The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas

Philip Lutgendorf is a scholar of Hindi literature and religion, and this University of California Press book is his standard scholarly study of the performance and reception history of Tulsidas's Ramcaritmanas, the vernacular Hindi retelling of the Ramayana that became central to North Indian devotional Hinduism. Its strength is that Lutgendorf treats the text as a living performed tradition, examining recitation, dramatic enactment and popular reception rather than the written text alone, giving the study an unusually complete picture of the work's actual religious life. Its limit is that it centers on the Ramcaritmanas specifically, so a claim about the Sanskrit Ramayana tradition more broadly needs a source addressing that separate textual lineage.