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© Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24:2 (2004)

Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India:

The Kavitavali of Tulsidas

IMRE BANGHA

Large literary masterpieces often secure fame for theirauthors but at the same time shorter compositions bythem may enjoy similar popularity. Shakespeare’s son-nets are as much read as any of his great plays. Brevity,making the poem more accessible for immediate appre-ciation, disciplined metrical form, and a hint of a morepersonal voice largely contributed to the success ofShakespeare’s 154 sonnets, collected by his friends andpublished in 1609 towards the end of his literary career.

The textual legacy of Tulsidas (1532?–1623?), a con-temporary of Shakespeare, whose standing in Hindiliterature matches that of the English author, presents asimilar phenomenon. His Kavitavali, a series of some350 loosely connected quatrains in stricter meters andwith a more individual approach than found in theauthor’s other works, was compiled probably around the1610s. Tulsi’s favorite themes are collected here, andalthough arranged into seven cantos (kandas) accordingto the Ramayana tradition, it does not always follow thelinear epic structure.

The collection has enjoyed immense popularity. Ini-tially it was transmitted in handwritten books, and al-though no autograph copy survives, about sixty copiedmanuscripts have been traced in the past hundred years.Several hundreds, however, must have been preparedover the centuries. Since its first printed edition in 1815the Kavitavali has been published about 120 times; theGita Press alone, its most popular publisher, had issued632,500 copies by 2001 according to the flyleaf of theedition. Apart from Tulsi’s Ramcaritmanas, only his VinayPatrika, a compilation of devotional padas (songs withrefrain set to a certain rhythm, tala, and in a dominatingmood, raga), and Hanumanbahuk, have sold more copies.(The latter, however, was originally part of the Kavi-tavali.)1

The Kabitt Form

The force that keeps the distinct parts of the collec-tion together is not that of a linear narrative but rather

the poetic form: the entire Kavitavali is written in kabitts(quatrains). The early bhakti poets conveyed their mes-sage most effectively in padas, which normally have aloose moraic meter suitable for emotional expressionthrough singing. The Kavitaval i is a devotional workwritten not in padas but in the kabitt form. The impor-tance of the form can be judged by the fact that inmany manuscripts and early editions this collection iscalled Kabitt-Ramayan (Ramayana in Quatrains), using theword kabitt in its broad sense of “self-contained poem.”This sense includes the four-line syllabic kavitt (oftencalled ghanaksari after the name of its most widely usedsubgroup), which relies on sequences of stressed andunstressed syllables, the anapestic or dactylic savaiya, andthe rare moraic jhulna and chappay; the latter are brokeninto six lines in modern editions. While the syllabickavitts were especially suited to dhrupad singing, to whichtheir emergence can be linked, the savaiyas were meantto be recited or written down. With their somewhatstrict meter kabitts had a closer link with the written andcourtly than with the oral world. Tradition holds that theKabitt-Ramayan is Tulsi’s effort to present the Rama storyin a courtly style.2

While padas, written in various dialects, were the mainform of devotional singing, kabitts were products ofBrajbhasa. Although their early usage was linked toKrishna literature and they never ceased to be vehiclesof devotional messages, along with the couplet doha theybecame the major meters in court poetry. The quatrainform, especially the syllabic kavitt, survived into twenti-eth-century Hindi poetry.

Kabitts are a somewhat more recent form than padas,which date to the beginnings of devotional Hindi lit-erature. Although some chappays and savaiyas are attrib-uted to Hit Harivamsh (?1502–52),3 the kabitt forms didnot become popular until the late sixteenth century.Both poets at Akbar’s court, such as Rahim, Tansen,and Gang,4 and Krishna devotees in Vrindaban, such asKalyan, Biharinidas, and Gadadhar Bhatt,5 used this

34 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24:2 (2004)

form. While for most of them the main literary activitywas in other meters, Gang and Kalyan wrote chiefly inkavitt, savaiya, and chappay, and the mixing of these threeforms was imitated by poets of the following two centu-ries. It was also at that time that Narottamdas (b. 1545?)wrote a Sudamacarit entirely in kabitt,6 and kabitts werefurther popularized by influential poets such as Raskhanand Tulsidas. The adoption of this form by Kesavdas inhis Kavipriya and Rasikpriya set an example, and in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries kabitts were themost important vehicles of mannerist literature, oftendetached from a devotional message although makingample use of Krishna mythology.

The Transmission

While the old manuscripts, composed with a varyingdegree of textual corruption, show a complex interrela-tionship, all modern redactions and commentaries ofTulsi’s minor works, including the edited Gita Press vol-umes as well as the huge number of critical studies, di-rectly or indirectly rely on the texts of their exemplar,the Tulsi-granthavali published in in 1923.7 This is, however, not a critical edition: the editors do not indicate thesource for the text of an individual composition andgive variants only occasionally. Only the Ramcaritmanashas a critical edition based on a consistent collation ofthe most important manuscripts,8 and since the stillauthoritative book of Mataprasad Gupta on Tulsidas,9

first published in 1942, only a few scholars have touchedtextual problems.

No history of the transmission of the Kavitavali hasso far been undertaken. The material collected for aforthcoming critical edition by the Tulsidas TextualStudy Group, a group of students and academics in Bu-dapest, Oxford and Miercurea Ciuc in Romania, however, can serve as a basis for studying its spread.10 Witha large number of manuscripts lost and with the avail-able material only partially processed, the reconstructionof the history of the text is only fragmentary. This pa-per will present only some ideas and problems contrib-uting to the better understanding of the dynamics oftextual transmission of a widely read premodern text.

In the case of devotional literature, the popularity ofthe poet can expand a collection of a few hundred in-dependent poems into thousands during a phase of oraltransmission. For example, from the inflated corpusesthat we have at our disposal we cannot determine whatpoets like Kabir, Surdas, or Mira Bai wrote. We expectthat the Tulsi corpus, which was no less popular, wasalso prone to being expanded. While at least one in-stance of amplification can be documented, it did not oc-cur on a scale similar to Kabir or Surdas.11

As far as the Kavitavali is concerned, the use of thekabitt form connected with the written tradition, thealmost uniform sequence of poems, as well as the na-

ture and the relatively small number of the variantreadings show that the extant texts stem from writtenversions and no phase of oral transmission was in-volved, although oral tradition must have influenced it.(Even today many people know several of Tulsi’s quat-rains by heart.) The transmitted text must be very closeto that of the first edition(s) prepared in all probabilityby the poet himself. During the period of writtentransmission the text has either been corrupted by mis-takes or changed tendentiously by its scribes.

Apart from the collector tendency towards expandinga literary corpus we can observe another that is moredifficult to detect in the case of oral transmission: a“purist tendency” to purge the corpus of metrically oraesthetically weak poems or of variations on the sametheme conceived as redundancy. This phenomenon,called athetisation in textual criticism, can also shed lighton some aspects of scribal manipulation. The authen-ticity of the poems was questioned by some scribes and,following them, by the early editors in cases of sectarianappropriation, stylistic weakness, incompleteness, orsuspected samasyapurti, the widespread poetic practice ofwriting a new poem on a given phrase or line. (In otherwords, if two poems contained the same line or phrase,one of them became suspicious.) India is a country ofinfinite sectarian debates and Tulsidas is considered oneof its most prominent religious poets. One would there-fore expect that theological problems had the mostprominent effect on scribal argumentation, the forceworking behind deliberate changes in the transmittedtext, documented through omitted, inserted, or changedpoems. However, questions relating to style seem tohave played a role at least as important as those relatingto theology.

