Tulsidas

On a black, rain-lashed night, somewhere in the middle years of the sixteenth century, a young scholar named Tulsidas stood on the bank of a river that had gone wild with monsoon flood, and decided to cross it anyway. That afternoon his wife, Ratnavali, had left with her brother for her father's house, an ordinary, unremarkable errand, the kind wives made all the time. But Tulsidas had already buried one child, an infant son named Tarak, and grief had fused itself to his love for the one person left to him so completely that an evening's separation felt unbearable. He would not wait for the ferry, would not wait for morning. He went into the water in the dark, past the place where the current split, holding onto whatever would float. Tradition insists that what kept him afloat that night was not a log at all but a corpse, bloated and drifting, and that he did not know this, or did not let himself know it, until he had already reached the far bank. He found her father's house without a stair or ladder to the upper room where she slept, only a rope-like length hanging down from the window, and he climbed it hand over hand in the dark and the rain. It was, the story says, a python.

Ratnavali woke to find her husband standing in her room, soaked, trembling, having crossed a flooded river and climbed a snake to reach her because he could not spend one night without her. She did not weep or embrace him. Shame and something harder than shame came into her voice, and what she said to him has survived in a couplet that devotional India still quotes: asthi-charma-mai deha mama, taame jaisi preeti, taisi jo Shri Ram mahu hoti, na to bhav bhiti, that is, this body of mine is nothing but bone and skin and blood, and such is the love you bear it; had you loved Shri Ram with even that much love, you would have no more fear left of this world's ocean. It is a brutal thing to say to a man who has just risked his life for you, and it landed on Tulsidas like dawn breaking over a night that had gone on too long. He turned and walked out of that house, and he did not go home. Something in him that had been asleep for years woke up on the riverbank he had nearly died crossing, and it never went back to sleep.

To understand why that one rebuke could turn a man's entire life, it helps to know what had come before it. He was born, tradition says, into a household thrown into disorder by his own arrival: astrologers found the hour inauspicious, and hagiography adds the kind of details that cling to a future saint, that he stayed twelve months in the womb, that he was born with a full set of teeth, that he did not cry as infants do but uttered the name Rama instead, which is supposedly why he was first called Rambola, the one who spoke Rama. Whatever the truth buried under those legends, what is certain is that the household sent the infant away within days into the care of a woman named Chuniya, and that his mother died the very next day, and that his father, hearing of it, could not look at the child without holding him responsible for his wife's death and kept his distance ever after. Chuniya raised him for five and a half years in her own village before she too died, and the boy who would one day write the verses reciting couples across two continents spent a stretch of his childhood wandering from door to door, begging for food, belonging to no one. Biographers argue bitterly over when all this happened. Some place his birth around 1497, others in the 1530s, and the gap between the two guesses is wide enough that if the earlier date is right he lived past a hundred and ten, which is itself part of why the argument has never settled. What is not in dispute is that the abandoned, motherless child was eventually found by a wandering ascetic named Narharidas, who took him in, performed his sacred initiation at the age of seven, and began teaching him the story of Rama at a pilgrimage town on the Ganga called Soron. From there the boy went on to study for the better part of two decades at Kashi under a teacher called Shesha Sanatana, absorbing Sanskrit grammar, the Vedas, and the six schools of philosophy the way other boys absorbed the games of the street. Whatever had been broken by that early abandonment was, by the time he was a grown man, entirely covered over by learning and by one great, consuming human love: his marriage to Ratnavali.

Which brings the story back to the riverbank, and to a man walking away from his father-in-law's house at first light with nowhere to go. He did not go home. He went toward Kashi, toward the city that would become, in every sense, his true home for the rest of his life, and he arrived there not as a householder but as a wandering sadhu who had renounced the world in a single night. He took up residence on the ghats of the Ganga and gave himself to the service of Rama with the same totality he had once given his wife, and if there is a single hinge on which the entire life of Tulsidas turns, it is that one exchange on a monsoon night: a woman's harsh honesty converting a husband's desperate love into the most influential devotional literature the Hindi language has ever produced.

