Tulsidas

Tulsidas (traditionally c. 1532–1623 CE) was a Vaishnava (Ramanandi) poet-saint of North India, renowned above all for his devotion to Rama. He lived chiefly in the holy cities of Varanasi and Ayodhya, and is credited with founding the Sankat Mochan Hanuman temple in Varanasi.

His birth year is given variously by tradition and scholarship — c. 1532 is the long-current date, though some sources favour 1511 — while his death in 1623 is more firmly held; the Atlas records the traditional span and notes the uncertainty.

Tulsidas’s towering achievement is the Ramcharitmanas (“The Lake of the Deeds of Rama”), an epic retelling of the Ramayana composed not in scholarly Sanskrit but in the vernacular Awadhi, deliberately so that the story and its devotion would be open to ordinary people of every caste.

The work fused high theology with intimate devotional feeling and became, in effect, a scripture of the heart for vast numbers of North Indians, recited and sung for centuries. He is also traditionally credited with the Hanuman Chalisa and other hymns.

For Tulsidas, loving devotion to Rama — sustained through the repetition of the divine name and the constant rehearsal of sacred story — was the surest and most accessible road to liberation, available even to the lowest-born.