The Range of Poems

The arrangement of the first six kandas of the collec-tion follows the Rama story, providing us with glimpsesat some of its most enchanting points, while the Uttara-kanda discards the linear structure and comprises poemscelebrating Rama’s name, virtues, or grace, descriptionsof the dark Kali age, of places of pilgrimage, of thegopis’ love for Krishna, or descriptions of Shiva, prayersfor release from calamities such as the pestilence inBenares, and so forth. Several poems expound Rama’sgrace with reference to Tulsi himself. Even the first partof the Kavitavali is not strictly linear but rather like aseries of miniature illustrations to an epic tale withwhich everyone is familiar. F. R. Allchin, the Englishtranslator, rightly observes,

In some cases we may feel that the episodes wereones—such as the encounter with the boatman—forwhich Tulsi felt particular affection, in others thatthey were ones which he felt, after the completion ofthe Rama-carita-manasa, might be rendered more ef-

Bangha: Dynamics of Textual Transmission in Premodern India 35

fectively in these meters. An example of the latterkind is the burning of Lanka which Rama-carita-manasa passes over in four short verses but whichKavitavali expands to greater size (VI.3-25). But inthe second half we can have no such clues to thecomposition . . . There are numerous traditions whichassociate verses in this part with special occasions,mainly in the latter days of Tulsi’s life.12

Some passages can indeed be accepted as references toTulsi’s life and to his circumstances rather than as liter-ary topoi. Tulsi's childhood story is widely known inpresent-day north India and popularized by influentialmedia. For example, the Amar Citra Katha comic books’Tulsi biography rely heavily on a few poems from theKavitavali.

The poems sometimes show a style full of figures ofsound and sense of which any poet of the manneristera, the ritikal, could be proud. The selection of the po-etic meter also suits the themes. The kavitt form with itsreliance on sequences of stressed and indifferent sylla-bles is especially suitable for conveying a sense of vio-lence, heroism, or fear. The whole of the Sundarakanda,with its description of the burning of Lanka, and themajor part of the Lankakanda is written in kavitts. Thearray of emotions evoked in the collection is, however,wider and ranges from the fearful to the erotic or to thehumorous.

The StructureThe structure of the Kavitavali is uniform in the mod-

ern editions, where it is a collection of 325 independentquatrains. We can refer to this as the vulgate text, withinwhich the only variation is that the Tulsi-granthavali givesan extra savaiya in a footnote but immediately rejects itas inauthentic. The collection is structured according tothe seven kandas of the Ramayana but the distributionof the poems is rather uneven. There are altogether 142quatrains in the first six kandas, with only one poem inthe Aranyakanda and one in the Kiskindhakanda; 183,more than half of the total, are in the Uttarakanda. Cer-tain editions give the 44 kabitts of the Hanumanbahuk asan appendix to the Kavitavali.

The oldest available manuscript, from 1691,13 com-prises only the Uttarakanda together with the Hanuman-bahuk, which shows that at an early time the quatrainsthat did not relate directly to the Rama story were inindependent circulation.14 There is, however, no manu

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script evidence for the independent existence of thestory portion, that is, of the first six kandas. Therefore,the present form of the Kavitavali is probably not theresult of putting together two collections of quatrains,one with the Rama story and the other the independentpoems that became the Uttarakanda. On the contrary,the Uttarakanda was an original part of the Kavitavali thatsome time in the seventeenth century came into inde-

pendent circulation. A similar distinction can be ob-served in the case of the padas of Tulsi’s Gitavali andVinay Patrika. Those in the former compilation retell theRama story and those of the Vinay Patrika are sort of“personal prayers.” According to Mataprasad Gupta,this is the result of a later editorial process and theoriginal collection(s) of the padas did not have such aclear distinction.15 The independent Uttarakanda in thecase of the Kavitavali indicates an attempt to impose asimilar distinction. This separation, however, did nottake root and no later manuscripts consist of only thisportion.

There was, however, another separation here. Al-though somewhat mixed up with the last quatrains ofthe Uttarakanda, the poems related to Hanuman ac-quired an independent existence at some time. The ear-liest dated independent Hanumanbahuk manuscript isfrom 1744 (VS 1803).16 The emergence of the Bahuk asan independent collection may be attributable to thegrowing cult of Hanuman.17

The Two RecensionsAlready in 1941 Mataprasad Gupta observed that the

text of the collection differs largely in some manuscriptsand expressed the need for a critical edition. For thispurpose I collected copies of thirty-three complete orfragmentary manuscripts from Punjab, Rajasthan, UttarPradesh, Bihar, the United Kingdom, and the UnitedStates. References to about thirty more have beenfound, but some of them have disappeared and someare kept locked by their custodians. (The twenty-foursubstantially long manuscripts available to us at the timeof the computerized statistical analyis and examined inthis paper are listed in Appendix A.)

An examination of the number of poems in themanuscripts available in complete form shows a varia-tion of about ninety poems. On the basis of this we candistribute the manuscripts into two groups of similarsizes. The first group comprises those that reach Uttara-kanda 180 and normally include the Hanumanbahuk, andthe second group those ones that reach at most Uttara-kanda 161 and do not include the Hanumanbahuk. Wecall the former the Longer Recension and the latter theShorter Recension.

The sequence of poems in the manuscripts of thetwo recensions shows further peculiarities that justifytheir grouping together. Six poems in the middle of theUttarakanda (vv. 7.91–6) are missing from all representa-tives of the Shorter Recension but are present in all ofthe Longer one. In a similar way three or four more po-ems of the modern published version up to v. 7.161 aremissing from the Shorter Recension,18 but five “apocry-pha” (i.e., poems missing from the vulgate) are presentin almost all manuscripts of this recension and one (af-ter v. 2.21) in three of them.19 In this way the archetype


of the Shorter Recension contains 288 to 290 quatrains.Manuscripts of the Longer Recension contain all kabittsthat found their way into the modern published ver-sions, as well as eleven or thirteen apocrypha, out ofwhich three always and another three occasionally corre-spond to the apocrypha of the Shorter Recension.20

Seven of them are found only in manuscripts of theLonger Recension.21 In this way the archetype of theLonger Recension contains 382 or 380 kabitts.

