The Ramayana of Tulsi Das. Translated from the original Hindi. By F.S. Growse. by Tulsi Das; Frederic Salmon Growse, translator - 1883

Allahabad: North-Western Provinces and Oudh Government Press; photographic plates printed by the London Autotype Company, 1883. Revised and illustrated. 4to (28 x 22 cm), pp.[vi], xx, 2, 572, 14, frontispiece, 16 photographic plates, 1 double-page. Title printed in red and black. A very good copy bound in contemporary cloth-backed boards, printed in red and black, by the Gove Press, Allahabad. Remnants of contemporary paper labels on spine. The first illustrated edition of the complete English translation of the Ramcharitamanasa, a vernacular Hindi retelling of Valmiki's Ramayana, the great Sanskrit epic, composed by Tulsi Das (1532-1623), Hindu poet-saint. Tulsi Das's text remains one of the great works of Indian vernacular literature, of which Growse was a champion. Frederic Salmon Growse (1836-1893) spent most of his working life as the collector of Mathura, a pilgrimage and worship site for Krishna. He first published this English translation in parts from 1877 to 1880; a four volume second edition was published between 1880 and 1881. Our copy is from the first illustrated edition. The frontispiece and three of the plates are after photographs of "Chitrakut" (Chitrakoot) and locales associated with Tulsi Das, taken by an unnamed "local native photographer", commissioned by Growse. Chitrakoot, first recorded in Valmiki's Ramayana, was where Ram, Sita, and Lakshman were exiled, a place of great natural beauty and abundance. Tradition has it that all three appeared to Tulsi Das by the banks of the Mandakini river. The images published in our copy appear to be among the first photographs of this holy site produced. One plate reproduces a lithographed drawing of the wrath of Shiva by "a Bengali artist of some promise, who came and settled at Mathura when I was there but died shortly afterwards." The remaining thirteen plates are after the miniatures of a finely illuminated manuscript in the collection of the Maharaja of Benares, who kindly supplied Growse with photographic negatives.