Hanuman

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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.

In the epic’s narrative he is the minister and champion of the monkey kingdom who allies with Rama in the search for Rama’s abducted wife, Sita. The episodes that fixed his character are well known across the subcontinent: the leap across the ocean to the island of Lanka to find Sita captive; the burning of the city when his tail is set alight; the flight carrying an entire mountain when only a single healing herb was needed and he could not pick it out. 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.

What practitioners hold of him follows from that. 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 and ill fortune, and his shrines are among the most common in India. Devotional texts such as the Hindi Hanuman Chalisa, a hymn of forty verses widely attributed to the sixteenth-century poet Tulsidas, address him as deathless, celibate, and ever-present to those who call on him. 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.

Scholarship traces a long development behind the settled figure. The vanara of the oldest layers of the Ramayana is not obviously the great god of later worship; the rise of Hanuman to an object of independent, large-scale devotion appears to belong to the medieval period, gathering force with the bhakti movements and with vernacular retellings of the epic. Earlier connections — to Vedic wind imagery, since he is called the son of the wind-god Vayu, and to older notions of the powerful monkey — have been proposed and debated rather than established. The relation between the literary character and the worshipped deity is itself one of the recurring questions in the study of the tradition.

Hanuman’s reach extends well past the bounds of the original epic. He appears in regional and Southeast Asian versions of the Rama story, each adapting his character, and his image — kneeling, mace in hand, or tearing open his chest to reveal Rama and Sita seated within his heart — has become one of the most recognizable in Hindu iconography. 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.