Illustrated lecture by Prof. Philip Lutgendorf, scholar of South Asia, Emeritus Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies, University of Iowa and author of the award winning book The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas (University of California Press: 1991), Hanuman's Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey (Oxford University Press, New York: 2006) among others

Chair: Prof. Ananya Vajpeyi, Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

The poet-saint Tulsidas’s immensely popular retelling of the Ramayana saga, Ramcaritmanas (ca.1574 AD), is structured as an allegorical Himalayan sacred lake symmetrically bounded by four seven-tiered ghats. The narrators (in order of appearance) are the human author Tulsidas, the Vedic sage Yajnavalkya, the god Shiva, and a crow named Bhushundi. Whereas the first three are either human or (in Shiva’s case) divine-anthropomorphic, the final one is an avian form. Why did the poet choose this unusual figure to conclude whose epic narrative and to deliver, in effect, the “last word”? 

(Collaboration: American Institute of Indian Studies)