Tulsidas Jayanti 2020: History, significance and celebrations on day remembering saint who authored Ramacharitmanas

Goswami Tulsidas was a Ramanandi Vaishnava saint and poet renowned for his devotion to Lord Rama. He is the author of the Hindu epic Ramcharitmanas, an Awadhi variant of the Ramayana composed by Sage Valmiki. Tulsidas is also believed to have penned the Hanuman Chalisa. It is believed that he was born to a Brahmin man named Atmaram Dubey and his wife Hulsi in Uttar Pradesh’s Sookar Kshetra Soron. Legend says the first words that Tulsidas uttered after his birth was the word ‘Rama’ and was thus named Rambola. However, he was abandoned by his parents and instead raised by a maid. After her death, he wandered around before being adopted by a saint named Narharidas, who became his spiritual father. As per the Hindu calendar, Tulsidas was born during the month of Shravana and Tulsidas Jayanti is celebrated on the Saptami of the Krishna Paksha which translates to the seventh day of the dark fortnight of the moon. In 2020, Tulsidas Jayanti is being celebrated on 27 July. Tulsidas Jayanti’s significance lies in the fact that the day creates awareness among the people about the works of Goswami Tulsidas. The day also highlights the work he did to popularise Ramayana in India, making Lord Rama more comprehensible to the common man. Each year, the day is celebrated by the reciting of paragraphs of Sri Ramcharitmanas at temples dedicated to Lord Rama and Hanuman in various parts of the country. As per a report in The Print, Philip Lutgendorf, an American Indologist and professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies in the US and the writer of The Life of a Text Performing the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, has said that anyone who is interested in the religion and culture of northern India definitely gets references to Ramcharitmanas. As per the report, Lutgendorf has stated in the book that the sixteenth-century retelling of the legend of Lord Rama by Tulsidas has been hailed not only as the greatest modern Indian epic, but like a “living sum of Indian culture”.