Most manuscripts of the Longer Recension containthe Hanumanbahuk, which some time before 1744 be-came an independent collection, and the popularity ofwhich today overshadows even that of the Kavitavali.Within the Longer Recension (L) two slightly differentgroups can be further differentiated that I will call L1

and L2. In the group L2, which contains some of theoldest dated manuscripts, the first six poems of the Ba-huk are intermixed with the last kabitts of the vulgateKavitavali. In the evidently more recent L1 group, theforty-four quatrains of the Bahuk are already groupedtogether.22

The distribution of the manuscripts into two recen-sions is further supported by an examination of thevariant readings. Since our earliest manuscript dates toabout seventy years after the poet’s death, it is probablethat the text had already undergone several changes bythe time it was copied. On the whole, however, themanuscripts show a relatively small number of variantreadings. By far most of them arose from non-standardized orthography and from scribal errors, suchas confusing similar-looking characters. The major vari-ants, considerably fewer in number, include synonymssuch as priti (love) instead of neha (affection) or tapa(heat) instead of daha (burning), confusion over difficultreadings, correction of metrical licenses such as omit-ting the word jaga (world) from the beginning of a linein a dactylic savaiya, and the replacement of some com-promise words. For example, in a quatrain making funof ascetics longing for women, in the phrase bindhi kebasi udasi tapi bratadhari maha (executors of great vows,indifferent ascetics, dwelling in the Vindhya mountains)the expression bindhi ke basi (dwellers of the Vindhyamountains) was changed into puri ke basi, saving the faceof the ascetics but creating the muddled meaning “ex-ecutors of great vows, indifferent city-dwellers.”

Manuscripts belonging to the same recension are alsolikely to share the same major variants. On the basis ofthe non-orthographic variants from fifteen poems indifferent parts of the twenty-four substantially longmanuscripts, a cluster analysis on a computer distributesthe manuscripts into two groups with two subgroupseach. On the two-dimensional distance model in Figure1, manuscripts that share more variants are closer toeach other. (The manuscripts are labeled according tothe place of their copying or, when that is not known,

according to the place where they were found.23 Theeccentric Patna2 manuscript is omitted.)

Figure 1: Euclidean distance model

(prepared by Dániel Balogh)

The distribution of the manuscripts is far from ran-dom; rather, they tend to converge into two major gal-axies, which correspond to the two recensions. Thegroup on the left represents the Longer Recension, theone on the right the Shorter Recension. There are vari-ants within a recension, too, but their weight is usuallyless than that of the variants that define the two recen-sions. This shows that the authority of either recensionwas not questioned apart from some stray eccentricmanuscripts. It can also be observed that manuscripts ofthe Longer Recension come mainly from Rajasthan,while those of the shorter one are chiefly from the cen-tral and eastern Hindi areas. Clearly, the manuscriptswere circulated widely in north India. That is why, forexample, our Dhaka manuscript is now found in Vrind-aban. The regional distribution of the recensions, however, suggests that manuscript circulation on a largescale was within a limited region: people in Rajasthanwere more likely to copy another manuscript from Ra-jasthan, while people in the east would rather copy abook from their area.

As has been seen the Longer Recension can furtherbe divided into L1 and L2 groups on the basis of thesequence of the last poems (177 to 183) in the vulgateUttarakanda. These two groups show further structuraldifferences. The L1 cluster as well as the eccentricUdaipur1 includes two apocryphal quatrains after thesingle poem of the Aranyakanda, and two others after v.148 of the Uttarakanda. Those of the L2 cluster do not,although some of them include one. This division isalso present in the textual variants, since in our graphmanuscripts belonging to the L1 cluster are in the upperpart of the group and those belonging to the L2 one arein the lower part. (The eccentricity of Udaipur1 on thebasis of textual variants is apparent on the graph, and it


can also be observed that it really belongs to the L1

cluster and not to L2.) On the basis of similar structuralpeculiarities, the Shorter Recension also can be dividedinto two groups. The S1 manuscripts tend to include theapocryphal 2.21+ quatrain while the S2 ones omit it.(The + sign indicates an “apocryphal” poem followingthe one from the vulgate indicated by number.) Our S1

manuscripts (Bharatpur2, Patna1, Patna3) are in thelower part of the diagram, while the S2 ones are in theupper. An examination of the sequence of poems di-vides the L2, S1, and S2 clusters into further versions andsub-versions. This, however, is not reflected clearly inthe distribution of the textual variants.

On the basis of twenty sample places already proc-essed, it can be observed that either the variant readingsof the two recensions show insignificant differences(e.g., soca versus soka) or those of the Longer Recensionare better but sometimes more difficult. Variants withinthe Shorter Recension tend to be more simplistic ornonsensical. For example, v. 89 in the Uttarakanda isabout Rama’s name, which is more powerful than Ramahimself. In the first line it is illustrated by the case of thepoet Valmiki:

rama bihaya mara japate bigari sudhari kabi-kokila hu ki

[Having abandoned Rama, simply by repeating theword mara, “it is dead,” even the corrupted fate of thepoet-cuckoo came right.]

The third line refers to Draupadi’s calling on God’sname when Duryodhana tried to strip her naked,

nama pratapa bade kusamaja bajai rahi pati padubadhu ki

[Through the great power of the name the honor ofthe Pandavas’ wife was saved openly in a wickedassembly.]

This is, however, the reading only of the Longer Recen-sion. The Shorter reads rama instead of nama (name),not only producing punarukti dosa, the error of repeatingthe same word in the same sense, but also creating con-tradiction with the first line emphasizing the greatnessof God’s name.

It is a generally accepted philological rule that a moredifficult but still meaningful reading, the lectio difficilior,tends to be more authentic than a simpler one, which isnormally the result of the scribe’s not understanding thecomplexity of the text. The more sensible nature of themore difficult reading is illustrated by the third line in v.100 in the Uttarakanda, in a reference to Rama’s takingthe side of a dog against a Brahman mendicant. SinceBrahmans cannot be punished physically, Rama cleverlymade him the abbot of an extremely corrupt monastery,a position the dog had held in his previous life.

sahiba sujana jana svana hu ko paksa kiyo

[The clever lord knowingly took the side even of thedog.]

Again, this is the reading only of the Longer Recension.The shorter one reads jinha (who) instead of jana

(knowingly), destroying the internal rhyming and takingaway one shade of the meaning, the emphasis onRama’s cleverness.

The Shorter Recension seems to also show less diver-sity in its variants, which suggests that its text was editedafter the longer one by an editor less sophisticated thanTulsi. Another case of a better lectio difficilior can be ob-served in the first line of the apocryphal v. 2.11+, whichis a description of Sita’s languor:

sukhi gaye ratanadhara manjula kanja se locana caru cucvai

[The jewels of her lips went dry and her lovely eyes,which are like charming lotuses, are dropping tears.]

Here the Longer Recension has more difficult readingsthan the somewhat clumsily rhyming versions of theshorter one. The readings of the Shorter Recension alsodo not show as much variation among different manuscripts as those of the longer one, where the scribeswere at odds. The scribes of the Longer Recensionseem to have felt uncomfortable with the word cucvai, apresent singular third-person form of the verb cucana (todrip, to ooze) slightly distorted for the sake of rhyme.The fourteen manuscripts of this recension I consultedhave nine variant readings to it, either breaking therhyme or with further distortions. The Shorter Recen-sion simplifies the case and puts citai (she looks up) re-sulting in the flaw of repeating the same word in thesame sense, since citai also figures in the third line. Nev-ertheless, nine out of eleven manuscripts give this read-ing. The two rhymes that follow in the same verse aresimilarly problematic and present several variants.

