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Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Philip Lutgendorf’s Volume Six of The Epic of Ram, his English translation of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas for the Murty Classical Library of India, brings familiar epic events into focus as difficult questions about duty, devotion and interpretation. In Nikhil Govind’s reading, the text does not hand down answers unchanged: it invites each era to reconsider what its questions mean.
When duties conflict, what does the epic ask us to weigh?
The Ramcharitmanas retells the story of Ram, but Govind’s review emphasizes that its familiar events are also tests of competing obligations. Martial, marital, familial and devotional duties do not always point in the same direction. One example Govind highlights is Ram prioritizing his duty to his brother over his duty to his wife. The choice matters not only as a plot point, but as a prompt to ask how a person should act when worthy commitments collide.
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That question is not resolved simply by recognizing the characters or knowing what happens next. The review’s emphasis is on the tensions the narrative makes visible: what loyalty requires, whose needs take precedence, and how devotion shapes a decision. These are literary and ethical questions embedded in the epic’s action, not detachable lessons with one universally settled answer.
How does a translation convey Awadhi—and what can it not carry?
The edition places Indic scripts on the left-hand page and Lutgendorf’s English translation on the right. As Govind notes, that facing-page arrangement lets readers follow the English while checking it against the source text. It makes the translation a useful route into the work’s meanings without pretending that English can reproduce every quality of the original.
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In particular, the review says the “aural mellifluousness” of Tulsidas’s Awadhi cannot be fully captured in translation. The loss is not a reason to dismiss the English version: it is a qualification about what translation can do. Lutgendorf’s rendering offers a firm starting point for following the text, while the facing Indic script gives readers a way to attend to the original alongside it.
Why does a volume about war also invite contemplation?
Volume Six is primarily concerned with war, and its violence is part of what the reader encounters. Yet Govind’s account resists reducing it to battles and destruction. He also draws attention to devotional and contemplative dimensions, including the image of warriors inwardly meditating on Ram. The juxtaposition asks readers to hold violence and devotion together rather than treating them as separate subjects.
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The volume also contains comedy and beauty, according to the review. Those elements complicate the experience of a narrative shaped by conflict: its emotional and religious life is broader than the immediate mechanics of war. Reading the volume means attending to those different registers as they coexist.
What does it mean to read a premodern text now?
Govind argues that the Ramcharitmanas remains a conversation across eras because its questions can be posed anew and answered differently in changing contexts. This is his interpretation of the work, not a claim that every reader or Indic tradition understands it in the same way. On this account, the text’s meanings are temporal and open to reinterpretation; the present is not merely a place to receive an inherited conclusion, but another moment from which to ask what the text is asking.
That approach also challenges the assumption that premodern literature belongs only to a remote past. Govind writes: “Pre-modern texts – and thus the scholarship on them – do not always reside in the niche of the “pre”.” The sentence is the reviewer’s, not a quotation from Tulsidas or Lutgendorf. It captures his case for engaging scholarship on older works as relevant to current literary, philosophical and religious questions.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why the edition matters for study
Govind recommends incorporating scholarly translations of premodern texts, with critical notes, into undergraduate humanities syllabi. The point is not that an English translation replaces the original, but that a carefully presented edition can give students a structured way to encounter a work, its language and the questions it raises. The facing-page format described in this volume supports that kind of close engagement.
The review appeared on October 29, 2022, and the Murty Classical Library of India republished it on December 5, 2022. At the time, the review described Volume Six as recently released, noted that the series began with Volume One in 2016, and anticipated a final Volume Seven in early 2023. That final-volume statement records an expectation in 2022; it does not establish what was published afterward.
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