The Ramcharitmanas 2
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TULSIDAS
THE RAMCHARITMANAS 2
Translated by Rohini Chowdhury
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
Book II: Ayodhyakand (Ayodhya)
Book III: Aranyakand (The Forest)
Footnotes
Book II: Ayodhyakand (Ayodhya)
Book III: Aranyakand (The Forest)
Notes
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE RAMCHARITMANAS 2
TULSIDAS (c.1532–1632), the most important of the saint-poets of the medieval bhakti movement in northern India, is also Hindi’s greatest poet. Though very little is known about Tulsi’s personal life, he left behind a considerable body of work, including his epic, the Ramcharitmanas, a retelling of the story of Ram in Avadhi. Tulsi was an ardent devotee of Ram, and his works have come to occupy almost a canonical status in the Ram tradition in northern India. His other important works include the Gitavali, the Vinay Patrika and the Kavitavali. In addition, the Hanuman Chalisa, a short devotional poem of forty verses in praise of Hanuman, is popularly ascribed to Tulsidas, and is considered by many to be his most important work after the Manas. Tulsidas’s works continue to remain popular even today, more than four hundred years after their composition.
ROHINI CHOWDHURY is an established literary translator. Her primary languages are pre-modern (Braj Bhasha and Avadhi) and modern (Khari Boli) Hindi, and English. Her translations include the seventeenth-century Braj Bhasha text Ardhakathanak, widely regarded as the first autobiography in an Indian language, into modern Hindi and into English. She also writes for children, and has more than twenty books and several short stories to her credit. Her published writing, in English and Hindi, covers a wide spectrum of literary genres including novels, short fiction and non-fiction. Her literary interests include mythology, folklore, mathematics and history. She runs a story website at www.longlongtimeago.com.
Introduction
Amongst the most important of the saint-poets of the medieval bhakti movement in northern India, Tulsidas is also Hindi’s most renowned poet. In 1574, he commenced the composition of his Ramcharitmanas, a retelling of the story of Ram, the legendary prince of Avadh. Tulsi’s epic poem is unanimously regarded as the greatest achievement of Hindi literature, and is a significant addition to the Ramayana corpus. Composed in the vernacular Avadhi—a literary dialect of eastern Hindi—and therefore accessible to everyone without the need for learned intervention by the Brahmin, it became, and remains, the dominant and accepted version of Ram’s story in the Hindi-speaking north.
My own engagement with Tulsidas began one crisp autumn night fifty years ago in a small town by the banks of the Ganga, when I saw my first performance of the Ram Lila. The sky was sprinkled with stars but I had eyes only for the drama unfolding upon the crude wooden stage before me, where the story had reached a critical point: Hanuman’s tail was to be set on fire. The sets were crude, the costumes garish, the acting unsophisticated—but the story transcended all such concerns, such was its magic and power. I did not know it then, but that was also my first intimate encounter with the Ramcharitmanas, upon which the Ram Lila is based. Growing up, Tulsi’s poem was always around me—chanted in the homes of friends or neighbours, sung on the radio, or the theme of plays and dance dramas. So when the opportunity came to translate it into English for Penguin India, I accepted it with alacrity—and the last five years that I have spent walking behind Tulsi, one of the greatest literary minds of all time, have been a pleasure and a privilege. My translation does not do justice to Tulsi’s extraordinary poetic genius. His use of wordplay, his rhymes and alliteration, and the sheer musicality of his poem I have found impossible to capture in English. I have therefore contented myself with being as clear and accurate as possible in my translation, and to convey, to the best of my ability, the scale and grandeur of his great poem.
The Ramayana tradition
For at least the last two and a half thousand years, poets, writers, folk performers, and religious and social reformers have drawn upon the story of Ram as a source of inspiration. It has been told again and again in countless forms and dozens of languages, making it one of the most popular and enduring stories in the world. More than any other hero, Ram has been upheld as dharma personified, the epitome of righteousness, and his actions as the guide for right conduct. In recent times, the story has provided inspiration for films, novels, and in the late 1980s, a weekly television series watched by more than eighty million viewers.
The oldest and most influential surviving literary telling of the story of Ram is the Sanskrit epic called the Ramayana. Composed sometime during the first millennium BCE, and consisting of some 50,000 lines in verse set in seven kands or books, it is attributed to the poet Valmiki, and is widely regarded as the ‘original’.1 The influence of Valmiki’s Ramayana has been so profound that the title of his epic has come to denote the entire tradition, from oral and folk performances to literary texts and translations. Within this rich and varied tradition also lie the Ramayana songs from Telangana, the folk performances of the Ram Lila in northern India, the eleventh-century Tamil Iramavataram (‘The Incarnation of Ram’) by Kamban, and Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas.