It is not only the textual variants shared within a re-cension that point to the authority of the editor. Nokabitt of Tulsi is found in the other collections of hisworks, although the syllabic line-pattern of the kavittwas frequently used in the padas of his Gitavali and Vi-nay Patrika. In these collections, however, there are noquatrains and the songs with the kavitt-type lines have arefrain and five or more lines. I was not able to find anykabitt claimed to be Tulsi’s but not present in the Kavi-tavali. This fact suggests that towards the end of his lifeTulsi himself, or maybe someone else with an authorityto respect his text, collected all the kabitts not present inearlier collections and edited them.

This inference is further supported by the content ofthe poems themselves. The last twenty-two poems ofthe Longer Recension refer to astrological events and anepidemic (mahamari) in Benares, indicating a mid-1610sdate for this section.24 Many of these twenty-two quat-rains as well as the Hanumanbahuk note that their poet ishighly respected, and others refer to old age and suffer-ing from diseases. A celebration of recovery would havebeen a good opportunity to show the working of God’sgrace, as the poet did in the case of his childhood dep-rivations. The lack of any reference to recovery in anywork suggests that the Kavitavali, together with the Ha-


numanbahuk, is among the poet’s last works.25 Indeed,tradition holds that the Kavitavali contains Tulsi’s lastpoem, a quatrain (v. 7.180) about glimpsing a kite (ksem-kari), an auspicious bird at the time of setting out for ajourney.26 The style of these last twenty-two poems is soconsistent with that of the previous quatrains that noone has ever questioned their authenticity. The mostobvious explanation for the emergence of the two re-censions is therefore that the Shorter Recension is basedon an earlier version of the Kavitavali prepared beforethe poet’s illness.

Tulsi edited his works several times, as MataprasadGupta has demonstrated in the case of the Gitavali andthe Vinay Patrika as well as the Manas. The Gitavali, aretelling of the Rama story in padas, and the Vinay Patrika, a collection of devotional songs, developed fromtwo collections called in manuscript colophons PadavaliRamayan and Ramgitavali respectively, of which Guptasaw two related manuscripts written apparently by thesame hand in VS 1666 (AD 1609).27 The interrelation-ship of the two is illustrated by the fact that five songsof the Ramgitavali related to the Rama story but not pre-sent in the Padavali Ramayan found their way into theGitavali. Gupta also observes that five padas relating tothe same theme, i.e., the dialogue between Trijata andSita, are in different places in the Padavali Ramayan butgrouped together in the Gitavali. From the absence ofother Padavali Ramayan and Ramgitavali manuscriptsGupta inferred that Tulsi himself had edited the textsand these edited versions spread.

On examining the Manas, Gupta found that its firstversion might have been the second half of theBalakanda (from v. 184, that is, without the initial frameof the story) and the Ayodhyakanda. This section showsunity in form (eight ardhalis in each caupai) and theme:the speaker is the poet himself and the story is linear,starting with the causes of Rama’s birth. In a verse fromthe Uttarakanda, Tulsi claims that his work contains 500caupais. This may refer exactly to this original core of506 caupais. The second version contained Balakanda36–183 and the remaining kandas with Yajnavalkya,Shiva, and Bhusundi as speakers. In a third and lastphase Tulsi prepared the high-soaring introductory part(Balakanda 1–35) and finished the poem.28 A close lookat Tulsi’s other works shows that he not only reeditedhis earlier works but also kept developing his ideas. Pre-occupations of an earlier work can recur in later poemsin a more refined way as was for example the case withsome ideas present in the Ramcaritmanas, which returnedin the Gitavali.29

It would be easy to assume that the two recensions ofthe Kavitavali are two editions, but as we are going to see,the situation is more complicated. The study of trans-mission is made more difficult and more interesting bythe process of contamination resulting in the fact that

some manuscripts are not copies of one single sourcebut rather composite versions. In a few manuscripts asecond hand executed corrections on the basis of athird manuscript. In the case of the Kavitavali, the mostspectacular example of contamination is the Tijaramanuscript, which in its form before the correctionsshows similarities with a cluster within the S2 group ofthe Shorter Recension containing the Alvar, the Har-vard, and the Jaipur5 manuscripts. A second hand, however, added to its wide margins all the poems that weremissing from the Shorter but present in the L1 group ofthe Longer Recension, and whenever possible changedits readings to be similar to those of the Longer Recen-sion.

The “Problematic” Poems and Scribal Argumenta-tion: The Collector and the Purist Tendencies

As discussed above, the Longer Recension in allprobability came into being by adding twenty-two morepoems together with the Hanumanbahuk, all written inTulsi’s last years, to an original Uttarakanda that ended atv. 7.161. This theory, however, does not explain how thecorrupted readings became authoritative in the ShorterRecension and how the Longer Recension came to in-clude some twenty other poems at different points ofthe collection. While the authenticity of the twenty-twopoems after Uttarakanda 161 cannot be questioned andthey are rightly included in modern editions, the cases ofanother twenty-two, namely the nine poems omittedfrom the Shorter Recension and the thirteen apocryphaomitted from the vulgate and at least two manuscripts,should be examined individually.

The chart in Appendix B gives the details of the sus-pected poems. Let us first look at four individual casesthat illustrate different types of omission. The easiestone is the omission of Uttarakanda 113 from amongseveral similar sounding chappays full of the exclamationjaya jaya “Victory! Victory!” which is clearly a scribalerror called homoeoarcta ‘loss of lines between twolines that begin similarly’ in textual criticism and no con-scious argumentation is involved. The omission, how

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ever, was carried over in six inspected manuscripts ofthe Shorter Recension.

Amplification: the “Collector Tendency”

The two apocryphal poems that are included afterUttarakanda 148 show a different picture. At that pointthe section praising various places of pilgrimage (vv.7.138–48) ends, and at v. 7.149 poems to or about Shivastart. These two apocryphal poems are out of contexthere. The first one is about how to reach the attrib-uteless niranjan (stainless) God, the second about thevanity of sacrifice without devotion to Rama. This sec-ond savaiya mentioning “the woman, who is pleasing tothe body,” which might be embarrassing, has a phrase in


the last line that already occurs in two earlier poems. Itsuggests samasyapurti, a popular form of poetic contestin which the poet is given a samasya (problem), a last line,a phrase, or a rhyme, and is asked to write a poem on it.In this case the last line starts with the words ete taje tokaha tulasi jo pai… (What is the point in abandoning allthis, Tulsi, if…), which is similar to the last line of vv.7.43 and 7.44, (aise bhae) to kaha tulasi jo pai… ( “What isthe point in this, Tulsi, if…). The “problem” may havebeen to kaha tulasi jo pai (What is the point, Tulsi, if). Thesamasya determines the form and the style of the poem,and it may not have been difficult for someone to writea savaiya similar to Tulsi's.

