Rama’s poet who made Ramlila possible in Hindi
Tulsidas (1511–1623), born Rambola Dubey, was a Ramanandi Vaishnava saint-poet of Rama whose works reshape North Indian culture through Ramlila, music, and vernacular speech. He lived mainly in Banaras and Ayodhya, named Tulsi Ghat, and founded Varanasi’s Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple at a vision site.
Acclaimed among Hindi and world poets, his imprint still marks popular and classical music. Sanskrit Tulasīdāsa versus vernacular Tulsidas spelling tracks how devotion crossed elite and folk tongues.
He left few facts about himself, so his life comes from later accounts: Nabhadas's Bhaktamal, composed between 1583 and 1639; Priyadas's commentary of 1712; the Gosain Charit of about 1770; the Mula Gosain Charit, said to date from 1630 and to be by his disciple Veni Madhav Das; and the Gautam Chandrika of 1624, whose author's father was his close companion. Some scholars doubt the later-published accounts. Nabhadas and the Ramanandi sect hold that he was the sage Valmiki reborn to sing Rama's story in the common tongue.
Tradition puts his birth on the seventh day of the bright half of Shraavana, matching 11 August 1511, and most scholars place it at Soron in Kasganj, Uttar Pradesh. Legend says he spent twelve months in the womb, was born with all thirty-two teeth and cried out Rama instead of crying, hence the name Rambola, he who uttered Rama. A nurse named Chuniya raised him in Haripur for five and a half years until she died, leaving him a destitute orphan begging for food. He first heard the Ramayana from his guru at Soron's Varaha Kshetra, understanding little at the time.
In Varanasi he then spent 15 to 16 years studying Sanskrit grammar, the four Vedas, the six Vedangas, astrology and the six schools of Hindu philosophy under Shesha Sanatana at Pancaganga Ghat. His marital status is contested: some sources say he married Ratnavali, daughter of Dinbandhu Pathak, in 1561, while scholars such as Rambhadracharya cite verses from the Vinayapatrika and Hanuman Bahuka to argue he never married and was an ascetic from childhood.
Source: Tulsidas
