Hanuman

A newborn once looked at the sky, saw a small red sun rising over the eastern hills, took it for a piece of ripe fruit, and simply leapt for it. This is where most tellings of Hanuman's story like to begin, and it is worth beginning there again, because it already contains him whole: the appetite of a child, the audacity of a god, and a body that does not yet know the difference between the possible and the impossible. He is said to have cleared thousands of yojanas in that single bound, closing on the sun itself, until Indra, alarmed at a mere infant swallowing the source of the world's light, hurled his vajra at him. It struck his jaw. He fell to earth stunned, his chin (hanu) left slightly misshapen, which is one telling of how he came to be called Hanuman. His father, the wind-god Vayu, could not bear to see his son struck down and withdrew breath from the three worlds; every creature began to suffocate at once, and it took Brahma and the assembled gods hurrying to Vayu with blessings and boons of invulnerability, strength, and near-immortality for him to relent and let the world breathe again. A child not yet a day old had already brought the cosmos to its knees, without ever intending harm to anyone.

Of his parentage the tradition itself does not speak with one voice, and it is more honest to say so than to flatten it into a single tidy fact. Most tellings hold that his mother was Anjana, an apsara under a curse to live in vanara form until she bore a son who was an amsha of Shiva, and that after long tapasya to Shiva she conceived through Vayu, who is said to have carried a portion of the very payasam offered in King Dasharatha's putrakameshti yagna to her on the wind. In this account Hanuman is at once wind-born and Shiva-born, and his social father is the vanara chief Kesari, who raised him with love regardless of whose son he was said to be by the gods. Where exactly this happened is itself contested by living tradition rather than settled by it: Anjaneri hill near Trimbakeshwar in Maharashtra, sites near ancient Kishkindha in Karnataka, and Anjanadri hill near Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh all keep festivals claiming him as their own son. Rather than choose between them, it seems truer to let each hold its claim lightly, the way a village does not need its saint verified by outsiders to love him.

His boyhood, by every account, was not a serene one. He grew up restless with a strength he barely knew how to hold, forever pulling at the beards and yagnas of meditating sages in mischief, until more than one rishi lost patience and cursed him to forget his own powers unless someone else reminded him of them. It is a strange kind of curse, not a punishment so much as a lesson in humility waiting to be triggered at exactly the right moment, and it is why the mightiest being in the vanara army would one day sit quietly on a seashore, uncertain whether he could leap across it, until an elder had to tell him who he already was.

That moment came many years later, when a wandering ascetic met two princes, Rama and Lakshmana, searching the forests near Rishyamukha for a stolen wife. Hanuman, sent by Sugriva to find out whether these strangers were spies of the tyrant Vali, approached them in the guise of a brahmin and spoke to them so precisely, so free of any excess or defect in grammar, that Rama turned to his brother afterward and said that no one who had not mastered the treatises on speech and the Vedas thoroughly could speak with such faultless clarity. It is one of the few moments in the epic where Rama is said to praise a stranger's mind before he has any reason yet to trust his heart. That praised, faultless speech became the seal on an alliance: Sugriva regained his kingdom with Rama's help, and in return the vanara armies were pledged to find Sita, and Hanuman, until then merely one clever minister among many, became the one on whom the entire search would turn.

When the armies reached the southern shore and stared at the ocean separating them from Lanka, despair spread through the ranks; no one, not even the great vanara generals, believed they could cross it. It was the old bear-king Jambavan, keeper of memory, who turned to Hanuman and reminded him, one by one, of the boons the gods had given him at his birth, of the strength coiled inside him that the sages' old curse had put to sleep. As the memory returned, so did the scale: Hanuman's body began to grow, mountainous, blazing, until he stood at the edge of the sea and simply rose into the sky. The crossing itself became its own small epic: the mountain Mainaka surfacing from the ocean floor to offer him a moment's rest out of old friendship with Vayu, which he touched only briefly before continuing; the serpent-mother Surasa opening her mouth wider and wider to swallow him as a test set by the gods, until he shrank himself to the size of a thumb, darted in and out in an instant, and satisfied the boon without breaking it; the shadow-demoness Simhika dragging him down by his reflection in the water, whom he tore through and slew before flying on. Every obstacle in that crossing seems designed to teach the same lesson twice: that a being empowered by the divine still has to choose, again and again, to keep going.

In Lanka he found Sita at last, wasting away with grief in the Ashoka Vatika, guarded by fearsome rakshasis, refusing every comfort Ravana offered her. Hanuman, watching unseen from a tree above, dropped Rama's signet ring before her as proof that he came in good faith, and when she was finally convinced, he offered to carry her home on his own back that very night. She refused, gently but firmly: it would rob Rama of the chance to redeem her honor himself, and Hanuman, though it must have cost him something to yield a solution that simple, respected the reasoning entirely. He accepted the choodamani, the jewel from her hair, as a token to carry back, then deliberately allowed himself to be captured so that he could be brought before Ravana and take the measure of the enemy's court with his own eyes before the war even began. When Ravana, enraged, ordered his tail set alight as an insult, Hanuman used the very fire meant to humiliate him to leap from rooftop to rooftop and burn much of golden Lanka to the ground, then plunged his blazing tail into the sea and returned to Rama with the news that Sita lived.

