Goswami Tulsidas

The Yamuna was in flood, and a Brahmin scholar named Tulsidas was swimming across it in the dark. Rain lashed the water. He did not notice, because his mind held only one thought: that his wife Ratnavali had gone to her father's house a few days before, and he could not bear another night without her. In his desperation he laid hold of what he took for a floating log and rode it across the current; only in the grey light after did he realize it had been a corpse. He reached the wall of his father-in-law's house and found no ladder, so he caught what he thought was a rope hanging from her window and hauled himself up hand over hand; it was a snake, still and cold, mistaken in his blindness of longing for a way home. Ratnavali woke to find her husband dripping and trembling at her window in the middle of the night, having crossed a flooded river and climbed a python to reach her. She did not embrace him. She looked at him for a long moment and said, more or less, that the flesh and bone she was made of could never deserve a love pursued through corpse and serpent; if only he turned even half that longing toward Ram, he said, he would cross oceans no flood could touch. It is said to be the single most consequential sentence spoken to any poet in the history of the Hindi language, because within it the man who had been called Rambola since infancy died, and Goswami Tulsidas, the singer of the Ramcharitmanas, was born.

He had already survived a stranger beginning. Born, by the reckoning many old accounts give, under the inauspicious lunar asterism called Abhukta Mula, a birth omen said to endanger the father who witnesses it, the infant was sent away from his parents' house within days, entrusted to a woman named Chuniya, who raised him for some five years until her own death left him an orphan wandering from door to door for scraps. Different threads of tradition disagree sharply on exactly when he was born, some placing it as early as the end of the fifteenth century and others well into the sixteenth, and no independent record settles the question; what the different threads agree on is the shape of the childhood, hunger and homelessness ended only when a wandering Vaishnava renunciant named Narharidas found the boy, recognized something in him, and took him in. Narharidas performed his sacred-thread initiation at Ayodhya and began teaching him the Ramayana at the holy town of Soron on the Ganga, feeding him the story of Rama the way another guardian might have fed him bread. The boy who had first cried out the name Ram instead of wailing at birth, so the old memory insists, grew under that teaching into a Brahmin of formidable Sanskrit learning, married in due course to Ratnavali, and might have lived out an ordinary scholar's life had his wife not, on one rain-soaked night, told him the truth about where his love belonged.

He left the next morning and did not return. What followed were years of wandering between the two cities that would define the rest of his life, Ayodhya where Ram was born and Kashi where Shiva is said never to sleep, years in which the grieving, love-shattered Brahmin remade himself into an ascetic who possessed nothing and wanted nothing but darshan of Ram. Kashi is where the stranger episodes of his life begin to cluster, episodes that read now less like biography than like scripture insisting on itself. One is remembered this way: each morning near the river he would offer the last mouthful of his ritual water to a peepal tree, not knowing it sheltered a preta, a restless spirit, until the spirit spoke from the branches one day and told him he was pleased, and asked what boon he could grant in return. Tulsidas asked to see Hanuman with his own eyes. The preta told him that an old leper came every evening to his discourses on the Ramayana, arriving first and leaving last of anyone in the gathering, and that this leper was no leper at all.

That evening Tulsidas watched for him and, when the discourse ended, followed the bent, sore-covered old figure into the trees rather than letting him slip away as he always had. In the dark, at the spot where the Sankat Mochan Hanuman temple stands in Varanasi today, Tulsidas threw himself at the old man's feet and would not let go until he showed his true form. The leprous beggar became, before him, Sri Hanuman, the wind-god's son, tireless servant of Rama. When Tulsidas found his voice again he did not ask for wealth or for the end of his own wandering; he asked only that Hanuman let him behold Ram directly, in the body, the way Hanuman himself once had in Lanka and in the forest. Hanuman told him to go to Chitrakoot, where Ram had lived in exile, and to wait.

At Chitrakoot, at the ghat on the Mandakini river, Tulsidas took up the humble work of grinding sandalwood into paste to mark the foreheads of the pilgrims and sadhus who came bathing there, and he sat at that work for days in an agony of longing, wondering when his own eyes would finally be granted what he had crossed the country to see. One afternoon two princely boys came riding through on the hunt, dressed in forest green, bows in hand, chasing a deer, and were gone again before Tulsidas had gathered his thoughts; something in him stirred but did not resolve into certainty. Hanuman found him soon after and asked whether he had seen his beloved Lord. Tulsidas, honest even in his grief, admitted he had seen something but had not truly known it. Only then did the full weight of what had passed him by strike him, that Ram and Lakshman themselves had ridden within arm's reach and he had let the moment go for want of faith to recognize it, and by every account he wept as he had not wept since Ratnavali turned him from her door. Hanuman relented and promised a fuller vision, and it came at the same river: Sita and Ram enthroned together, Bharat holding the royal umbrella over them, Lakshman and Shatrughna standing at either side waving the chamar, the whole scene bathed in the ordinary afternoon light of Chitrakoot as if divinity had simply decided, for once, not to hide. Tulsidas called himself, from that day, a man whose life's debt had been paid.

It was at Ayodhya, on Ram Navami, the ninth day of Chaitra, in the Hindu year corresponding to 1574 of the common era, that Tulsidas began setting down the story he had spent his whole broken and remade life inside of, choosing to write not in the Sanskrit of the learned but in Awadhi, the spoken tongue of ordinary Awadh, so that the herdsman and the housewife could receive Ram's story as directly as any pandit. He called it the Ramcharitmanas, the lake of Ram's deeds, and by his own testimony, in a line from its closing pages that has been recited by devotees for four centuries since, he wrote it swantah sukhaya, for the joy of his own heart, and let whatever benefit came to others follow from that joy rather than from any ambition to instruct them. It took him roughly two and a half years to complete, finished at last in Kashi, and its very existence was an act of quiet defiance: an epic once guarded in a sacred language was now available to anyone with ears.

