So... what should you expect here?

Look, this is my personal translation, exploration, and downright obsession with the Ramcharitmanas.

I originally started this project entirely selfishly. I needed a reading guide for myself. This epic is monolithic, and I needed somewhere to collect my thoughts, piece together the Awadhi vocabulary, and make sense of the sheer scale of the literature.

When I started digging around for existing English translations, I got really frustrated really fast. Everywhere I looked, I just found massive, paragraph-long explanations summarizing what Tulsidas was trying to say.

But here's the thing: a poem is not a novel. You don't read a poem just to find out what happens next. You read a poem to play with the words. You read it to have fun with the grammar. You read it to feel the rhythm in your chest.

All those other translations were so fully focused on explaining the plot that they completely murdered the poetry. I didn't want a long-winded summary of the story. I wanted a literal, word-for-word meaning. I wanted someone to explain exactly how Tulsidas was flexing his Awadhi grammar. I wanted notes on the literary devices, the rhyme schemes, the metaphors.

I couldn't find a single book like that.

So, I decided to build it myself.

This project is for me, but it's also for anyone else out there who is looking for the exact same thing. We aren't just reading a story here; we are studying a literary masterpiece.

And let's be completely transparent here: I am using a whole lot of AI to help me pull the meaning out of these words. I am absolutely not an Awadhi scholar. If I were natively fluent in 16th-century Awadhi poetry, I wouldn't have been desperately hunting for this guide in the first place. But because I'm figuring this out as I go, using my hindi knowledge and having AI map the dense, archaic vocabulary of awadhi allows me to actually build this.

Fair warning: this is an absolutely massive undertaking, and I am nowhere near finishing it anytime soon. But whatever is done, is done properly, raw, and with a whole lot of love.

Feel free to poke around, read along, or if you're feeling brave, jump over to GitHub and contribute!