His years of wandering pilgrimage in the wake of that renunciation produced a story that Kashi still tells about its most famous ghat. Tulsidas had a habit, after his morning ablutions on the river, of pouring out the last of his water pot beneath a particular tree on his way back into the city, a tree that happened to be haunted. One day the spirit who lived there, moved by years of this small unthinking kindness, appeared before him and offered him a boon in return. What Tulsidas wanted was not wealth or comfort but darshan of Rama himself, and the spirit told him something that reoriented his entire practice: that Hanuman came in disguise every evening to sit among the listeners at his recitation of Ramkatha, the story of Rama, and that Hanuman could be told apart from the ordinary crowd because he was always first to arrive and last to leave. That evening Tulsidas watched, and noticed an old man with the marks of leprosy on his skin sitting apart from everyone else, arriving before the rest and lingering after they had gone. It is a scene the Ramcharitmanas itself seems to anticipate, in a verse that says wherever anyone tells the story of Rama, there the son of the wind god is present, palms folded above his bowed head, listening with tears running down his face. Tulsidas followed the old man out, fell at his feet, and said plainly that he knew who stood before him. Hanuman lifted him up, blessed him, and told him to go to Chitrakoot, where Rama himself could be seen. The spot on the Ganga where this happened is why the Sankat Mochan temple stands in Varanasi today.

At Chitrakoot the darshan did not come easily even then. Tulsidas sat waiting by the forest path, and two strikingly handsome young men in princely dress rode past him on a hunt, and something in him recognized nothing at all; he let two of the most sought-after eyes in the devotional universe pass him by simply because they did not look the way he had imagined them looking. Hanuman had to come to him afterward and tell him plainly who had just ridden past, and the grief and self-reproach that followed were, by every account, ferocious. He was given a second chance the next morning. A beautiful child approached him at the Ramghat and asked, with the unbearable ordinariness of a boy's request, whether the ascetic had any sandalwood paste to spare for a tilak. Tulsidas was so undone simply by being addressed that he forgot to hand over the paste at all; the child took it from his hand himself, marked his own forehead, then reached out and marked Tulsidas's forehead the same way, and vanished. Tulsidas would say later that it was by the grace of Gauri and Shiva together, and by the grace of Hanuman, that he was able to compose anything true about Rama at all, and that debt is written into the opening invocations of everything he wrote afterward.

The writing itself began years later, in Ayodhya, on the ninth day of the bright half of Chaitra, the very day tradition marks as Rama's birth, and it very nearly did not survive its first attempt. Tulsidas started composing his account of Rama's life in Sanskrit at a ghat in Kashi, and for eight consecutive nights the pages he had written during the day disappeared before morning. Shiva came to him in a dream and told him, in effect, that the story of Rama did not belong shut up in a scholar's language; it needed to be told in Awadhi, the spoken tongue of ordinary people, so that a farmer or a widow or a child with no Sanskrit at all could carry Rama's story in their own mouth. Tulsidas obeyed, and the result, composed over roughly two years and eight months and completed on Vivaha Panchami, the day the tradition celebrates Rama and Sita's wedding, was named the Ramcharitmanas, the manasa lake of Rama's deeds, a title that plays deliberately on Manasarovar, the sacred lake said to have formed first in the mind of Brahma: an ocean of scripture that any pilgrim, however unlettered, could wade into and be cleansed.

That very choice, to give scripture back to everyone in the language everyone actually spoke, is what nearly got the book destroyed. The learned custodians of Sanskrit ritual in Kashi were offended that the deeds of Rama, traditionally the property of scholars fluent in Valmiki's Sanskrit, had been rendered into the speech of the street, and they resolved to settle the question of its worth by ordeal. The story goes that the manuscript was placed at the very bottom of a stack of Sanskrit scriptures inside the sanctum of the Vishvanath temple overnight, the doors sealed. When the priests opened the sanctum in the morning, the Ramcharitmanas had somehow risen to the top of the pile, and on its cover, in a hand no one present had written, were the words Satyam Shivam Sundaram, truth, auspiciousness, beauty, signed as though by Shiva himself. Opposition did not end quite so neatly; there was at least one attempt to steal the manuscript outright, and the story told about that night is that the thieves who broke into Tulsidas's dwelling were met instead by two young guards, one dark-complexioned and one fair, armed with bows, who frightened them into flight. When the shaken thieves came the next morning to ask who had been guarding the house, and Tulsidas realized from their description that no one but Rama and Lakshmana themselves could have stood watch over his sleep, he is said to have wept, not with relief but with something closer to shame, that God had troubled Himself to guard a poet's manuscript through the night.

