Chalisa (the 40-verse hymn to Hanuman that is India's most-recited daily prayer). Tulsidas's samadhi at Varanasi (Tulsi Ghat) draws over 1 million pilgrims annually. The Ramcharitmanas remains central to north Indian Hinduism and the Ramnami tradition.
- Date
- 1532–1623
- Periods
- Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions, Early Modern Age
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Condition
- living text and performance
- River basin
- Ganga
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — established literary association; biography partly traditional
- Location
- 25.320, 82.970
About the place
Placed at Varanasi, where he lived and where the Ramcharitmanas was largely written, and where Tulsi Ghat and the Sankat Mochan temple are attributed to him.
Connections (4)
- Life routeChitrakūt
Chitrakoot and Tulsidas are connected through the devotional transformation of the Ramayana landscape. Tulsidas spent time in Chitrakoot and composed or recited works associated with Rama there. Local tradition also associates the Kamadgiri region with his encounters with Rama. His presence helped strengthen Chitrakoot’s importance within North Indian Rama bhakti and pilgrimage.
- Life routeKāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras
Tulsīdās wrote the Rāmcharitmānas at Banāras, beginning in 1574, and was attacked by pandits for putting the Rāmāyana into Awadhi. The Sankat Mochan temple he is said to have founded is still there, and so is the Rāmnagar Rāmlīlā, performed from his text for thirty-one nights every year. The Rāmnagar Rāmlīlā is staged across a whole neighbourhood rather than on a stage, with the audience walking between locations, and the Maharaja of Banāras still attends on an elephant.
- Devotional corpus onAyodhyā
The Rāmcharitmānas is why Ayodhyā is imagined as it is by most of north India — not through the Sanskrit Vālmīki but through a sixteenth-century Awadhi poem meant to be sung. A vernacular retelling has shaped a city's meaning more than the original ever did. The poem was composed in Awadhi, the speech of the Ayodhyā region itself, which is part of why its version of the city displaced the Sanskrit one so completely.
- Court associationKabīr
Kabīr and Tulsīdās are the two poles of Banāras devotion a century apart: one a Muslim-raised weaver who said god has no form and no name and that pilgrimage is a swindle, the other a Brahmin who wrote the Rāma story that made the city's pilgrimage make sense to millions.
On these journeys
Sources
Ramcharitmanas; Tulsidas studies and Ramlila scholarship.
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