Hanuman
அனுமன் हनुमान्
Also Anjaneya, Maruti, Bajrangbali, Pavanaputra, Sankat Mochan.
VaishnavaSaivaVillage and folk
Who this is
Hanuman is the servant, and the tradition holds that to be the highest thing a devotee can be rather than a lesser one. He is the son of the wind, strong enough to leap to Lanka and to carry a mountain, and he uses none of it on his own account. He is a chiranjivi, one of the immortals, and is held to be present wherever the Ramayana is being read, which is why a seat is left for him. He is the god of the wrestler and the watchman, of Saturday and of trouble, and his image at the edge of a village faces out.
How to recognise them
A monkey faced man, often orange with sindoor and oil, with a mace in one hand and a mountain in the other, or tearing open his chest to show Rama and Sita inside it. Flying, kneeling before Rama, or standing with the tail curled above the head. The sindoor is reapplied constantly and builds up over the years until the features are lost, which is counted as devotion rather than neglect.
Family and companions
Son of Anjana and of Vayu the wind; Kesari is his earthly father. Brother in some tellings of Bhima, the other son of the wind. He is a bachelor in the north, though the Telugu country keeps Suvarchala as his wife at Khammam, and the two traditions do not trouble each other about it.
How they are worshipped
Saturday and Tuesday; Hanuman Jayanti, kept on different days in different regions.
Saturday and Tuesday are his days. Sindoor mixed with oil is smeared on the image, and vadai malai, a garland of urad vadai, is the offering. The Hanuman Chalisa is said, forty verses, and is probably the most recited text in India. Vows are made to him for strength, for a court case, for protection against ghosts and against Saturn, and worked off by reading the Chalisa a set number of times.
The stories
As they are told, with the disagreements left in
The sun he took for a fruit
As a child he saw the rising sun, took it for a ripe fruit and leapt for it. Indra struck him with the vajra to stop him and broke his jaw, which is where the name Hanuman comes from, the one with the jaw. Vayu, his father, withdrew the wind from the world in anger until the gods relented and gave the child boons from every one of them, which is the stock of powers he spends the rest of the epic using for somebody else. The story is told to children as the first of him, and the detail kept is that he forgot he had the powers until reminded.
The chest torn open
After the war Sita gave him a pearl necklace. He bit each pearl open and threw it away, and when the court asked why, he said he was looking for Rama in them, and that anything without Rama in it was of no use to him. Asked whether Rama was in him, he tore open his own chest, and Rama and Sita were seen seated there. Every temple has that image, and the tradition uses it to make a point about what devotion looks like when it is not performing.
The mountain and the herb
Lakshmana fell in the war and the physician named a herb that grew on a Himalayan peak, to be brought before dawn. Hanuman flew north, could not tell the herbs apart in the dark, and carried the whole mountain back. Along the way Bharata, not knowing him, shot him down with an arrow, and he explained himself and was sent on. He reached Lanka in time. In the Tamil and the north Indian tellings alike this is the moment he is loved for, because the solution is unsubtle and it works.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Tamil Nadu
- Anjaneyar stands at the edge of the village and at the tank bund, and the Namakkal image is one of the tallest; the vadai malai is the vow.
- North India
- Bajrangbali of Tuesday and Saturday, with Salasar and Mehandipur visited for possession and for cases, and the Chalisa said everywhere.
- Maharashtra
- Maruti, with the eleven Marutis of Samarth Ramdas around Satara, and the akhada wrestling tradition keeps him as its own.
- Andhra and Telangana
- Kept with Suvarchala as his wife at Khammam, which the north does not do, and the forty one day Hanuman deeksha is begun on Chithirai Pournami.
- Sri Lanka
- The Ramayana trail of Sri Lanka marks the places of his crossing and his search, and Ramboda has the hill temple.
Their days
Every one of these has a page of its own
Where to see them
From the temple directory
- Namakkal Anjaneyar Temple Namakkal, Tamil Nadu
- Salasar Balaji Temple Salasar, Churu, Rajasthan
- Mehandipur Balaji Temple Mehandipur, Dausa, Rajasthan
- Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple, Varanasi Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh
- Sri Bhaktha Anjaneyar Temple, Nanganallur Nanganallur, Chennai, Tamil Nadu
- Sholingur Yoga Narasimha Temple (Ghatikachalam) Sholinghur, Ranipet, Tamil Nadu
What is said
From the mantra library