Hanuman

← Encyclopedia

Hanuman is a Hindu deity, depicted as a vanara — a member of the forest race of monkey-like beings of Indian epic — whose extraordinary strength is bound entirely to his devotion to the god-king Rama. He belongs first to story: he enters the tradition as a character in the Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic attributed to the poet Valmiki, and only later stands at the center of a cult in his own right. The arc from one to the other — from a figure inside a poem to a god with his own shrines, festivals, and forty-verse hymn — is among the more fully documented careers any deity has had, and it runs largely through the second millennium of the common era rather than the first.

Hanuman parting his chest to disclose Rama and Sita enthroned in his heart, the tradition’s emblem of total devotion — chromolithograph from the Ravi Varma Press, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The vanara of the epic

In the epic’s narrative he is the minister and champion of the monkey kingdom, sachiva to the vanara king Sugriva, who allies with Rama in the search for Rama’s abducted wife, Sita. The fifth of the Ramayana’s seven books, the Sundarakanda — the “beautiful book” — is given over almost entirely to him: it is here that the supporting character becomes the engine of the plot. The episodes that fixed his character are known across the subcontinent and beyond it. He leaps across the ocean to the island stronghold of Lanka to find Sita held captive in the demon-king’s grove, and carries to her Rama’s signet ring as proof of his embassy. Seized and bound, his tail set alight by his captors, he turns the punishment into an assault and burns the city. Later, in the war, when Rama’s brother lies struck down and only a single herb from a far northern mountain can revive him, Hanuman flies for it; unable to tell the healing plant from the rest, he tears up the whole mountain and carries it back through the air. These feats are told not as displays of power for its own sake but as the overflow of an absolute loyalty — a strength that activates fully only in another’s service. The recurring grammar of the figure is that capacity exceeds what any single errand requires, and the surplus is spent on the one he serves.

Hanuman bears the uprooted herb-bearing mountain through the air to revive Rama’s fallen brother — print from the Ravi Varma Press, 1910s, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

His parentage carries the same doubleness. He is the son of the apsara Anjana and the vanara chieftain Kesari, and at the same time the son of the wind-god Vayu — whence his common epithets Vayuputra and Pavanaputra, “son of the wind,” and the name Maruti. The two paternities are not reconciled so much as held together: a being of mixed origin, monkey in form and divine in descent, able to expand to mountainous size or shrink to the span of a thumb, to fly and to change shape at will. The scholar Philip Lutgendorf reads this categorical ambiguity as central rather than incidental — Hanuman is precisely the figure who can appear as more than one thing, and the powers of flight, growth, and self-transformation are read as inheritances from his airy patrimony, Vayu’s office in both the body and the cosmos.

From character to god

Scholarship traces a long development behind the settled figure. The vanara of the oldest layers of the Ramayana is not yet the great god of later worship. Lutgendorf’s Hanuman’s Tale (2007), the fullest modern study, sets the emergence of Hanuman’s theological weight and of dedicated devotion to him at roughly a thousand years after the epic’s composition — in the second millennium CE, gathering force in the centuries of Islamic rule in the subcontinent and with the vernacular retellings of the Rama story. Evidence of his independent worship is sparse in the earlier textual and archaeological record; the great spread of Hanuman shrines, and his elevation from epic character to object of cult, belong to that later period and to the regional devotional currents of the medieval and early-modern centuries. Lutgendorf’s broader argument is a corrective: against the older academic habit of filing Hanuman as a “minor” or merely “folk” deity, he documents a figure of growing, not residual, importance — one whose temples multiplied as forts and towns multiplied, often set near gates and thresholds, where a god of strength and unbreakable fidelity was wanted.

