Eternal Ramayana: The Ramayana of Tulsidas

The Ramayana of Tulsidas ranks among the greatest and most popular religious classics of the world. One reason for its universal popularity and why it still casts a spell is because it is based on certain moral and spiritual values which have universal appeal. While Valmiki Ramayana is composed in Sanskrit, Tulsidas deliberately chose to write in the common man's language, Awadhi - a dialect of Hindi. When Valmiki wrote his Ramayana, India was at its peak of cultural refinement. At the time when Tulsidas wrote there was widespread degradation in the values of life. Society was vitiated by the rivalry among different faiths and sects to acquaint the mass with what was best in the Hindu scriptures in understandable language. It became extremely popular with the common man labourers, peasants, householders, Indian labourers who were shipped by the colonial English rulers to Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, and West Indies, who carried it with them and made it known to others. Tulsidas (b. 1497) was a Ramanandi Vaishnava saint and poet, re-nowned for his devotion to Rama. F.S. Growse originally belonged to the Bengal Civil Service. He was first appointed as Joint Magistrate, Mathura in 1871 and the following year he became Collector and District Magistrate. On this post he served for six years before his transfer to Bulandshahr in 1878. He founded the Mathura Museum in 1874. Besides his stray articles on the archaeo-logical discoveries of Mathura in different journals, he made a wonderful contribution by writing the Mathura Memoir which is till date a celebrated work on the history and culture of the region. He has devoted a complete chapter to the Buddhist city of Mathura and its antiquities. Even a renowned archaeologist like Cunningham recognized him as a great scholar.