Hanuman

Overview

Hanuman (हनुमान, Hanumān) is one of the most widely worshipped and most immediately recognizable figures in Hindu devotional life — a vanara (monkey) of immense strength, learning, and unwavering devotion, whose entire story in the Ramayana is bound up with his service to Ram. Where Ram’s story is one of duty carried out as a king and husband, Hanuman’s is one of duty carried out as a devotee: finding Sita, carrying messages across the ocean, and fighting at Ram’s side without ever asking anything in return.

That devotion is precisely why Hanuman is approached so directly and so often — in home shrines, in roadside temples, in a chalisa many people recite from memory without a text in hand. This page covers his names, his origins, his place in scripture, and how he is worshipped today.

Names and epithets

Hanuman carries more names than almost any other widely worshipped figure, and most of them point to a specific piece of his story rather than being interchangeable titles:

• Anjaneya (अंजनेय) — “son of Anjana,” his mother.
• Pavanputra (पवनपुत्र), also Maruti and Vayuputra — all mean “son of the wind,” referring to Vayu.
• Bajrangbali (बजरंगबली) — combining vajra (“thunderbolt”) and anga (“limb, body”), describing a physique as unyielding as a thunderbolt.
• Sankata Mochana (संकटमोचन) — “remover of difficulties,” an epithet invoked when Hanuman is approached for relief from hardship, and the name of one of his best-known temples.
• Mahavir (महावीर) — “great hero,” a common devotional address, especially across the Hindi-speaking north.

The name “Hanuman” itself is usually traced to hanu, “jaw.” One widely told story holds that as an infant, Hanuman leapt toward the sun mistaking it for fruit; Indra, protecting the order of the cosmos, struck him with his vajra, injuring his jaw and giving him his name. Beyond that story, the exact etymology isn’t fully settled — several derivations have been proposed by different grammarians over the centuries.

Family and origins

Hanuman’s mother, Anjana, is described in Puranic literature as a celestial being (an apsara) born into vanara form. His father is named in most tellings as Kesari, a vanara chieftain — which is why one of Hanuman’s names is Kesariputra, “son of Kesari.”

Alongside this earthly parentage, Hanuman’s birth is also attributed to Vayu, the wind-god: the Valmiki Ramayana’s Kishkindha Kanda describes Anjana receiving Vayu’s blessing, and later Puranic texts, including the Garuda Purana, describe Hanuman as an amsha — a partial manifestation — of Vayu. This dual paternity isn’t treated as a contradiction within the tradition; it’s carried directly in his names, with Kesariputra sitting alongside Vayuputra, Maruti, and Pavanputra.

A further layer exists in Shaiva tradition: some Puranic sources, including the Shiva Purana, describe Hanuman as an incarnation of Rudra — one of Shiva’s eleven Rudra forms — born through Vayu’s agency. This reading is specific to Shaiva lineages and sits alongside, rather than displacing, the Vayuputra account more commonly told in Vaishnav retellings of the Ramayana.

Devotee first

Unlike Ram, Hanuman is not counted among Vishnu’s avatars in mainstream Vaishnav tradition. His central role there is as the ideal devotee — the model of dasya bhava, devotion in the mood of a servant, in which the relationship to the divine is expressed entirely through service rather than through identity with it. Hanuman’s own words in the tradition are often summarized this way: in ordinary awareness he is Ram’s servant; in a deeper awareness, he is inseparable from Ram — but the service comes first, not the identity.

This is part of why Hanuman is also held up, separately from his theological standing, as a model for disciplined effort in ordinary life: he is traditionally regarded as a lifelong brahmachari (celibate), and is invoked by students, wrestlers, and others pursuing physical or mental discipline as much as by devotees seeking his protection.

In scripture

Hanuman appears across several texts, though rarely as the central character of the overall narrative:

• Valmiki Ramayana — Hanuman is a supporting figure through most of the epic, but the Sundara Kanda, its fifth book, is devoted substantially to him: his leap across the ocean to Lanka, his discovery of Sita, and his return with news of her. Many households recite the Sundara Kanda on its own, apart from the rest of the epic, as a practice associated with courage and protection.
• Ramcharitmanas — Tulsidas’s Awadhi retelling gives Hanuman a markedly larger and more devotionally central role than Valmiki’s Sanskrit original does, reflecting the bhakti emphasis of the text as a whole.
• Mahabharata — Hanuman appears in the Vana Parva, where he tests Bhima’s pride by refusing to let him move his tail. He is also said to sit on the banner of Arjuna’s chariot through the Kurukshetra war, a detail referenced at the very opening of the Bhagavad Gita.
• Hanuman Chalisa — a forty-verse devotional hymn in Awadhi, traditionally attributed to Tulsidas, distinct from the Ramcharitmanas and recited independently far more often than either of the epics themselves.

Worship today

Hanuman worship spans nearly every region of the subcontinent, from small roadside shrines to major pilgrimage temples. Tuesday and Saturday are widely kept as his particular days for worship, and it’s common for a Hanuman temple or shrine to be the busiest one in a neighborhood on those two days specifically, distinct from the pattern of worship at temples to most other deities.

As with the wider Ramayana tradition, Hanuman also appears in Southeast Asian retellings — Thailand’s Ramakien and Cambodia’s Reamker among them — though those are best understood as cultural and literary traditions shaped by each region’s own religious history, rather than devotional Hindu worship in the Indian sense.