The case of the first savaiya is even more inter-esting. It propagates the nirgun (attributeless) aspect ofGod instead of the sagun (that with attributes) adoptedby Tulsi. Nor is the fully developed metaphor, the sangarupaka, a figure that Tulsi was much in favor of using. Inall probability the verse is by Tursidas (Tulsidas) ofSherpur in Rajasthan, the leading poet of the Niranjanisect. Tursidas may have been active in the second halfof the seventeenth century and worshipped the attrib-uteless untainted (niranjan) deity.30

kanana ki patuki kari kai guru ki batiya suni dudha du-havai;

ya ghata ki matuki kari kai taba sadhu ki samgati javanalavai;

dhiraja khambha dhare tulasi taham auguna tina ko jaribahavai;

jnana rai lai mathai mana takra ko tau navanitaniranjana pavai. (v. 7.148+)

[Making a vessel of your ear, listen to the guru’swords and get the milk;

Then making an earthen pot of this body take thecoagulator, the company of sadhus;

Grabbing there the pole of steadfastness—saysTulsi—let the three defects burn and flow away;

Taking the staff of wisdom, churn the soul’s but-termilk, and then get the fresh butter, the UntaintedOne.] (trans. Mária Négyesi and Imre Bangha)

Poem 7.148+ originated from Rajasthan, but it traveledall around the Hindi belt and even the purist Short Re-cension did not find it suspicious. Its insertion into mostmanuscripts supports the idea that the theological con-tent of the poem was of relatively little importance, al-though for the reasons mentioned above, this is a poemthat one would expect the scribes to leave out. It is pre-sent in almost all manuscripts except the bulk of theoldest L2 group, where only two of the seven handwrit-ten books give it. This suggests that this poem was notpresent in the earliest versions of the collection but be-came unanimously accepted later. (It should, however,be mentioned that its omission from Prayag1, however,is not due to scribal argumentation, since this manu-

script is eccentric at this point with the omission of ablock of seven poems, vv. 7.149–55).

Two manuscripts come to our help: one of the oldestdated ones, Prayag2 (1772), and another one written inDhaka in 1830. Both of them include these two poemsand end at this point with a proper colophon, thusforming the shortest “complete” text of the Kavitavali. Itis tempting to speculate that Prayag2 and Dhaka withoutthese extras represent the earliest version of the collec-tion, to which the closing sections were later added. Theother manuscripts ending at v. 7.148 include these twopoems, while other scribes instead attached to the col-lection the closing sections (vv. 7.149–83) together withthe Hanumanbahuk. The breach, however, seems to havebeen soon healed and most manuscripts available todayinclude both the apocrypha and then the closing section.The quick healing of the breach is indicative of a strongcollector tendency in textual transmission.

It should be mentioned while speaking about thecollector tendency that not only poems were collectedbut also contexts. Although many quatrains have beencontextualized over the centuries, we do not have muchclue as to when. There is, however, an early instance ofcontextualization that can be dated. It is a variant ofsavaiya 128 from the Uttarakanda, which figures on aMewar miniature painting from around 1725–30. Thequatrain is introduced as Tulsi’s reply to Emperor Ak-bar, who asked him why Hindus worshipped stones.The poem and the painting evoke the story of the Man-lion incarnation of Vishnu who became manifest from astone pillar to save his devotee and to kill the skepticaland cruel king Hiranyakashipu.31

Athetisation: the “Purist Tendency”

The case of the embarrassing apocryphal v. 2.11+about Sita’s languor shows a different picture:

sukhi gaye ratanadhara manjula kanja se locana carucucvai;

karunanidhi kanta turanta kahyau kita duri mahabanabhuri jo svai;

sarasiruha locana nira hi dekhi citai raghunayaka siya paihvai;

abahim bana bhamini bujhati hau taji kosalaraja puri dinadvai.

[The jewels of her lips went dry and her lovelyeyes, which are like charming lotuses, dropped tears.

Suddenly she asked her beloved, the Treasury ofCompassion, “How far is the Great Forest, which isso huge?”

Observing tears in her lotus-eyes the Lord of theRaghus looked at Sita (compassionately).

Oh, passionate woman, we have left the city ofKoshala’s king only two days ago and you already askfor the forest?]


The poem is awkward because Rama’s answer can betaken as impolite and suggests his irritation with Sita. Itis omitted from three manuscripts of the L2 cluster andsurprisingly from one of the Shorter Recension as well.It is, however, present in the rigorous Sitapur1. Its textis sometimes obscure and, as has been discussed above,the rhymes of the Longer Recension fit better into theoverall context but are more difficult to understand thanthose of the shorter one.

Shall this poem be discarded as inauthentic, not suit-ing the generally noble approach of Rama and of Tulsi?Or, on the contrary, can anything similar be found inTulsi’s other works? From an examination of the songsof the Gitavali, a clear relationship can be detected be-tween the text of its songs and the quatrains of theKavitavali. Tulsi often recycled the same themes, evenusing the same phrases in his quatrains. The followingone and a quarter song from the Gitavali, for example,are recycled in Ayodhyakanda 11 and 12.

“Tell me how far is the forest grove

Where we set forth, oh son of Koshala’s Lord,”asks Sita in distress,

“Oh, Lord of my Life, you go barefoot to a foreignland having abandoned and broken connection withall pleasure.

Stop for a while under a tree, let me fan you andsweep away the dust from your feet.”

When the Lord of Tulsidas heard the words of hisbeloved, his lotus-eyes filled with water.

“Where is the forest now!? Listen, oh beautifulwoman!” Then the Lord of the Raghus looked at herfull of love.

(Gitavali, v. 2.13)

Rama looks at Sita again and again.

Knowing that she was thirsty, Lakshmana went tofetch some water...

(Gitavali, v. 2.14)

When from the city came forth Raghuvira’s lady

she set but two paces on the road with courage,

On her forehead glistened drops of perspiration

and her sweet lips went dry.

Then she enquired, “How much further must wego now?

when can we put up a little shelter made ofleaves?”

Seeing his wife thus sadly discomforted,

from her husband’s eyes most beautiful tearsflowed forth.

(Kavitavali, v. 2.11, trans. F. R. Allchin)

“Lakshmana has gone for water, he’s just a boy,

dear,

Let us stand in the shade an hour to await him,

I will wipe your sweat and fan you,

and wash those feet scorched by the burningsand...”

(Kavitavali, v. 2.12, trans. F. R. Allchin)

While the middle section of Gitavali v. 2.13 has equivalents in Kavitavali v. 2.11, the beginning and the endrather reflect the idea of our apocryphal quatrain above,with some irritation in Rama’s words. Therefore thiskabitt should be considered a weak but authentic prod-uct of the great poet. It is quite understandable thatsome scribes and the modern editors felt uneasy aboutincluding it among the works of Tulsidas.

It can also be considered that Tulsi did not alwaysproduce work of the highest quality. One of his earliestand weakest works, the Ramlala Nahachu (Rama’s NailParing) puts Rama’s wedding in Ayodhya rather than inMithila, showing that even the greatest poet is not freefrom contradictions. Scholars are at odds in discardingthis short composition as inauthentic, since Tulsi’s namefigures in it already in a manuscript dated from 1608 (VS1665).

