This week, we’re not exactly in the Ramayana, but we’re going to meet someone who is a very central figure in that story. And that character is Hanuman.
Hanuman is the equivalent of Superman. He’s got extraordinary powers with a much more interesting origin story than his Kryptonian comic book equivalent.
Amongst other things, we’ll see the first recorded space flight! And why it’s a terrible idea to throw anything at a monkey.
The character this week is a person from the same court of Emperor Akbar and Birbal, but who sometimes got the better of both of them!
Our story begins with an Apsara. An Apsara is a fairy who lives in heaven. Apsaras are skilled dancers and typically have a limited amount of magic. That includes the ability to teleport to Earth and back – without any of the “beam me up, Scotty”.
That’s precisely what Anjana was doing. It looked like a beautiful summer day in India, and so Anjana and few other fellow Apsaras decided to go on a picnic.
As they were just generally doing picnic stuff, Anjana happened to notice someone nearby. Why it was a monkey! Unlike regular monkeys at picnics, this one was very very different.
He was sitting and meditating, just like a regular rishi. And he was wearing regular Rishi clothes.
That should have been warning enough. But Anjana couldn’t help herself. She had to check if this was a trick someone was playing on her. She did the most inhuman thing possible. She threw a piece of fruit at the monkey.
Well, it was not a monkey. It was a regular Rishi who was praying and had for some reason taken on the monkey form. Obviously he was enraged. He cursed Anjana. Until she bore a child she could not return to heaven. And now, would she please look in a mirror?
Anjana did and discovered to her horror that she’d been turned into a monkey. As was common with Apsaras, she was proud of her beauty, and now she had lost it all because she had ridiculed someone else’s appearance.
Some poetic justice to go with the terribly misogynistic curse.
She tearfully bade goodbye to her fellow Apsaras and resigned to her fate. Was there someone she could appeal to? It turns out there was. Shiva the destroyer in the holy trinity.
She prayed to Shiva daily. During this time, she met another monkey, or Vanar as I’m going to call them. Saying “monkey” isn’t wrong, but “Vanar” is certainly more respectful.
The Vanar was Kesari. And together they were happy. To an extent. Anjana continued to yearn for her days in heaven.
Shiva finally heard her prayer. He set a plan in motion.
At about this time King Dasharath had received his to-go order of porridge from heaven, and dividing it up between his wives.
If you’ve heard Episode 7 – A kingdom by Horse before, I recommend you check it out. But if not, basically the idea is that most of the gods had teamed up to help Vishnu be born as sons to King Dasharath of Ayodhya. One of the sons was Ram, after whom the Ramayana is named.
So anyway, as the porridge was divided up between Dasharath’s wives, a little bit was leftover in the pot. It’s a good thing Dasharath didn’t scrape the pot clean, otherwise, the rest of the Ramayana would have turned out very differently. And that’s because the little bit of porridge that was remaining was picked up by a bird. You’re probably wondering how a bird with talons is able to pick up a semi-solid sweet dessert and fly for hundreds of miles with it. Well, this little bird had a bit of help from Vayu, the God of the Wind.
Vayu helped the bird maintain the porridge in perfect aerodynamic equilibrium. When the bird neared Anjana’s home, Vayu gently deposited the porridge right into Anjana’s mouth that happened to be open just then.
Now normally, if something drops into your mouth from the sky and all you see is a bird flying away, you should panic. Unless you’re a magical Apsara who knows that Shiva has answered her prayers. And it probably helped that the porridge was sweet.
Well, a few months later, Anjana gave birth to a baby Vanar: Hanuman.
The moment she did, she was back into her Apsara form. No longer a Vanar, she had to go back to heaven. She had been AWOL for far too long. And no, the baby wasn’t allowed to go with her. I’d like to imagine that it must have broken her heart to have to leave behind her baby son. But she had reasons to be confident in her son’s welfare. The divine porridge, together with Shiva’s blessing, along with her own limited magical ability had given the boy a number of superheroes. Besides Hanuman had three father figures in his life – Kesari, Vayu and Shiva himself. In fact Hanuman has at various points been referred to as the son of Vayu, the son of Kesari and the son of Shiva.
