Metrical and Narrative Structure

The Ramcaritmanas is a poem of roughly 12,800 lines divided into 1073 "stanzas" (to be defined shortly), which are set in seven "books" (kand^[*] ). The latter division is common in texts of the Ramayan tradition and reflects the primacy and influence of the Valmiki epic, which is so organized. All but one of Tulsi's books bear the same names as those of the Sanskrit epic,^[35] but this resemblance does not extend to their contents and relative lengths. Tulsi's first book, Balkand^[*] , for example, is his longest, comprising roughly a third of the epic and including much introductory material not directly related to the Ram narrative; the Sanskrit epic's opening book is its second shortest and commences the story of Ram with relatively little digression.

Although by the standards of Indian epics the Manas is fairly compact (it is less than a third the length of Valmiki's version), it is nonetheless substantial, and the line-count noted above reflects a poem that in printed editions typically runs to between five and seven hundred pages. The titles and relative lengths of the seven books are as follows:^[36]

Viewed in terms of the relative lengths of its sections, the work presents a rough symmetry: the first two and last two books are longer (the last two are lengthier than the stanza count suggests, as their stanzas themselves are generally longer), and the middle three shorter. The

[35] The exception is the sixth book, to which Valmiki gives the title Yuddhakanda^[*] , "The Book of War."

[36] In all citations, the kand^[*] will be indicated by number: "1" for Balkand^[*] "2" for Ayodhyakand^[*] , etc.

[37] This book contains a controversial stanza that some commentators regard as an interpolation; the Kashiraj edition, for example (published by the maharaja of Banaras under the editorship of Vishvanath Prasad Mishra) assigns no number to the troubling stanza (although it includes it), yielding an Ayodhya of 325 stanzas.

shortest book, Kiskindha^[*]kand^[*] , which describes Ram's encounter with the monkeys who will be instrumental in recovering his abducted wife, serves as a turning point in the narrative. Much of the first and last books consists of extended "introduction" and "epilogue" to the core narrative, which begins about halfway through the first book and ends about a third of the way into the final book.

The term "stanza" reflects no equivalent term in Hindi but is a useful designation for the conventional divisions of the text, which are based on a repeated sequential use of two meters: caupai and doha .^[38] The former refers to a two-line unit containing four equal parts. Its individual lines are each known as an ardhali (half) and comprise thirty-two "beats" or "instants" (matra ), the metrical units of most Hindi prosody, which are based on the perceived relative duration of long and short vowels. Each ardhali is divided in turn into two feet (pad ) of sixteen beats, separated by a caesura (indicated in writing by a vertical line called a viram , or "stop"; a double viram marks the end of a full line). A sample line from Balkand^[*] is given below; vowels marked with a macron and diphthongs are regarded as long and carry the relative weight of two beats; the others are short.

akaracarilakha caurasi | jatijivajala thala nabha vasi ||

(There exist) 8,400,000 forms of life, born by four modes, dwelling in water, on earth, and in the atmosphere.
1.8.1

Although in theory a caupai should consist of two such lines, in practice the term refers to any single line in this meter, and a person asked to recite "a caupai " from the Manas will usually quote an ardhali such as the one given above. Moreover, many stanzas contain an uneven number of lines, indicating that Tulsidas himself did not feel constrained to place such verses in pairs. Most modern editions of the Manas number each line in caupai meter as an individual unit, and this convention will be followed here.

As the epic's predominant verse form, caupais^[*] have been likened by the poet to the lotus leaves that crowd the surface of a lake. They are interspersed, however, with the blossoming lotuses of more "ornamental" meters. The most common of these is the doha and its variant form, the soratha^[*] . A doha is a couplet, each line of which consists of two unequal parts, usually of thirteen and eleven beats respectively; in reci-

[38] For a general introduction to Hindi prosody, see Kellogg, A Grammar of the Hindi Language; caupai meter is discussed beginning on p. 578.

tation, the break between the two parts of each line can be discerned, but in notation it is not shown.

Hearing this, people who lived along the road
came running, leaving homes and work.
Delighted to behold the embodiments of love,
all obtained their births' reward.
2.221

A soratha^[*] is a doha's mirror image: two lines each divided into eleven and thirteen-beat segments, with the rhyme falling at the end of the first segment rather than at the end of the line.

Shiva's heart was greatly agitated
but Sati did not perceive his secret.
Tulsi says, he craved sight of the Lord;
his mind hesitated but his eyes were greedy.
1.48b

Throughout the epic, each series of caupais^[*] —commonly eight or ten lines—is bracketed by one or more dohas or sorathas^[*] . These couplets are numbered consecutively throughout each book, and it is the repeated structural unit of caupais^[*] + doha/soratha^[*] that I refer to as a "stanza." Thus, for example, the citation "7.24.6" refers to the sixth line in the twenty-fourth stanza of the seventh book (Uttar kand^[*] )—the stanza that concludes with doha number 24.^[39] When a stanza concludes with a series of couplets, it is the convention to assign them a single number and to designate individual couplets with letters of the alphabet. Thus "24c" refers to the third of a series of couplets at the end of stanza twenty-four.

