Hanuman

Valmiki tells his birth twice. In Book IV (Kishkindha Kanda 66) Jambavan reminds Hanuman himself: his mother is Anjana, the apsara Punjikasthala, “the loveliest of the apsaras”, reborn on earth as a monkey “owing to a curse” (the text says neither which curse nor whose) and married to the vanara Kesari; he is Kesari's son in law and the wind god Vayu's son by begetting, so leaving Kesari out tells half the genealogy. As a child he saw the newly risen sun, took it for a ripe fruit and leapt at it; Indra hurled the thunderbolt, the fall broke his left cheekbone, and from that comes his name: hanumant, “the one with the jaw”. Vayu withdrew in fury with the child and stopped circulating, and with him stopped the breath of all beings, the sacrifices and the study of scripture, until the gods appeased him with boons. The list of who gave what is in Book VII (Uttara Kanda 36), a later addition: Indra made him proof against the thunderbolt, Surya promised him a hundredth part of his own brilliance and the gift of eloquence, Varuna that neither his noose nor his waters would touch him, Yama that he would not be slain in battle, Kubera gave him his mace, Shiva held back his arrows, and Vishvakarma and Brahma swore that none of their weapons could harm him. It is not immortality: it is dying only when he wills it, and no weapon wounding him.

He is shown as a vanara with tawny fur, a red face and a long tail, carrying the mace Kubera gave him. His showiest power is changing size: on the way to Lanka the demoness Surasa demands that he enter her mouth; he grows, she grows with him, and then he shrinks to a tiny thing, goes in and comes out in an instant (Book V, 1). The leap comes from his father: he crosses the sea driven by the wind, though the journey is broken three times — by Mount Mainaka, which rises to offer him rest, by Surasa, and by the rakshasi Simhika, who seizes him by his shadow. His strength moves mountains literally: in Book VI he tears a whole peak from the Himalaya “with its trees, its elephants and its gold”, because he cannot tell which herb he was sent for (VI, 74). He is not fireproof by nature. When the rakshasas set his tail alight the fire does not burn him, and the text gives its own reason: “the fire does not burn me, through the kindness of Sita, the power of Rama and the friendship of my father” (V, 53). He is no less provided with learning: Rama, who has not yet met him, infers from hearing him speak that he has studied the Rig, the Yajur and the Sama and has mastered grammar (IV, 3); the Uttara Kanda adds that he learned that grammar from Surya himself, following him from sunrise to sunset with the book in hand.

Book V of the Ramayana, the Sundara Kanda, is his alone. He leaps to Lanka, walks the city by night and finds Sita in the ashoka grove, in soiled clothes, emaciated and ringed by rakshasi guards (V, 15). Indrajit captures him with the brahmastra, Brahma's weapon, and he lets himself be bound so as to be taken before Ravana (V, 48). When they set his tail alight he burns the city “as Rudra burned Tripura”, sparing a single house, Vibhishana's (V, 54). In the war of Book VI he kills Dhumraksha, Akampana, Devantaka, Trishira and Nikumbha, and twice goes for the mountain of herbs: first for Rama and his brother (VI, 74), then for Lakshmana alone (VI, 101). The name Dronagiri, under which the episode is told today, is not in Valmiki, who speaks of Himavat, of Rishabha and of Mount Oshadhi. His forgetting his own strength is not modesty: it is a curse laid by the sages of the lines of Bhrigu and Angiras, worn out by his childhood mischief (VII, 36), which is why Jambavan has to remind him who he is before the leap. At the end Rama grants what he asks: to stay alive as long as his story is told (VII, 108). That is why he is a chiranjivi, and why the Mahabharata shows him centuries later on Mount Gandhamadana, testing Bhima and promising to ride on Arjuna's banner.