Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitmanas, The Lake of the Deeds of Rama, in Awadhi, a spoken vernacular of the Hindi belt, at a time when Sanskrit remained the prestige language of religious literature and a Sanskrit Ramayana, Valmiki's, already stood as the story's canonical version. That choice of language was itself a religious and social statement, placing Rama's story within reach of listeners who could never have accessed a Sanskrit text directly, and Philip Lutgendorf's study of the poem's reception describes this vernacular accessibility as central to why the Ramcharitmanas eclipsed Valmiki's Sanskrit original in everyday devotional life across North India rather than merely supplementing it.
Structured in seven books and saturated with bhakti theology, devoted surrender to a personal, saving God rather than only the heroic narrative Valmiki emphasizes, the poem casts Rama consistently as a form of the supreme divine rather than only an exemplary human king, reshaping the epic's emotional center of gravity toward devotion throughout. Its influence reaches well beyond private reading: the Ramlila tradition, an annual dramatic staging of Rama's story performed across North Indian towns and cities, most famously at Varanasi and Ramnagar, draws its script and structure directly from the Ramcharitmanas rather than from Valmiki, and the poem is recited aloud in full during Hindu festivals, read as daily devotional practice in countless households, and quoted so continuously in everyday North Indian speech that many speakers use its lines without consciously registering the source.