Who Is Hanuman? The Monkey God of the Ramayana
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
On Tuesdays and Saturdays across northern India the temples with the longest queues are often not those of Shiva or Vishnu but of a monkey: a figure painted orange, carrying a mace and often a mountain, with an expression of complete devotion. Hanuman is the servant of Rama in the epic Ramayana, and he has become, in his own right, one of the most worshipped deities in Hinduism, the god of strength, loyalty and the overcoming of obstacles, whose name is chanted for courage and whose forty-verse hymn is known by heart by hundreds of millions.
The son of the wind
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.
In the Ramayana
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
The perfect devotee
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.
How he is worshipped
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.
Hanuman now
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.
The takeaway
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.