The View from the Ghats: Traditional Exegesis of a Hindu Epic

Abstract

The most popular book in northern India is a Hindi retelling of the ancient tale of Prince Rām and his wife, Sītāa, composed in about A.D. 1574 by the poet-saint Tulsīdās of Banaras. Throughout a vast region with a population of more than three hundred million people, this epic of some fourteen-thousand lines has come to be regarded not only as a great masterpiece of literature but also as a religious work of the highest inspiration—a status recognized by nineteenth-century British scholars who labeled it "the Bible of North India." To its audience it is known by several names: simply the Rāmāyaṇ(borrowing the title of the Sanskrit archetype that, for Hindi speakers, it has largely supplanted); the Tulsī Rāmāyaṇ(invoking its author); and also the Mānas(The lake), which is a condensation of its true title, Rāmcaritmānas(The lake of the acts of Rām). Encountering the last name for the first time, a reader from another culture might be puzzled by its central metaphor: why should the image of a lake be so closely associated with this celebrated saga of virtue, heroism, and devotion?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.