The proposal of a Vedic ancestry is older and remains debated rather than established. The hymn at Rigveda 10.86 names a Vrishakapi, a “man-ape” or bull-ape associated with the cult of Indra, and some interpreters — the commentator Nilakantha among them, in his Mantra-Ramayana — read this as an early intimation of Hanuman. Most modern scholars decline the identification, taking Vrishakapi to denote a different figure altogether or to be a generic designation; the line from the Vedic ape to the epic vanara is suggested, not demonstrated. The relation between the literary character and the worshipped deity is itself one of the recurring questions in the study of the tradition, and the honest position holds the two apart: the Hanuman of Hinduism’s living cult is continuous with, but not simply identical to, the minister of Sugriva in the Sanskrit poem.

The shape of his devotion

What the tradition holds of him follows from the epic portrait. In popular Hindu devotion Hanuman is the model of bhakti, loving surrender to a personal god, and the patron of those who need protection, courage, or physical endurance; he is invoked against fear, affliction, and ill fortune, and his shrines are among the most common in India. He is set within the Vaishnava frame as the supreme servant of Rama, who is himself counted an avatar — a descent into the world — of Vishnu the preserver; to serve Rama is to serve the preserving power of the cosmos in its embodied form, and Hanuman’s devotion is the paradigm against which other devotion is measured.

Devotional texts give that paradigm its words. The Hindi Hanuman Chalisa, a hymn whose name comes from chalis, “forty,” for its forty chaupai verses (framed by opening and closing couplets), is widely attributed to the sixteenth-century poet Tulsidas (1532–1623), the Awadhi author of the Ramcaritmanas. It addresses Hanuman as deathless, celibate, and ever-present to those who call on him, cataloging his strength, wisdom, and the names by which he is known. His celibacy — brahmacharya — is itself read as a discipline in the service of devotion: the energies of the body are conserved and turned wholly toward Rama, so that even continence is a form of loyalty. Within several strands of later tradition he is counted among the chiranjivi, the deathless ones held to remain in the world through the present age; the conventional list of eight ranks him with figures such as the ageless sage Markandeya and the warrior-brahman Parashurama. The deathlessness is a tradition-internal claim about his presence: the same being who served Rama in the epic is held to be still in the world, reachable, attending wherever his name is recited.

Two later theological readings claim him for opposite high gods, and the tradition has not minded the doubling. A Shaiva line, prominent in the Shiva Purana, identifies Hanuman as a partial manifestation — an eleventh Rudra, an avatar of Shiva — taking vanara form so that the great ascetic god might himself enact the perfect devotion to Rama. A Vaishnava line within the Dvaita (“dualist”) school of Madhvacharya (1238–1317) makes Hanuman the first of three incarnations of Mukhya Prana, the chief vital breath identified with Vayu, followed by Bhima of the Mahabharata and by Madhvacharya himself; in that school the wind-deity is the highest of created beings and the eternal servant of Vishnu, and Hanuman is the founding instance of that office. The two readings — Shiva’s manifestation, Vayu’s incarnation — stand as the self-understanding of the traditions that hold them; they coexist in practice, and a single worshipper rarely needs to choose. Among the living gods his standing is distinctive in kind. Where a Kartikeya commands armies in his own right, a Kubera keeps the hidden wealth of the world, and a Brihaspati presides as chaplain over the gods’ own rites, Hanuman holds his powers only on loan to a purpose outside himself; his greatness is reckoned not by what he rules but by how completely he is given.

Iconography and the regional forms

Hanuman’s image is among the most recognizable in Hindu art. He is shown kneeling in homage before Rama with hands joined; standing as a warrior with the gada, the heavy mace, on his shoulder; flying with the uprooted mountain in one hand. He is most often coated in vermilion — sindoor — a usage explained by a much-told story in which, learning that Sita marked her brow with the pigment for her husband’s long life, the devotee reddened his entire body for Rama’s sake. The most concentrated of his images shows him tearing open his own chest to reveal Rama and Sita seated within his heart. That last image is the tradition’s own compact statement of what it understands him to be: a power whose whole interior is occupied by the one he serves. A five-faced form, Panchamukha Hanuman, bears the faces of Hanuman together with those of Narasimha, Varaha, Garuda, and Hayagriva, gathering several Vaishnava energies into one guardian figure; it is tied to a Puranic episode in which he rescues Rama from the underworld by extinguishing five lamps in five directions at once.

