Goswami Tulsidas wrote the Hanuman Chalisa in Awadhi, the everyday language of his part of North India. He was born in the 1500s and died in 1623, so the Chalisa is more than 400 years old. The poem itself gives no date, and no record from his time says in which year he wrote it.
You will often read “1574”. That is the year Tulsidas began the Ramcharitmanas, and he wrote it down in that book. The famous story that he wrote the Chalisa in Akbar’s prison was first written down about 90 years after his death. Here is what is known, and what is only told.
Who Wrote the Hanuman Chalisa?
The Chalisa names its poet in its last chaupai: “तुलसीदास सदा हरि चेरा। कीजै नाथ हृदय महँ डेरा॥” Tulsidas, forever a servant of Hari, asks Hanuman ji to make his home in his heart. Poets of his time often signed a poem this way, inside its last verse.
Tulsidas also wrote the Ramcharitmanas, the Vinay Patrika, the Kavitavali and the Gitavali. Biographers list twelve works as certainly his, and the Chalisa is not on that list: it is one of the works people have always given to him, and a few writers have doubted it. Most devotees and most writers take it as his, mainly because of that signature. More about his life on our Goswami Tulsidas page.
When Was It Written?
No one knows the year. The Chalisa carries no date, and no record from Tulsidas’s lifetime gives one.
What we can say is when he lived. His birth year is disputed (most scholars give about 1532, and one old biography 1497), and he died in Varanasi, at Assi Ghat, in 1623. So the Chalisa was written in the 16th or early 17th century.
Where 1574 comes from: Tulsidas began the Ramcharitmanas in Ayodhya on Ram Navami of Vikram Samvat 1631, which is 1574 CE, and he records this date in the Manas itself. Many websites give that year for the Chalisa by mistake.
Where Was It Written?
No record says. Tradition links the Chalisa to Varanasi, where Tulsidas spent his later years: to Tulsi Ghat, where he lived, and to the Sankat Mochan temple, which he is believed to have founded. The jail story places it at Fatehpur Sikri instead. Both are what devotees tell, not what a document shows.
The Akbar Jail Story: What It Says and Where It Comes From
The story goes like this. The Mughal emperor Akbar called Tulsidas to his court and asked him to show a miracle. Tulsidas said he had no power of his own, only his faith in Shri Ram. Akbar had him put in prison at Fatehpur Sikri. There Tulsidas sang the praise of Hanuman ji, and an army of monkeys overran the town until Akbar let him go. In many tellings, the verses he sang in prison became the Hanuman Chalisa.
The oldest written version of the story is in the Bhaktirasbodhini of Priyadas, a commentary on Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal, written in 1712. In that version the emperor is called only the king of Delhi, and Tulsidas prays to Hanuman ji in his heart; the Chalisa is not named. That is about 90 years after Tulsidas died, and many miracle stories about him were told this way. So historians treat it as a devotional story, not as recorded history. What is true is that the two men lived at the same time: Akbar ruled from 1556 to 1605.
Why Did Tulsidas Write It?
He does not say, and no record does. But the poem shows what it is for. It opens by asking Hanuman ji for bal, buddhi and vidya (strength, good sense and knowledge), sings of his service to Shri Ram, and ends with the prayer that he live in the devotee’s heart: “राम लषन सीता सहित, हृदय बसहु सुर भूप॥” People read it for the same things today: courage, a steady mind and faith.
Why Awadhi, Not Sanskrit?
Most religious books of the time were in Sanskrit, which ordinary people could not read. Awadhi was the language spoken at home in the Awadh region, around Ayodhya. Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas in it too. A prayer in the people’s own language could be understood, learned by heart and sung by anyone, with no priest or teacher in between. That is one reason it went from house to house. Every word’s meaning is on our word by word meaning page.
How the Chalisa Reached Every Home
For centuries people learned the Chalisa by heart and passed it on, at home and in temples. In the 20th century it was printed in cheap booklets, among them those of Gita Press, Gorakhpur (founded in 1923), whose text our pages follow. Then came recordings: the T-Series one sung by Hariharan, with Gulshan Kumar on screen, has been on YouTube since 2011 and was the first Indian video to pass 3 billion views. Today the Chalisa is read in every Indian script; it is on our pages in Hindi, English letters and eight other languages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions people often ask about the history of the Hanuman Chalisa, in English and in Hindi.
Read the full Hanuman Chalisa in Hindi or in English letters, its meaning in Hindi, or download the free PDF in 12 languages. More checked facts are on our facts page.