Arguments for Omission

The table in Appendix B lists the suspected poemsand the possible reasons for their omission, whetherauthentic or not. A poem becomes suspect for variouspossible reasons. Arguments relating to syntax, metrics,and structure figure more often than the contents of thepoems. Although the reason given by me for suspicionis arbitrary, there is an obvious indication that no theo-logical reasoning was involved in the argumentation,since the scribes did not suspect even the clearly apoc-ryphal v. 7.148+.

We can further observe that many of the suspiciouspoems show some kind of metrical, stylistic, or struc-tural weakness in the eyes of the copying scribes. It isdifficult to imagine how these poems found their wayinto a popular collection if they were not there origi-nally, and in most of the cases we can presume omissionrather than insertion.

The concept of weakness, however, is relative, since itseems that Tulsi’s poetic licenses were regarded as flawsonly by later generations. Similarly, in the case of Kali-dasa’s Raghuvamsa , later editors changed verses thatcontained the Sanskrit word aha (he/she says) in the pastsense even though Kalidasa repeatedly made use of thisdevice in his Kumarasambhava.32 A major poetic licenseTulsi took was the freedom to add or omit one or twosyllables in the beginning of a line in a savaiya. Five outof the twenty-two apocryphal poems have such unmet-rical lines, which occur in several other places as well.33


Four suspect cases are due to a supposed samasyapurtior variation. It is however, not necessary to assume thatanother poet wrote a quatrain on the same line. It mayhave been the original poet himself, and a similar proc-ess was not questioned in several other cases within theKavitavali.34

Yet another argument for omission is structurallooseness or obscurity. A later editor, or perhaps Tulsihimself, may have discarded the poems that he foundaesthetically weak. The case of a kavitt from the Hanu-manbahuk strongly suggests that it was a later editor whodiscarded the “lame” poems. The third line of the vul-gate of Hanumanbahuk v. 40 is present only in the manuscripts of the L1 group; an entirely different reading isgiven in the L2 manuscripts, and the whole poem isomitted from the extremely “purist” Sitapur1. Whatpicture does the oldest (Prayag1) manuscript present? Ithas only three lines and the suspicious third line ismissing. There is, however, some deliberate lacuna at theend to indicate a missing line. We may suspect that in-complete poems were originally also part of the collec-tion, especially when we take into consideration that weare dealing with Tulsi’s last poems and the dying poetmay not have been able to revise and complete them all.Later copyists, however, did not accept the fact that thepoet-saint may have written unfinished quatrains andeither completed Hanumanbahuk v. 40 or simply omittedit. Here the idea that the poet-saint must have producedonly perfect poems was at work. The case of the apoc-ryphal v. 7.106++ is similar. The second line is missingfrom Prayag1 and there is some empty space at the end.The quatrain is omitted from Sitapur1 and from manyother manuscripts including those of the Shorter Recension.35

Conclusion

The relatively small number of variant readings andthe more or less unquestioned structure of the collec-tion suggest that the Kavitavali goes back to a writtensource and that there has never been a period of oraltransmission as there has in the case of Kabir, Mira Bai,or Surdas. The use of the quatrain form also hints at awritten tradition. The fact that early kabitts appear atleast as much in a courtly context as in bhakti poetryindicates that the form was perhaps more aristocraticthan the song, pada, used almost exclusively for devo

-

tional purposes.

On the basis of our previous observations we canattempt to reconstruct some phases of the textual his-tory, although this may hardly be more than speculation.As has been mentioned, the Shorter Recension includesneither Tulsi’s last poems nor several apocrypha, whilemost manuscripts of the Longer Recension containboth. We have also seen that the readings of the LongerRecension are often more difficult but better. In all

probability several “suspicious” poems were present inthe collection but were discarded later by the editor ofthe Shorter Recension. It may well be the case thatsomebody observed the fact that apocrypha, such as theone about the indescribable, untainted God by Tursidas,were creeping into the collection. Making use of a ver-sion up to Uttarakanda 148 or 161 he purged the text ofmany poems and maybe also inserted some quatrainsboth at the end and in the Kiskindhakanda to fill the gapcreated by the small number of poems in this canto.

The emergence of the Shorter Recension did notsuppress the tradition initiated by the Longer Recension,and both had their sometimes independent, sometimesintertwining histories and came to include other apocry-phal quatrains. Naturally there was contamination be-tween the two recensions resulting in occasional purgingof the Longer Recension, as may be the case with theSitapur1 and Hoshiarpur1 manuscripts, or inclusion ofomitted poems into the shorter one, as in the Tijaramanuscript.

The two recensions also determined the publicationhistory of this work. The first published edition of the

Kavitavali from Calcutta in 181536 was based on theShorter Recension, the later Benares and Lucknow ver-sions, such as the one edited by Durga Misra in 1858, onthe Longer Recension.37 The modern vulgate text is acomposite version of the two that gradually developedduring the nineteenth century.

We have seen that the two standardized recensionswere copied for more than two centuries. Several poemswere added to them and some others, even though in allprobability written by Tulsi, were omitted. While in thecase of Kabir or Surdas collections the collector ten-dency was overwhelming and resulted in a dramatic in-crease in the number of poems, in the Kavitavali thewritten tradition did not permit many outside quatrainsto be included, and the purging tendency of a puristeditor kept the number of poems down. Most of thepoems excluded from about half of the manuscriptsshow poetic failings rather than ideological digression,indicating that the elimination of aesthetic or structuraldeficiencies was a more important editorial preoccupa-tion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thanfaithfulness to the received text. In contrast to the morepedestrian purist selection, the weaknesses shown bothin the earliest extant manuscript and in the suspectedpoems present a brighter and more human poet withflaws and imperfections.

Appendix A: Manuscript Sources

The manuscripts examined in this paper and their date of copying

Alvar 1877

Harvard

Tijara 1891

Jaipur5 1899

Bharatpur2

Patna1 1894


Sitapur2 1893

Patna3 1985?

Dhaka 1944

Prayag2 1829

Patna2 1933

Bharatpur3

Jodhpur1 1847

Bikaner 1919

Jaipur4 1858

Jaipur7

Udaipur2

Bharatpur1 1888

Vrindaban2 1897

Udaipur1

Uniyara 1912

Prayag1 1749

Sitapur1 1890

Jaipur6

Appendix B: The Apocrypha and the Poems Omitted

from the Shorter RecensionPoem Theme Possible Reason for

OmissionOmittedfrom

Pre-sentin

2.3 Kaushalya com-plains to Sumitra.

Complaint againstKaikeyi (?).

S+Sitapur1,Hoshiarpur1

L

2.4 Sumitra’s answer:“No happiness iswithout sorrow.”

Complaint againstKaikeyi (?).

S+Sitapur1,

Hoshiarpur1

L

2.11+ Sita’s languorand Rama’s re-proachful words.

Obscure rhymesand unmetrical firstline. Rama is pre-sented as less no-ble.

Alvar,Bharatpur3,Jaipur3,Jaipur6

(L)+S

2.21+ Sita explains thatRama is her hus-band.

