Alongside the Ramcharitmanas, Tulsidas is traditionally credited with the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses of praise addressed to Hanuman, Rama's devoted monkey general, framed by two introductory and one closing couplet and composed, like the Ramcharitmanas, in accessible Awadhi rather than Sanskrit. Recited daily by millions of Hindus, especially on Tuesdays and Saturdays, days traditionally associated with Hanuman, and turned to in particular at moments of trouble or fear, the Hanuman Chalisa has become, independent of its association with the longer Ramcharitmanas, one of the single most widely recited Hindu devotional texts in the world.
Philip Lutgendorf's scholarship treats the attribution to Tulsidas carefully rather than skeptically dismissing it: the ascription is traditional and effectively universal within the devotional community that recites it, yet it is not confirmed by any surviving manuscript from Tulsidas's own period, a gap common to popular devotional literature from this era and one Lutgendorf treats as leaving the attribution probable rather than proven. Tulsidas's own biography is itself heavily overlaid with hagiographic legend, including stories of a difficult birth under inauspicious stars, early abandonment, and a miraculous meeting with Hanuman himself that is said to have set him on his devotional path, material transmitted mainly through later hagiographies such as the Mula Gosain Charit rather than contemporary record. Whatever the precise historical facts beneath that legend, Tulsidas's literary legacy is not in doubt: few single authors anywhere have shaped the daily religious language of as large a population as the Ramcharitmanas and the Hanuman Chalisa together continue to do across North India today.