The five-faced Panchamukha Hanuman, gathering the faces of Hanuman, Narasimha, Varaha, Garuda, and Hayagriva into one guardian figure — ink and opaque watercolor, India, late 19th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

His shrines are everywhere, but several have become great pilgrimage centers in their own right — Hanuman Garhi above Ayodhya, the bearded Hanuman of Salasar in Rajasthan, the exorcistic shrine at Mehandipur, the hilltop temple at Jakhoo near Shimla. The pattern Lutgendorf describes — Hanuman set at the gate, the guardian of the threshold and the patron of those who must be brave there — recurs from village boundary-stones to the entrances of forts.

A Hanuman image carved with the mace on his shoulder, 1000-Pillar Temple, Moodabidri, Karnataka — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Hanuman’s reach extends well past the bounds of the original epic and the borders of the subcontinent. He travels with the Rama story across maritime and mainland Southeast Asia, and in each retelling his character is enlarged: in the Thai Ramakien, the national epic, he is a mischievous, amorous, irrepressible warrior far freer than the disciplined celibate of the Sanskrit text; in Lao tradition he is Hunlaman, in the Indonesian shadow-puppet wayang he is Hanoman, in Malay tradition Andoman, in the Khmer Reamker a white monkey of central importance. Episodes accrete that the Sanskrit Ramayana never knew — most famously his encounter with the mermaid Suvannamaccha, daughter of the demon-king, during the building of the bridge to Lanka, a romance unknown to Valmiki and native to the Southeast Asian recensions. The figure is plastic enough to carry a different temperament in each culture while remaining, everywhere, the bridge between the human prince and the powers that serve him.

Hanuman as the white monkey of the Thai Ramakien, in the gallery murals at Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok — photograph by Jorge Láscar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The textual record and its scholarship

The primary witness is the Sanskrit Ramayana itself, available to English readers chiefly through Ralph T. H. Griffith’s complete verse translation, The Rámáyan of Válmíki (1870–1874), long in the public domain and freely hosted; the prose version of Manmatha Nath Dutt (1891–1894) and the condensed verse of Romesh Chunder Dutt (1899) supplement it. For the devotional reception, the towering vernacular text is Tulsidas’s Awadhi Ramcaritmanas, the seven-book retelling that became the single most influential religious work of the Hindi-speaking north; the only major public-domain English translation remains F. S. Growse’s The Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás (1877–1881). The Hanuman Chalisa, traditionally Tulsidas’s as well, is the most-recited Hanuman text in living use.

The indispensable modern study is Philip Lutgendorf’s Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey (Oxford University Press, 2007), which combines Sanskrit and vernacular sources, iconography, and field research to follow the deity’s expansion and to argue against his demotion to the “minor” category. The wider devotional landscape in which Hanuman’s cult took shape — the medieval and early-modern flowering of vernacular bhakti across the regions — is itself a contested historiographical object: John Stratton Hawley, in A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard University Press, 2015), shows that the tidy picture of a single, pan-Indian “bhakti movement” owes much to twentieth-century scholarship and national feeling, and cautions against flattening the regional traditions into one phenomenon. Hanuman’s rise is best set against that more granular map: not one movement but many devotional currents, in many languages, each making its own use of the monkey who held nothing back.

For all the theological elaboration laid over him — eleventh Rudra, incarnation of the wind, deathless guardian, five-faced protector — the figure stays anchored to a single gesture. The chest torn open to show two figures seated inside is not a claim about cosmology; it is a claim about the interior of a self, given over so completely that there is nothing else to find there.

→ Related: Hinduism · Vishnu · Shiva · Avatar · Kubera · Kartikeya · Brihaspati · Mahabharata