It is rude to pointdirectly to one’sown husband.

S2+Jaipur3,Bharatpur3,Jaipur6

(L)+

S1

3.1+ The whole kandaretold in onlyfour lines. Similardigest as in thec a s e o fParashuram in1.22. or the firstsix poems of theUttarakanda.

No devotion ex-pressed.

Apocryphal, writ-ten to fill the gap(?).

Bharatpur3,Jaipur6, Si-tapur1

(L)+S

4.1++ The greatness ofRama’s name il-lus t ra ted onCandraprabhaand Sampati.

Obscure and loose.

Apocryphal, writ-ten to fill the gap(?).

Bharatpur3,Hoshiar-pur1,

Jaipur6, Si-tapur1,

(L)+S

7.44 “What is allwea l th worthwithout love forRama?” A varia-tion on 7.43 and7.148 ++.

Samasyapurti to 7.43 S+Sitapur1,Hoshiarpur1

L

7.91 “I do not haveRama in myheart, only mytongue declaresit.”

Obscure and hy

-

permetrical lastline.

S L

7.92 “Tulsi is yours, oRama!”

Two unmetricallines.

Obscure syntax.

S L

7.93 Rama’s grace isgratuitous.

Hypermetricalthird line.

S L

7.94 “Pe o p l e a r ehaughty but Tulsii s yours , oRama.”

Loose structure. S L

7.95 Rama is a greatgiver but he ac-cepted the gift ofthe lowly.

Hypermetricalthird line. Toomuch Persian in thelast line (?).

S L

the lowly. last line (?).

7.96 Everyone worksfor the fire ofthe stomach.

Obscure secondline.

S L

7.106+ Different opin-ions about Tulsi’scaste.

A variation on7.106 and 7.108.

Weak last line. S+Hoshiar-pur1, Sita-pur1

L

7.106

++

Whatever Tulsihas is because ofRama. (The linewith signaturemay be a lateraddition since itis absent fromPrayag1.)

Originally incom-plete (?).

S+Hoshiar-pur1,

Jodhpur1,Sitapur1

L

7.109+ A reproach tomen giving upthe singing ofRama’s name.

Broken rhythm. S+Jodhpur1,Prayag1, Si-tapur1

L

7.113 Praise of Rama.One among sev-eral c h a p p a y sstart ing with“jaya jaya.”

Omitted by mis-take.

Alvar, Bi-kaner, Har-vard,Prayag2, Si-tapur2, Ti-jara

L+(S)

7.127+ Salvation is pos-sible by Rama.

? S+Hoshiarpur1,Sitapur1

L

7.127

++

Salvation is pos-sible by Rama,who is the way ofthe Vedas and ofthe Agamas.

? S+ Sitapur1,Hoshiarpur1

L

7.141+ The virtues ofthe river Manda-kini.

Confusing mathe-matics in the lastline. (Alternativeline introduced insome manuscripts.)

S+Bharatpur3,Hoshiarpur1,

Sitapur1

L

7.148+ How to get thefresh butter, theuntainted (niran-jan) God.

Out of context.(Probably by theNiranjani TursiDas.)

Bharatpur3,Hoshiarpur1, Prayag1,Sitapur1

S+(L)

7.148

++

What if one re-nounces theworld but doesnot love Rama?

A variation on7.43 and 7.44.

Out of context.Samasyapurti.

Mentions “woman,who is pleasing tothe body.” (?)

Bharatpur3,

Jodhpur1,Prayag1, Si-tapur1,Varanasi2

S+(L)

7.158+ Description ofShiva. A variationon the last lineand the rhymesof 7.158.

Samasyapurti. S+Hoshiarpur1, Sitapur1

L

The letters L and S stand for the Longer and ShorterRecensions respectively. When in paranthesis they referto only a part of the recension.

NOTES1As we are going to see, in the recension to which three

(Prayag1, Pratapgarh, Jodhpur1) of our four pre-nineteenth-century complete manuscripts belong, the Bahuk follows theUttarakanda. The quatrains of the Hanumanbahuk in printededitions are sometimes presented as an appendix to the Kavi-tavali, but more often as a short independent collection.

2Personal communication of Prof. Govind Sharma (March2003)


3Ronald Stuart McGregor, Hindi Literature from Its Beginningsto the Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984),89.

4McGregor, Hindi Literature, 120.5McGregor, Hindi Literature, 92, 93, and 95.6McGregor, Hindi Literature, 91, 100.7Tulsi-granthavali II: Manasetar ekadas granth, ed. Ramcandra

Shukla and Bhagavandin and Brajratnadas, 2nd ed. (Benares:Nagaripracarini Sabha, 1974).

8Tulsidas, Ramcaritmanas, ed. Vishvanath Prasad Mishra,(Benares: Kashiraj, 1962).

9Mataprasad Gupta, Tulsidas: Ek samalocnatmak adhyayan, 6thed. (Allahabad: Lokbharti, 2002).

10 At present the Tulsidas Textual Study Group is working

on developing the edition into a project of the Society forSouth Asian Studies (British Academy). The publication isexpected around 2007.

11Only one case of insertion can be documented with cer-tainty. The presence of an “apocryphal” Niranjani poem, dis-cussed below, may be due to an effort of sectarian appropria-tion. The fact, however, that it was an isolated case suggeststhat simply the popularity of the poem helped its ascension tothe Kavitavali-corpus.

12F. R. Allchin, introduction to Kavitavali, by Tulsidas, trans.F. R. Allchin (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), 65.Some people consider Tulsi’s witnessing the burning ofBenares some time after the completion of the Manas as amotive behind writing the long description of the burning ofLanka (personal communication of Prof. Siyaram Tiwari,November 1996).

13Manuscript nr. 3–9 / 5264 at Hindi Sahitya Sammelan,Allahabad.

14The first eighteen folios of the manuscript are missingand fol. 19 starts with the end of v. 7.55. A calculation showsthat there was no space for the entire Kavitavali in it. There areabout 380 syllables on one folio, and the some 5,500 syllablesof the Uttarakanda up to 7.55 would occupy about fourteenand a half folios.

15Gupta, Tulsidas, 212–19.16Nagaripracarini Sabha, Benares, Ms Nr. 2970.17About the growth of the cult see Philip Lutgendorf, Ha-

numan (forthcoming).18Poems 2.3-4 and 7.44 are missing in all cases; in addition,

poem 7.113 is missing from six manuscripts.19Poems 2.11+, 3.1+, 3.1++, 7.148+, 7.148++. (The +

sign indicates an apocryphal poem following the one from thevulgate indicated by number; the double + sign indicates thesecond of two sequential apocryphal poems.)

20Poems 2.11+, 3.1+, 3.1++, 7.148+, 7.148++. (The +sign indicates an apocryphal poem following the one from thevulgate indicated by number; the double + sign indicates thesecond of two sequential apocryphal poems.)

21Poems 7.106+, 7.106++, 7.109+, 7.127+, 7.127++,7.141++, and 7.158+. There are also four poems that areomitted from two manuscripts and three apocrypha that fig-ure in one or two, but these are not relevant to our investiga-

tion, since they represent relatively isolated cases and themanuscripts involved are more or less recent ones.

