The Hanuman Chalisa is a hymn of forty verses (chalis, forty) in praise of Hanuman, the monkey deity of the Ramayana, composed in the Awadhi vernacular by Tulsidas, the sixteenth-century poet who also wrote the Ramcharitmanas, the immensely influential Hindi retelling of the Rama story. It is among the most recited devotional texts of North India, said on Tuesdays and Saturdays, in times of fear or difficulty, and by countless people who know it by heart, and its accessibility, vernacular rather than Sanskrit, short, and easily memorised, is central to its reach.
The hymn praises Hanuman as the ideal devotee, whose strength, learning and courage are entirely placed at the service of Rama, and it is precisely this subordination of great power to loving service that makes him a model. Hanuman is invoked as a remover of afflictions and a giver of strength, and popular piety attaches protective force to the recitation itself. That a poem in a spoken vernacular, by a bhakti poet, should have become one of the most repeated of all Hindu texts illustrates the devotional turn that reshaped Hinduism in the second millennium, in which the vernacular hymn to a personal deity came to rival the ancient Sanskrit liturgy in living importance.