The use of the caupai-doha stanza as the basic structural unit for a poetic narrative was not original to Tulsidas but appears to have had a long history in the North Indian vernaculars. In Avadhi itself—the dia-

[39] One could argue that a stanza might just as reasonably begin with a doha/soratha^[*] , since all but one of the kands^[*] open with invocatory verses in these meters. In fact, both notation systems are in use, but oral performers typically seem to regard the doha as a unit of closure, and the authoritative commentary Manaspiyus^[*] (ed. Sharan) prefers this approach. As a consequence of this convention, invocatory dohas will be designated by a "zero" (0) in notation; thus "2.0" refers to the doha that opens Ayodhyakand^[*] .

lect of the Manas —it had been used in a number of allegorical romances by Sufi poets, beginning with the Candayan of Maulana Daud (c. 1380) and including the great Padmavati of Malik Muhammad Jayasi (c. 1540).^[40]

A third meter that occurs with fair frequency in the Manas is harigitikachand —"meter of short songs to Vishnu"; this is generally shortened to chand in notation. Verses in this meter seem to be inserted at moments of heightened emotion and serve to elaborate on something that has already been described rather than to advance the flow of the narrative, for which the more prosaic caupai is preferred. Chands are nearly always placed between a group of caupais^[*] and their concluding couplet; thus they are contained within "stanzas" as defined above, and in my notation simply continue the numbering of stanza lines. A chand comprises four equal lines of twenty-six to thirty beats. The final syllables in each line rhyme and there is often internal rhyme within lines; the rhyme scheme, combined with the frequent use of alliteration, gives this meter an especially rhythmic and musical quality. Appropriately, it is the chands among all the verses of the Manas that are most often set to melodies and sung as devotional hymns.^[41] A famous example occurs in the passage celebrating Ram's liberation of Ahalya—a woman transformed into a stone by her husband's curse. The first two lines of this chand read:

parasata pada pavanasoka nasavanapragata^[*]bhaitapa punjasahi |
dekhata Raghunayakajana sukha dayakasanamukha hoi kara jori rahi ||
1.211.1,2

In his 1887 translation F. S. Growse attempted to simulate the rhyme scheme of some of these musical verses; for the above lines he offered:

At the touch so sweet of his hallowed feet,
she awoke from her long unrest,
and meekly adored her sovereign lord,
awaiting his high behest.^[42]

Whatever the aesthetic merits of this approach, it necessitated taking considerable liberties with the text; a more literal translation would be:

[40] On the genre of Sufi premakhyan (allegorical romance) in Avadhi, see Millis, "Malik Muhammad Jayasi."

[41] For example, in one commercial recording of Manas hymns (SriRamayanamah^[*] , Bombay: Polydor of India, Ltd., 1979), nearly all the selections are in chand meter.

[42] Growse, The Ramayana^[*]of Tulasidasa , 133.

At the touch of his holy feet, which destroys grief,
that treasury of asceticism became manifest.
Beholding Ram, who delights his devotees,
she stood before him with palms joined.

Meters other than the caupai , doha/soratha^[*] , and chand occur only rarely in the Manas . They include invocatory, Sanskrit slokas , which open each book and close the final one, and occasional hymns of praise (stuti ) spoken by characters—learned Brahmans or sages—who might be expected to address the Lord in Sanskrit; several of these are widely used in worship today.^[43] Another Hindi meter called tomar chand (spear meter)—similar to the caupai but with shorter and more strident lines—occurs twice during battle scenes (3.20.1-13; 6.113.1-16), to which it was evidently thought to be well suited.

Apart from its division into books and stanzas, the Manas has, in the view of its audience, a further implicit division into episodes (prasang^[*] ) and dialogues (samvad ). These appear to reflect the conventions and constraints of oral storytelling and sequential recitation.^[44] Their acquired names are often printed in the margins of modern editions for the convenience of devotees and are commonly invoked in oral discourse on the epic—thus a traditional scholar may be asked to expound the "episode of the departure for the forest" (van-gaman prasang^[*] ) or "Ram's dialogue with the boatman" (Ram-kevat^[*]samvad ). Certain beloved passages have acquired names that seem to bear little relation to their narrative content; thus, Lakshman's philosophical discourse to the tribal chief Guha in Book Two^[45] is commonly referred to as Laksman^[*]gita (The Gita expounded by Lakshman)—implying the similarity of its message to that delivered by Krishna to Arjuna in the Mahabharata .

One other convention deserves note, for it is used frequently in all the recurring "ornamental" meters of the epic: the bhanita , or signature of the poet. This usually consists of the word "Tulsi" or "Tulsidas" placed in a line in such a way that it must be construed to mean "Tulsidas says . . ." or taken as an interjection ("O Tulsi!"). Although such a signature was a convention in medieval lyric poetry that added an element of personal witness to the verses, within the epic scope of the Manas it was adapted to serve an additional purpose: to remind the

[43] E.g., Atri's hymn to Ram (3.4.1-24); Sutikshna's hymn to Ram (3.11.3-16); a pious Brahman's hymn to Shiva (7.108.1-18).

[44] Weightman suggests that it is in part the episodic structure of the Manas that makes it "read" badly in translation and gives Western readers a poor impression of the effect of the original; "The Ramcaritmanas as a Religious Event," 60.

[45] 2.92.3-94.2.

audience of an overarching design within which the narrative is set. This design and its significance must now be briefly examined.