Not everyone welcomed it. Pandits in Kashi who had built their authority on Sanskrit learning were offended that the Ramayana had been given a vernacular body, and, in the account cherished ever since, a group of them slipped a copy of the manuscript into the sanctum of the Kashi Vishwanath temple at night, burying it beneath the pile of Sanskrit scriptures kept there, meaning to see it crushed and forgotten under weightier texts by morning. When the doors were opened at dawn, the Ramcharitmanas was found resting on top of the entire stack, as though it had risen through the night of its own will, and the priests who had meant to bury it instead carried it out in procession. Opposition did not end there. Tradition also remembers two men sent, whether by rival pandits or by simple greed, to break into Tulsidas's dwelling and steal the manuscript outright; they found instead two young men standing guard in the dark, one fair and one dark-skinned, bows drawn, and fled in terror. When they crept back at dawn to see who had frightened them off, Tulsidas himself realized with a shock what they were describing, that Ram and Lakshman had stood sentry over his poem while he slept. He wept again, this time that he had slept through the sight of them, gave his money away, and sent the precious manuscript for safekeeping to his friend Todar Mal, a minister at the Mughal court, so that no thief, common or jealous, could take it from him again.

The deepest teaching of Tulsidas's life, though, may sit in two smaller, quieter stories he told about the power of Ram's own name to erase whatever human beings had decided should keep them apart. In one, a man tormented by a killing he had committed years before wandered from pilgrimage to pilgrimage, calling himself aloud a murderer and begging alms in that same breath as he cried the name of Ram. The priests of the city wanted nothing to do with him. Tulsidas welcomed him to sit and eat at his own side, insisting that a tongue which called Ram's name in such anguish had already been washed clean, whatever law books said about the penance still owed; when the city's scholars pressed him to justify overturning their judgment, he answered them with citations from the old Upanishads themselves on the purifying power of that name, saying they read the scriptures without letting the truth in them touch their hearts. In the other story, a different man that the town's priests had shut out over some technicality of ritual defilement came to Tulsidas begging to be readmitted among the faithful, and Tulsidas, refusing the standard he was offered, declared that if Ram's name had truly purified him then even Nandi, Shiva's stone bull standing eternally in the great Kashi temple, would eat rice from the man's own hand as proof. A crowd gathered to watch what could only end in humiliation. The stone Nandi bowed its head and ate. Those who had gathered to see Tulsidas shamed instead raised a shout of victory for Ram's name and for the faith of the man who had trusted it absolutely.

Even an emperor, in time, wanted to test him. Word had spread that a dead Brahmin had opened his eyes again through Tulsidas's prayer, and the badshah of Delhi, whom devotional memory names as the Mughal emperor Akbar, though the exact dates are debated by historians and cannot be proven to align, sent for him to perform some comparable wonder at court. Tulsidas went without fear, but when commanded to show a miracle he answered plainly that he knew no karamat, no sorcerer's trick, that he knew and loved only Ram. Enraged at what he took for insolence, the emperor had him thrown into a cell. What happened next, as the story has been told and retold for generations, is that an army of monkeys descended on the city, swarming the ramparts, overturning the guards, and terrifying the court itself, until a wise man at last told the emperor that this chaos was the doing of the wind-god's son, angry on behalf of the imprisoned saint. It is in this same stretch of imprisonment that popular memory places the composing of the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses in praise of Hanuman said to answer the forty days Tulsidas is remembered to have spent behind bars, though scholars caution that no firm historical record ties the hymn to that specific cell. The emperor, humbled, ran to Tulsidas's feet, begged forgiveness, and ordered him released and honored on his way home.

Before returning to Kashi for good, tradition holds that Tulsidas traveled to Vrindavan and met, face to face, the poet-compiler Nabhadas, author of the very Bhaktamal in which this account of his life is preserved; the two men, so the story goes, greeted each other with the plain joy of fellow devotees, and Nabhadas read him aloud the verse he had already composed in his honor, so that Tulsidas heard, in his own lifetime, how another lover of Ram had chosen to remember him. Whether that meeting happened exactly as later devotees loved to picture it or was shaped afterward into legend, it captures something true about how the bhakti poets of that century thought of themselves, not as isolated geniuses but as a single garland of devotees strung together by their shared beloved.

Old age did not spare him pain. Around 1607, by the reckoning many biographers give, Tulsidas was seized by a burning affliction in his arms and shoulders so severe that ordinary remedies, medicine, amulets, every kind of treatment his contemporaries could offer, failed to touch it. Rather than despair, the old man turned the agony itself into praise, composing the Hanuman Bahuk, forty-four verses that describe his own suffering in unsparing detail even as they call on Hanuman's strength to bear it, and devotees have held for centuries that as he recited the closing verses the pain that medicine could not reach simply left his body. He died at Assi Ghat on the Ganga in Kashi in 1623, by tradition at a very great age, having spent the last of his strength the way he had spent every year since that flooded river crossing: turning whatever love or grief life handed him back toward Ram.

What he left behind was not a doctrine so much as a door. The Ramcharitmanas he wrote for his own heart's ease became, within his own generation, the Ramayana that most of North India actually knew, recited in villages that had never seen a Sanskrit manuscript, performed each autumn in the Ramlila crowds still gather for, sung at deathbeds and weddings alike. Tulsidas had crossed a flooded river and climbed a serpent for a woman's love before he understood that the crossing itself, undertaken for Ram instead, would carry not just him but every reader after him to the far shore he had been seeking all along.