Hanuman's devoted following arose a thousand years after the Ramayana
Hanuman, the divine vanara who serves Rama in the Ramayana, is venerated in temples and images more than ever. Yet early texts and archaeology show little devotion to him. His rise as a god worshipped in his own right came roughly a millennium after the epic was composed, during the second millennium CE.
Known also as Maruti, Bajrangabali and Anjaneya, Hanuman is counted among the chiranjivi, the long-lived immortals. Most traditions call him the spiritual son of the wind god Vayu, who blessed his mother Anjana with a child without physical contact; his earthly father was Kesari. Shaiva traditions instead see him as an incarnation of Shiva, and a 17th-century Odia work, the Rasavinoda by Dinakrishnadasa, even has Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva merging into his form.
The origin of his name is uncertain. One reading is one with a disfigured jaw, echoing a Puranic story in which the infant Hanuman mistakes the Sun for fruit, leaps for it, and is struck on the jaw by Indra. Other names describe his deeds or lineage: Rama Doota means Rama's messenger, and Sankata Mochana, remover of hardships. A divine monkey appears far earlier, in Rigveda hymn 10.86, dated between 1500 and 1200 BCE.
In Valmiki's Ramayana, composed around or before the 3rd century BCE, Hanuman is a resourceful helper and messenger. His elevation came in the late medieval period, above all through Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas of about 1575 CE, which cast him as the model devotee, brave and immensely strong. Tulsidas also composed the Hanuman Chalisa, a hymn to his virtues that is still widely recited.
From the 17th century onward, stories presented him as fully divine and increasingly human in appearance, with less fur. He became a champion of the religiously persecuted, a yogi, and an inspiration for warriors and martial artists; Samarth Ramdas portrayed him as an emblem of defiance against oppression. He fuses two prized ideals, shakti and bhakti, meaning assertive strength and loving devotion, and is traditionally honoured as a lifelong celibate.
Source: Hanuman