The rise of bhakti
Scholars of the Ramayana tradition hold the view that Ram was originally a human hero and was only later raised to the status of avatar of Vishnu. In the five central books of Valmiki’s epic, Ram is portrayed as an earthly prince: though endowed with godlike courage, fortitude and compassion, his exploits are those of a human being. It is only in the first and last books of the poem—which are considered to be later additions to Valmiki’s epic—that Ram is explicitly declared to be an incarnation of Vishnu on earth.
Soon after the beginning of the Common Era, Ram began to be increasingly regarded as an avatar of Vishnu. At about the same time, a new attitude towards the divine began to replace austere monistic meditation, sacrificial rites and polytheistic practices. This was bhakti, or intense emotional attachment and love towards a chosen, personal god and his avatars—particularly Vishnu and his earthly incarnations, Ram and Krishna—and joyous and public worship of that god. Bhakti assumed a dualistic relationship between the devotee and his god, as opposed to the monistic ideal of the Advaita or non-dualistic school of philosophy. Its proponents considered the way of bhakti (bhakti-marg) superior to other means of achieving salvation such as knowledge or good works or ascetic disciplining of the body; it was also open to everyone, regardless of their caste, class or sex. With the advent of bhakti, Ram’s transition from godlike prince to God became complete. This was a critical transformation of the Ram story—and it is within this bhakti tradition that Tulsi wrote his Ramcharitmanas.
The bhakti movement was characterized by its emphasis on the use of vernacular languages, making its teachings directly accessible to the common people, regardless of class or caste. This was in stark contrast to traditional practice, within which Sanskrit, regarded as the sacred language, was used for all important literary and religious texts. Sanskrit was thus the preserve of an elite few, typically high-caste Brahmins, who would study, interpret and explain the texts to the common people. The earliest bhakti texts to appear were in Tamil—these were devotional poems in praise of Shiv and Vishnu, composed by saint-musicians, the Nayanars and Alvars, of southern India between the seventh and the tenth centuries CE. Also written in Tamil was Kamban’s Iramavataram. Composed in the eleventh century, it is amongst the earliest vernacular Ramayanas. It became, and still is, the definitive version of the Ram story in the Tamil-speaking areas of the subcontinent. The bhakti movemen
t soon spread northwards, appearing in texts such as the Bhagavata Purana, composed in Sanskrit in the tenth century and celebrating devotion to Krishna. More vernacular Ramayanas were composed. Amongst the more noteworthy of these were the thirteenth-century Telugu Ramayana of Buddharaja and the fifteenth-century Bengali Sriram Panchali by Krittibas. In Hindi, the bhakti movement reached its zenith in the sixteenth century, with Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas.
The Ramcharitmanas: spread and impact
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. It is worth noting that this initial circulation of Tulsi’s poem took place before the advent of printing in India, in areas and times of exceedingly low literacy, its currency strongly dependent on the oral tradition and remarkable feats of memorization by its devotees. 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.2
In the late eighteenth century, the Ramcharitmanas found royal patronage in the courts of resurgent Hindu kingdoms in northern India who found it a convenient, authoritative and accessible text through which to assert their Hindu identity and legitimize their rule by invoking Ram as the ideal and perfect king. In the nineteenth century, the Ramcharitmanas gained even greater currency as north Indian mainstream Hinduism found within it not only an answer to the Christian Bible, but also a nationalistic response to British colonialism. The development of movable type in Indian scripts led to the growth of vernacular presses and the printing of popular books in Indian languages, including, in 1810 in Calcutta, Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas. By the end of the century, printed versions of Tulsi’s epic were available all across the north of India—from Calcutta, in Bengali translation, to Gurmukhi-script editions in Delhi and Lahore, and Gujarati and Marathi versions from Bombay.3 Today, known to its audience as ‘Tulsi’s Ramayan’, or simply the Manas, Tulsi’s great poem is read, sung, recited 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.
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 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 initial 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 1632.4
A synopsis
In the beginning sections of his poem, Tulsidas tells us that he commenced this work in Ayodhya, on the ninth day of the Hindu month of Chaitra—the day of Ram’s birth—in the year 1631 of the Vikram Era, i.e., 1574 CE.5 This also makes the Ramcharitmanas the earliest of his major works. Consisting of approximately 12,900 lines of Avadhi verse set in seven kands or books, it is also Tulsi’s longest work, and its composition probably took him several years. The fourth book of his poem opens with an invocation to the city of Banaras, suggesting that he completed the epic after moving there.
