Awadhi Poetry
Quick answer: Awadhi poetry is the language of Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas and Jayasi's Padmavat. Learn its meters, its Bhakti and Sufi masters, and how to write in it.
Awadhi poetry is verse written in Awadhi, an Eastern Hindi speech of the Awadh region around Ayodhya, Faizabad and Lucknow in present-day Uttar Pradesh. It reached the height of its power in the sixteenth century, when two very different masters chose it for their greatest work: Tulsidas, who retold the story of Rama in the Ramcharitmanas, and Malik Muhammad Jayasi, a Sufi who wrote the romance Padmavat. Between a Hindu devotional epic and a Muslim allegory of love, the same soft, rural tongue carried both.
That range is the point. Awadhi was never a courtly show language like Persian, nor a Krishna-centred one like Braj Bhasha. It was the ordinary speech of farmers and pilgrims, and poets used its plainness to reach everyone. Learning how it works teaches you something durable about writing for the ear rather than the page.
The poem
Siyaaraama-maya saba jaga jaanee,
Karaun pranaama jori juga paanee.
Tulsidas, Ramcharitmanas (1532 to 1623)
The Meters It Runs On
Awadhi's long narrative poems are built almost entirely from two units you can borrow: the chaupai, a four-line stanza of roughly sixteen beats a line, and the doha, a self-contained couplet of twenty-four beats split thirteen and eleven. Tulsidas alternates runs of chaupai, which carry the story forward, with a doha that pauses to sum up or bless. The effect is a long tide of narrative broken by small, quotable resting places.
Both meters count matras, or beats, not syllables, so a short vowel weighs one and a long or closed one weighs two. You cannot copy that arithmetic exactly into English, but the shape transfers: keep the story moving in even quatrains, then land a two-line thought that could survive on its own.
The Devotional Line
The Ramcharitmanas, finished in the 1570s, is the reason most people meet Awadhi at all. Tulsidas took a Sanskrit epic reserved for scholars and rebuilt it in the language of the village, so that it could be sung, wept over and memorised by people who had never read a book. It is still recited daily across North India, in homes and in the staged Ramlila performances each autumn.
His register is worth studying: reverent but concrete, full of rivers, dust, feet and folded hands rather than abstraction. Here is a chaupai from the opening of the poem.
The Sufi Romance
The other great Awadhi tradition is the premakhyan, the Sufi love-tale. Jayasi's Padmavat (1540) tells of a king's quest for the princess Padmavati, but read as allegory the seeker is the soul and the beloved is the divine, a device familiar from Persian mystical verse. Earlier poets such as Maulana Daud, with his Chandayan, had already shown that Awadhi could hold this Persian frame inside an Indian setting.
This double life, the same language serving Ram-bhakti and Sufi longing, makes Awadhi a quiet lesson in how a plain vernacular can carry the highest matter without dressing itself up.
Writing In Its Spirit
You will probably not compose new verse in Awadhi itself, but you can write in its manner. Take a story you want to tell and set it in steady quatrains, then interrupt every few stanzas with a couplet that states a truth the scene has earned. Ground every abstraction in a physical thing. If your lines can be spoken aloud once and remembered, you are working the way Tulsidas did.
What poets can take from this
- Study a passage of the Ramcharitmanas in transliteration to hear how chaupai and doha take turns.
- Move your narrative in even four-line stanzas, then stop it dead with a summarising couplet.
- Count the pulse of a line by ear rather than by syllable, the way matra meters ask you to.
- Keep the diction plain; Awadhi's power comes from ordinary words placed exactly.
- Anchor devotion or longing in concrete images: feet, rivers, dust, folded hands.
- Test each couplet by speaking it once aloud, since this verse was made to be heard and held.
Try it yourself
Write a short narrative in five chaupai-style quatrains that tells one small event, then close with a single doha-style couplet that turns the event into a lesson, grounding every line in a physical object rather than an abstract feeling.
Questions
What is the difference between Awadhi and Braj Bhasha?
Both are old literary forms of Hindi, but Awadhi belongs to the eastern Awadh region and is tied to Rama devotion and Sufi romance, while Braj Bhasha comes from the Mathura area and is the classic language of Krishna poetry, as in Surdas. They use overlapping meters but carry different literary worlds.
Why did Tulsidas write in Awadhi instead of Sanskrit?
He wanted the story of Rama to reach ordinary people who could not read Sanskrit. Writing the Ramcharitmanas in the spoken Awadhi of his region made it something farmers, women and children could sing and memorise, which is a large part of why it endured.
Can I write poems in Awadhi today?
You can, and some poets still do, but most writers instead borrow its methods: the alternating chaupai and doha, the plain diction, and the aim of verse built for the ear. Reading Tulsidas or Jayasi in a good transliteration is the best starting point.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.