Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi and called its seven books sopans. They are the seven steps down into the lake he made of his poem. Through those steps story, bhakti, dialogue, and the questions of a life walk together. Each kand is divided into episodes. Each episode is a full page, a long English story that carries Tulsi’s verse inside it.
The verse is the Gita Press text of Gorakhpur. It is carried whole into English prose, chaupai by chaupai and doha by doha, with every name, number, and order kept as Tulsi gives them. Each line is read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.
Tulsidas’s Rama story
The ground of everything here is Tulsidas’s Awadhi Ramcharitmanas. Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana can be read whole, in its own right. The two poems share many episodes, and they differ in order, in dialogue, and in detail. Each episode is checked against the Manas’s own text and Poddar’s commentary, and what is told there is what Tulsi tells.
Source: the Gita Press edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, all seven sopans, read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.