In the beginning of the Ramcharitmanas, Tulsi explains that he first heard the story of Ram from his guru in Sukarkhet when he was still a boy, and that this is the story that he now seeks to set down in the spoken tongue.6 In outline, the story of the Ramcharitmanas is as follows:
King Dasharath of Koshal rules in splendour from his capital city, Avadh. The king has all that a man could desire, except a son. So, upon the advice of his guru, the sage Vasishtha, he holds a great fire-sacrifice, as the result of which four sons are born to him: Ram, the eldest, to his chief queen, Kaushalya; Bharat to his favourite wife, Kaikeyi; and the twins Lakshman and Shatrughna to his third queen, Sumitra. Ram is no other than the great god Vishnu, who has become incarnate in human form in order to rid the world of Ravan, the powerful king of the Rakshasas, who cannot be killed except by a mortal man and who has overrun the earth and overwhelmed even the gods.
The four princes grow up to be brave and skilled warriors. One day, when the princes are still youths, the sage Vishvamitra arrives at Dasharath’s court and requests that Ram and his brother Lakshman be sent with him to help protect his fire-sacrifices from the depredations of the Rakshasas. Dasharath protests that his sons are still too young, and offers the sage his whole army instead. But Vishvamitra insists that he wants only Ram and Lakshman to help him. Finally, Dasharath agrees.
The two young princes leave with Vishvamitra for the forest, where they successfully kill the Rakshasas disturbing his worship. Vishvamitra then takes the princes to the city of Mithila, to the court of King Janak. There, Ram sees and falls in love with the king’s daughter, Sita, and wins her hand in marriage by breaking the great bow of Shiv. The wedding of Ram and Sita is celebrated with great splendour. Lakshman, too, is married to Sita’s sister Urmila, and Bharat and Shatrughna to her cousins, the daughters of King Janak’s brothers. The four princes and their brides return to Ayodhya, where they continue to live in harmony for several years.
The aging Dasharath then decides to appoint Ram his heir. As preparations for his investiture get under way, Kaikeyi’s old nursemaid Manthara convinces her that Ram’s investiture would mean the end of her position as the king’s favourite, and would cause Bharat to languish in a prison cell while Ram ruled with the help of his favourite, Lakshman. Once, in return for saving his life on the battlefield, Dasharath had given Kaikeyi the gift of two boons: she could ask of him anything that her heart desired and he would fulfil it. Kaikeyi now demands that Bharat be made heir in place of Ram, and that Ram be banished to the forest for fourteen years. Bound by his word, the old king is unable to deny her requests. Realizing the situation, Ram cheerfully accepts his exile and leaves for the forest. Sita and Lakshman, who refuse to stay back, accompany him. Dasharath dies of a broken heart, and all of Avadh is plunged into mourning.
Bharat, who has been away all this while, is summoned back urgently by Vasishtha. He returns and is devastated to find his brother exiled and his father dead. He denounces his mother’s actions, refuses the kingship and sets out in pursuit of Ram, determined to bring him back as the rightful king of Avadh. Ram, however, refuses to return, saying that he must honour their father’s word, and requests Bharat to go back and rule as their father had desired. Bharat returns heartbroken to Avadh, and taking up an ascetic residence in the nearby village of Nandigram, rules as Ram’s regent till the end of his period of exile.
Ra
m, Lakshman and Sita wander through the forest, encountering demons, ascetics and sages, including the sage Valmiki, who directs them to make their home amongst the hills and forests of Chitrakut. There, Supnakha, the sister of Ravan, sees and falls in love with Ram. Turning herself into a beautiful woman, she approaches Ram, who rejects her advances. Lakshman cuts off her ears and nose in order to teach her a lesson. Mutilated and humiliated, she appeals to her Rakshasa brothers, Khar and Dushan, who attack Ram with their entire army. While Lakshman protects Sita and hides her away in a mountain cave, Ram single-handedly kills the demons and destroys their army. Supnakha then runs in despair to Ravan, who is infuriated by her story, in particular the killing of Khar and Dushan. Ravan decides to kidnap Sita and enlists the help of Marichi, another Rakshasa. Marichi turns himself into a golden deer and manages to lure Ram and Lakshman into the forest. In their absence, Ravan carries Sita off to his island kingdom of Lanka, where he keeps her prisoner.
The vulture Jatayu sees Sita being carried off and tries to save her, but is fatally wounded by Ravan. Ram and Lakshman return to find the hermitage deserted and Sita missing; as they search for her, they find the wounded Jatayu, who lives just long enough to tell them of her abduction. Ram performs his last rites, and Jatayu receives liberation.
Ram and Lakshman search desperately for Sita, and reach the monkey kingdom of Kishkindha. There, Ram meets Hanuman, who becomes a staunch devotee. He also meets the displaced monkey prince Sugriv, who has also lost both wife and kingdom to his brother Baali. Ram kills Baali and installs Sugriv as king of the monkeys; in return, Sugriv agrees to help him and sends his warriors in every direction in search of Sita. They discover that she is being held prisoner in Lanka.