Who Is Hanuman? The Monkey God of the Ramayana

Hanuman was born to Anjana, a monkey queen, and fathered by Vayu, the wind god, which is why he can fly and why he is called Pavanputra, son of the wind. As a child he mistook the rising sun for a ripe fruit and leapt into the sky to eat it, and Indra, king of the gods, struck him down with a thunderbolt, breaking his jaw; the name Hanuman means one with a distinctive jaw. Vayu withdrew the wind from the world in fury until the gods made amends by giving the child their gifts: invulnerability, the ability to change size and shape, and immortality. Because his powers made him unruly, a sage cursed him to forget them until someone reminded him at need, which is why, in the great epic, he does not know what he can do until he is told.

The Ramayana tells how Rama, prince of Ayodhya and an incarnation of Vishnu, was exiled to the forest, and how his wife Sita was carried off by Ravana, the ten-headed demon king of Lanka. Hanuman enters as minister to the monkey king Sugriva, whose alliance Rama wins, and from then on he is the story's engine. His deeds:

• •Reminded of his powers on the southern shore, he grows to a giant and leaps the ocean to Lanka in a single bound
• •Shrinking to the size of a cat, he searches the city and finds Sita captive in a grove, gives her Rama's ring and refuses her offer to carry her home, since the glory of the rescue must be Rama's
• •Captured, he lets Ravana's men set fire to his tail, then breaks free and burns Lanka with it
• •When Rama's brother Lakshmana falls in battle, Hanuman flies to the Himalayas for the healing herb, cannot identify it, and brings the whole mountain back in his hand
• •At the end, asked what reward he wants, he asks only to live as long as Rama's name is spoken on earth, and so is one of the immortals

What Hanuman stands for in the tradition is bhakti, devotion, and he is its model. A famous episode has the court of Ayodhya doubting whether he truly loves Rama, since he wears none of the pearls Sita has given him; he tears open his chest, and Rama and Sita are found enthroned in his heart. His strength is never his own project; it exists to serve, and it is only usable when he is reminded of it, which teachers have read as a lesson that power comes from forgetting oneself. He is also a scholar, the ninth author of grammar in some traditions, celibate, and the patron of wrestlers, whose gymnasiums are dedicated to him, and the wrestler's oiled body and the god's orange colour, from the vermilion and oil with which his statues are anointed, go together.

Hanuman's worship grew from the medieval period and exploded with the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses in Hindi composed by the poet Tulsidas in the sixteenth century, which are recited for protection, for courage before an exam or a journey, and against fear of ghosts, over whom he has authority. His temples are everywhere from village shrines to a 33-metre statue in Andhra Pradesh, and his image guards the entrances of other gods' temples and the dashboards of trucks. Tuesday and Saturday are his days, when devotees fast and offer laddoos, oil and vermilion. He crossed the sea in another sense too: as the epic travelled through Southeast Asia, he became a hero of Thai, Cambodian and Indonesian dance-drama, and in the Chinese novel Journey to the West of the sixteenth century the monkey king Sun Wukong, who flies, fights and serves a pilgrim, is thought by many scholars to owe something to him.

In the last few decades Hanuman has become a symbol of muscular Hindu identity in India, his image on posters and flags, an angry version with narrowed eyes replacing the gentle one of tradition, and the Hanuman Chalisa played from loudspeakers in political demonstrations. Traditional devotees point out that the god of the epic is the one who refused a reward and asked only to serve. The two Hanumans, the strong one and the devoted one, are the same figure seen from different needs, and the tradition has always held that the strength exists for the devotion and not the other way about.

There is no single Ramayana, and Hanuman changes with the telling. The Sanskrit epic attributed to the sage Valmiki is the oldest surviving version, but the story has been retold for well over a thousand years in regional languages, each with its own emphasis. The Tamil poet Kamban composed a celebrated version in the twelfth century, and Tulsidas, the author of the Hanuman Chalisa, retold the whole epic in the Awadhi language in the Ramcharitmanas, which for many people in northern India is the Ramayana. In Tulsidas especially, the story becomes a work of devotion in which Hanuman's loyalty sits at the centre.

Outside India the differences are sharper. In the Ramakien, the Thai national epic, Hanuman is a dashing, mischievous hero who has romances and children, including a son with a mermaid, which would be unthinkable for the celibate devotee worshipped in Indian temples. Jain tellings present the characters in human rather than divine terms. Scholars see this variety not as a corruption of an original but as the normal life of a story that belongs to many communities at once. If you meet a detail about Hanuman that contradicts another, the likeliest explanation is that both come from genuine traditions.

Because he is immortal, Hanuman also appears in the Mahabharata, set long after Rama's time. During the Pandava brothers' exile in the forest, the strongest of them, Bhima, finds an old monkey lying across his path and orders it to move. The monkey says it is too weak and asks Bhima to lift its tail aside himself. Bhima, famous for his strength, cannot shift it at all, and the monkey reveals itself as Hanuman. Both are sons of the wind god Vayu, so the scene is a meeting of half-brothers, and it humbles Bhima's pride in his own power.

Hanuman then promises to help the Pandavas in their coming war, and he does so from the banner of Arjuna's chariot at the battle of Kurukshetra, which is why Arjuna is called the one whose flag bears the monkey. Later devotional traditions added further forms. The best known is Panchamukhi Hanuman, with five faces, his own and those of Narasimha, Garuda, Varaha and Hayagriva, explained in a popular story in which he had to blow out five lamps at once to defeat the demon Ahiravana. Images of this form are kept for protection in many homes and shops.

One of the most widely recited Hindu devotional poems is the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses in praise of Hanuman. It is traditionally attributed to Tulsidas, the sixteenth-century poet who also wrote a hugely popular version of the Ramayana in the Awadhi language, a form of Hindi, rather than in Sanskrit, making the story accessible to ordinary people.

Many devotees recite the Chalisa daily, especially on Tuesdays and Saturdays, days associated with Hanuman, and recordings of it have been played many hundreds of millions of times online. People turn to it for courage and protection from fear, reflecting Hanuman's character as fearless, strong and utterly devoted. Its short, rhythmic verses are easy to memorise, which helps explain its reach.

Hanuman is the monkey god of Hindu tradition, son of the wind, who in the Ramayana leaps the sea to find Rama's captive wife Sita, burns the demon city of Lanka and carries a mountain of healing herbs, and who asks as his only reward to live as long as Rama's name is spoken. He is the model of devotion, the god of strength and courage, the patron of wrestlers, and through the Hanuman Chalisa one of the most widely worshipped deities in India.