22L2 =176–180, Bahuk 1–6, 181–3, Bahuk 7–44; L1 = 176,181–3, 177–180, Bahuk 1–44. In the L2 group Hanumanbahukis thus interrupted by the three last poems of the Uttarakanda,but in L1 those referring to Hanuman are uninterrupted andthe three poems are put after 176. We should also note at thispoint that 7.180 is believed to be Tulsi’s last poem. In fact, itis the last poem before the Bahuk in most of the manuscripts,although not in modern editions. Its theme of departure mayhave predestined it to be the last in the collection.

23For full details of the manuscripts, see the critical editionin progress.

24The Rudrabisi, or “Twenty years of Rudra” (7.170 andpoem nr. 240 in another work, the Dohavali) refers either to1566–85 (according to Kannu Pillai, Indian Ephemeries) or to1598–1618 (according to Sudhakar Dvivedi). See Gupta, Tul-sidas, 183. The Min ki sanicari, or “Saturn in Pisces” (7.177)took place from March 1583 (Caitra Sukla 5 VS 1640) tillMay-June 1585 (Jyestha VS 1642) and again from March 1612(Caitra Sukla 2 VS 1669) till May-June 1614 (Jyestha VS 1671),according to Sudhakar Dvivedi. See Gupta, Tulsidas, 186 and504–8. There were three major epidemics during Tulsi’s life-time. The famines of 1555–6 and of 1595–8 are supposed tohave been followed by pestilence, and a new disease, bubonicplague, appeared in 1616. See Vincent A. Smith, Akbar theGreat Mogul, 1542–1605 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917),397–8; and Jahangir, The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri or Memoirs of Jahangir,vol. 1, trans. Alexander Rogers and Henry Beveridge (Lon-don: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909), 330, 442.

25Tulsi’s most influential biographer, Mataprasad Gupta,considered the Kavitavali, together with the Hanumanbahuk, asdating from the period 1610–23 (Gupta, Tulsidas, 251–4). Sev-eral scholars, including the English translator F. R. Allchin,followed his ideas (introduction to Kavitavali, 63–6). Shyam-sundar Das and Pitambardatt Barthwal, however, relying onthe Mul gosaim-carit (claimed to have been preserved in amanuscript from 1791), argue that the Barvai Ramayan, theHanumanbahuk, the Vairagya-sandipani, and the Ramayana-praunaare Tulsi’s last works (see Gupta, Tulsidas, 69) while MadanlalSharma and Gitarani Sharma consider the Vinay Patrika to behis swan song although they do not provide any argument forthis supposition (Kavitavali: bhakti darsan aur kavya [Delhi: Ra-jesh, 1990], 56).

26Allchin, introduction to Kavitavali, 66.27The Padavali Ramayan manuscript was incomplete, con-

taining only thirty-five padas of the Sundarakanda and nineteenof the Uttarakanda. The order of padas is different in the be-ginning of each kanda. The Ramgitavali manuscript was com-plete, though with some serious lacunae, containing 158 padasin an order largely different from that of the Vinay Patrika.Gupta, Tulsidas, 212–19.

28The Padavali Ramayan manuscript was incomplete, con-taining only thirty-five padas of the Sundarakanda and nineteenof the Uttarakanda. The order of padas is different in the be-ginning of each kanda. The Ramgitavali manuscript was com-plete, though with some serious lacunae, containing 158 padasin an order largely different from that of the Vinay Patrika.


Gupta, Tulsidas, 212–19.29Gupta, Tulsidas, 237–41.30McGregor, Hindi Literature, 140. My attribution is merely

hypothetical based on the use of the term niranjan and on thestrong propagation of the attributeless god. Although thenirgun aspect of God is occasionally present in Tulsi’s works,its propagation even in the most prominent places such asManas 1,108.4–109.1 or 1,116.1 is much milder than in Tursi-das. Unfortunately Tursidas’s poetry has never been editedand the only monograph I was able to find, oddly enough,does not seem to know about any savaiya in its survey of thepoetic forms the Niranjani poet used. See Satyanarayan Misra,Santakavi Tursidasa Niranjani sahitya aura siddhanta (Kanpur:Sahitya Niketan, 1974), 134-8.

31Andrew Topsfield, Court Painting at Udaipur: Art under thePatronage of the Maharanas of Mewar (Zurich: Artibus Asiae,2001), Illustration 125 (on p. 150), prepared under MaharanaSangram Singh and probably commissioned by PancoliKishan Das. The introductory lines and the savaiya are as fol-lows:

“sriramji / patsajinem bhagata tulasidasaji nava betham thakampuchyo / so hinduam re patharahem kyom pujem hem / jini uparemtulasidasaji kabitta kahyo he

karhi kara bamna karapam nigahi pitu kala karala bilokanabhage / ramma kaham saba thamma he ham suni ha ka tiham nara-kehari jage / beri bidara bhaye kirapala kahe pehalada hi kemanuragem / prita pratita barhi turasi taba tem saba pahamna pujanalage//”

32Dominic Goodall, “Bhute ‘aha’ iti pramadat: Firm Evidencefor the Direction of Change Where Certain Verses of theRaghuva m s h a Are Variously Transmitted,” Zeitschrift derDeutschen Morgenländ Gesellschaft 151:1 (2001): 103–24.

33Vv. 1.20, 2.5, 2.7, 6.5, 6.13, 6.33, 7.1, 7.12, 7.34, 7.43, 7.47,7.49, 7.51, 7.52, 7.88, 7.103, 7.106, 7.132, 7.147, 7.153, 7.154.

34Vv. 1.2 and 1.6, 1.3 and 1.4, 2.1 and 2.2, 7.40 and 7.41,7.43 and 7.44, 7.112–7.114 share the same last line. Partialsimilarity can be observed in the cases of 5.11 and 5.12 (onlythe last word is shared), 6.1 and 6.2 (parallel construction),.The last word is similar in 6.44 and 45, in 7.75 and 83, and in7.88-7.90.

35This is, however, not an overall model, and the cases ofomission are more complex. Prayag1 omits one or more linesin three more cases in the Uttarakanda (107 111, 123), whenall later manuscripts give the vulgate reading. The apocryphalsavaiya 7.141+ is missing from the handwritten books of theShorter Recension. The fourth line is absent in the Jodhpur1and in Udaipur1 manuscripts, while in Jaipur4 the last line ofthe poem is erased and a new first line is added. The samestructure with the same four lines is followed in three moremanuscripts (Jaipur7, Tijara [marginalia], Uniyara). Lines canalso be omitted on purpose, as was done with the embarrass-ing last line of v. 2.11+ in two manuscripts (Vrindaban1 andPatna2).

36Tulsidas, Kavitta Ramayana, ed. Baburam Sarasvat (Khidir-pur: Sanskrit Press, 1815).

37Tulsidas, Kavitta Ramayana, ed. Durga Misra (Benares: Di-vakar Chapekhana, 1858). The editor mentions that the text isbased on the manuscript of Pandit Raghunathdas Gosvami.

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