A History of Sanskrit Literature c13.s2.30

c13.s2.30

This prophecy has been perhaps even more abundantly fulfilled than the well-known prediction of Horace. No product of Sanskrit literature has enjoyed a greater popularity in India down to the present day than the *Rāmāyaṇa*. Its story furnishes the subject of many other Sanskrit poems as well as plays, and still delights, from the lips of reciters, the hearts of myriads of the Indian people, as at the great annual Rāma festival held at Benares. It has been translated into many Indian vernaculars. Above all, it inspired the greatest poet of mediæval Hindustan, Tulsī Dās, to compose in Hindī his version of the epic entitled *Rām Charit Mānas*, which, with its ideal standard of virtue and purity, is a kind of bible to a hundred millions of the people of Northern India.