The part of his life that traveled furthest beyond devotional circles is his brush with the Mughal court. Word of the miracles clustering around Tulsidas's name reached the emperor Akbar, who summoned him to Fatehpur Sikri; Tulsidas, by most versions of the story, declined to perform on command, saying only that all he knew was Rama, and was brought before the emperor by force regardless. When pressed to prove his powers he composed, verse by verse over forty days of imprisonment, the hymn now recited by more people on more mornings than perhaps any other Hindi poem in existence: the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses in praise of Hanuman's strength and devotion. According to the legend that has attached itself permanently to that hymn, an army of monkeys descended on Fatehpur Sikri as he chanted, overturning the emperor's own household and pelting the ramparts with debris, until an elder at court told Akbar plainly that this chaos was the doing of the holy man he had imprisoned. Akbar is said to have released him, apologized, and issued an order that Rama's devotees and Hanuman's should not be harassed in his territories, and to have remained on cordial terms with him afterward. It is worth noting that Tulsidas's warmth toward figures at the Mughal court was not limited to legend: he maintained a real friendship with the poet-general Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, a friendship built on an exchange of couplets rather than miracles. Rahim was known for giving alms to the poor while keeping his eyes lowered, never meeting the recipient's gaze, and when Tulsidas sent him a verse asking why he gave in so strange a manner, Rahim wrote back that the true giver was someone else entirely, giving day and night without pause, and that the world only credited the gift to him, which was reason enough to keep his eyes down in shame at receiving credit that was not his. Two men from entirely different worlds recognized, in four lines, that they were talking about the same God.

Old age did not spare him gentler treatment than the rest of his life had. In his final years he was afflicted by boils so painful that he composed the Hanuman Bahuk, a raw, almost embarrassingly physical cry to Hanuman describing the pain in his own limbs and begging for relief, and tradition holds that the pain eased once the verses were complete, as though naming the suffering to Hanuman directly had itself been the medicine. Around the same period he composed the Vinaya Patrika, structured deliberately like a petition, a patrika, submitted to a sovereign, because that is exactly what it is: a written appeal addressed to Rama enthroned as king of the universe, written in the language of a subject with no other recourse, confessing his own unworthiness without any decoration at all. Alongside these he left behind the Kavitavali, the Geetavali, the Dohavali, the Janaki Mangal, and other works, but it was the Ramcharitmanas that reshaped an entire region's relationship with its own scripture, giving rise to the Ramlila plays that are still performed every autumn from village crossroads to the Ramnagar fort across the river from where he lived, the same story he set down by hand centuries ago acted out afresh every single year.

He died, by the most commonly repeated reckoning, in 1623, at Assi Ghat on the bank of the Ganga in the city that had sheltered him since the night he swam a flooded river and lost his household and found everything else instead. Devotees who came after him, beginning with his own contemporary Nabhadas, the very compiler of the Bhaktamal in which this account is set, looked at the scale of what Tulsidas had done and reached for the only comparison large enough: that he was Valmiki himself, returned in the Kali age, so that the Ramayana might be sung a second time, this time in a tongue the whole land could speak. Whether or not one accepts that claim as literal fact, its truth as devotion is not in question. A man who lost his mother at birth, was raised by a stranger, was scorned by his own father, and finally driven out of his marriage by a wife's unbearable honesty, took every ounce of that grief and unmet love and poured it, without holding anything back, into a name. Centuries later, in villages that never had running water and cities that now have none of the sixteenth century left standing, people still open their mouths first thing in the morning and say his verses before they say anything else of their own. That, more than any miracle involving monkeys or serpents or ghosts, is the proof his devotees would ask you to weigh: not that Rama came to him at Chitrakoot for a moment, but that he found a way to make Rama available to everyone else for good.