The most quietly astonishing feat of the entire war may still be the Sanjeevani episode. When Lakshmana lay dying on the battlefield after Meghnad's shakti struck him, and the physician Sushena said only a specific herb from a specific Himalayan mountain could save him by dawn, Hanuman flew north through the night. Unable to tell one herb from another once he reached the mountain, he did not waste the remaining hours guessing; he tore the entire peak, Dronagiri, from its base and carried it back through the sky, herb, soil, and all, so that Sushena himself could choose. Lakshmana was revived before sunrise. It is worth pausing on the fact that Hanuman's solution to a problem of precision was not cleverness but complete, unhesitating labor, the willingness to carry a mountain rather than risk being wrong about a leaf.

After Ravana's fall, in Rama's court at Ayodhya, came the episode that Nabhadas himself chose to hold up as the truest image of this devotee: Vibhishan, newly crowned king of Lanka, brought as tribute a garland strung from the rarest jewels of Ravana's treasury and offered it to Rama with full devotion. The whole assembly gazed at it with open longing, and Rama, seeing how even his own liberated, desireless bhaktas could still be stirred by beauty, hung the garland instead around Hanuman's neck, meaning to draw everyone's craving toward it and then dissolve it. Hanuman, who had been lost simply in the sight of Rama's face and had barely noticed the garland's weight, eventually looked at the gems, turned them over, and found nowhere in them the name of Rama. One by one he cracked them open with his nails, searching inside each stone, and one by one, finding nothing, he flung them aside, until the court sat stunned watching priceless jewels scatter across the floor. Vibhishan finally asked him, half in wonder and half in offense, whether this was simply a monkey's nature or whether some reason lay behind it. Hanuman answered plainly that anything without Ramnaam in it was worthless to him. Vibhishan, testing him further, asked why then he kept his own body, since no one could see Rama's name written on it either. Without a word Hanuman drove his nails into his own chest and peeled back the skin, and there, in every fiber and pore of his body, in letters of subtle light, the name of Rama stood written through and through. It is a cousin of the more widely painted image of Hanuman tearing open his heart to reveal Sita and Rama enshrined within it, and whichever version a household grew up with, both point at the same unbearable, joyful fact: this is a being with no interior left that is not already given away.

When the war was over and Rama offered, as he offered every faithful soul, the chance to return home to Vaikuntha and be free of the world, Hanuman is remembered as the one who declined. He asked instead to remain on earth for as long as Rama's story continued to be told and sung, keeping his brahmacharya, keeping his readiness, needing no paradise other than the chance to keep serving. It is why he is counted among the chiranjivis, the deathless ones, and why devotees say, to this day, that wherever the Ramayana is recited with sincerity, Hanuman is present in the room, unseen, weeping quietly at the parts he loves best. Long afterward, in the age of the Pandavas, he is said to have tested his own half-brother Bhima, blocking a mountain path in the guise of an old, feeble monkey and asking only that his tail be moved aside; Bhima, proud of his own strength, could not budge it an inch, and in that failure learned something no war had yet taught him about whose strength truly moves the world. In that same age, tradition holds that Hanuman sat invisibly atop Arjuna's chariot flag throughout the war at Kurukshetra, absorbing the shock of Krishna's conch and holding the vehicle together, again the servant no one had to see to depend upon.

Centuries later, in Kashi, a poet named Tulsidas is remembered to have recognized an old, unremarkable man slipping quietly out of the back of his gatherings each night before the closing verses of a great retelling of the Ramayana, and having heard that only Hanuman himself would leave before hearing his own praises sung, followed him and caught hold of his feet. Hanuman, unable to refuse a devotee who had recognized him without any proof but a hunch and a lifetime of longing, blessed him, and is said to have directed him toward Chitrakoot for the sight of Rama his heart had been begging for since childhood. Out of that friendship poured the Hanuman Chalisa, forty verses that ordinary households still murmur before dawn or in the middle of an ordinary bad week, not because they expect a miracle but because saying his name has always, in this tradition, been treated as a kind of shelter in itself.

What Nabhadas is pointing to, tucking Hanuman in among the first and greatest of the bhaktas, is a particular shape of love that asks for nothing back: dasya bhakti, the devotion of the servant, which this tradition does not consider lesser than the devotion of the lover or the friend but in some ways harder, because it requires a strength capable of lifting mountains to stay perfectly, permanently subordinate to a will not its own. Every version of Hanuman's story, the sun mistaken for fruit, the ocean crossed on nothing but reminded faith, the mountain carried rather than a single leaf misjudged, the jewels broken open one by one until his own skin had to answer for them, is the same devotion wearing a different weather. He remains, across a thousand small shrines and a thousand tired evenings, the one devotee tradition insists is still listening, and it is very hard to read his story all the way through, even now, without wanting to whisper his name once before turning out the light.