Tulsidas and the conversion of the tribals. Notes for a new reading of the Ramcharitmanas

This article represents the revised and enlarged version of the essay (published in 2012), where a new interpretation of Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas at the light of the dynamics of Hinduization of Adivasi groups in northern and central India was proposed. Compared to the first version, some additions have been made to the text and a number of entirely new notes have been added. The first part of the paper contains a textual analysis of a few selected passages where Tulsi more radically deviates from, or innovates with regard to, the classical Ramayana narration. In the following sections, these passages are analyzed with an eye to assessing on the one hand Tulsi’s positions on the tribal communities, and on the other the dynamics which – at the time of the composition of the Ramcharitmanas – could bring about their conversion to the cult of Rama and, consequently, their absorption into the mainstream Hindu religion. Such dynamics are described in detail against the backdrop of the main processes that were then taking place in northern India: the expansion of permanent agriculture, that was particularly relevant under the Tughlaq’s rule and that forced indigenous groups of primitive cultivators to be incorporated into a highly stratified agrarian society; the strong political centralization brought about by the Mughals; the progressive Islamicization of the urban centers. In order to support the above hypotheses, and to show on which bases the conversion of the tribal communities to the cult of Rama could take place, a few elements that are consistent with a general phenomenology of conversion are traced and analyzed in the last part of the paper.