As Hanuman grew up with his foster father Kesari, he started discovering his own powers, sort of like Superman must have done growing up on the Kent farm.
He had inhuman and very un-Vanar like strength. And when he was a toddler he discovered he could fly. Yes. He could actually fly!
One day the child Hanuman was feeling more than a little hungry. He checked the pantry for mangoes. But they were fresh out of mangoes.
“Guess I’ll just go to the mango tree and pluck a fresh one for myself,” thought Hanuman
On his way to the mango tree suddenly Hanuman thought. “Hey, there’s a bright and shiny mango right there in the blue sky! It is surprisingly round unlike a regular mango-shaped mango. But I’m sure on the basis of absolutely nothing at all, that it is at least as sweet as regular mangoes. Why don’t I eat that?”
With that he launched himself towards the Sun.
It took a while to get closer, as you can imagine. The Sun is after all 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers away. On the way Hanuman ran into Rahu. Rahu is the god of asteroids and said to cause eclipses sometimes. Hanuman swatted him away, no questions asked and continued on towards the Sun.
The Sun-god, Surya, saw this child making straight for him, mouth all drooling. And panicked. Surya sent a quick S.O.S. to Indra, the King of the Gods in Heaven. Indra had to stop the boy before he gobbled up the Sun.
Indra fired a thunderbolt at Hanuman striking him dead on and sending the child tumbling back to Earth.
Now Vayu, Hanuman’s father saw this and softened his fall. He was angry. How dare the Gods strike his little boy! He would teach them a lesson. He was going on strike!
Well, when wind or air circulation completely stops it can be a bit hard to breathe. And that’s what started happening. All the Gods panicked and approached Vayu to relent. Which he finally did, after they gifted the child with more superpowers.
Shiva gave him the ability to walk on water. Surya gave him the power to change his size at will. Brahma, the creator who’s also my dad, gave him the ability to shapeshift. Varun, the god of the sky and seas, made him immune to drowning. Agni, the fire god, made Hanuman immune to burning. Yama, the god of death made Hanuman immortal. And Kubera, the treasurer of the Gods, blessed him with the greatest wealth of all – being eternally happy and content. Kamadev, the God of non-platonic love, made him immune to non-platonic love.
His own dad, Vayu gifted him more speed.
Now you might think that Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movies has all of those super-powers too. You wouldn’t be wrong. But let’s just say Hanuman had bigger things in mind than traveling back in time to rescue future revolutionaries and accidentally inspiring Skynet.
Hanuman had his mind set on University. He was going to learn a lot! And he had just the professor in mind.
That professor was the Sun! Yes. Hanuman had decided that the Sun god observes everything everywhere, so he must be the one to teach Hanuman.
The Sun god tried to make excuses of course – I’m too tired all day from going around the Earth.
“I thought the Earth went around the Sun!” said Hanuman
“Depends on your frame of reference” replied the Sun “I see you have lots to learn still”
“Okay, you can fly around the Earth all day, I’ll fly with you. I’ll match your speed and fly backwards so I’m facing you. Then you and I are stationary in each other’s frames of reference. And then you can teach me!”
Hanuman was a fast thinker and a fast learner, indeed.
That’s pretty much what happened. Surya taught Hanuman everything he knew about pretty much everything under the Sun!
When it was time for Hanuman to graduate, he asked Surya what his Tuition fees were. It was custom back then for fees to be provided at the end, and not up-front.
Surya replied that his son, Sugriva needed a friend. To help and protect him.
Hanuman did do that. And that leads to an important part of the Ramayana.
That’s all for now
Notes
I have a number of things to note about Hanuman, so buckle up.
The reason I’ve picked Hanuman stories this week is that we celebrate Hanuman Jayanti on Wednesday. Yup, it’s only 6 days away from Ram’s birthday. That should give you a sense of how long it took the bird to fly from Ayodhya to Anjana’s home if all else is equal.
The similarities between Hanuman and Superman are striking.
Both were abandoned as a baby. Though in Superman’s case he was shipped off himself, while Hanuman stayed put and his mom went away.
They both had super-strength and could fly obviously.
But what I find most remarkable is that both lived amongst people who had no superpowers. And yet, neither assumes a superior attitude towards the rest of humanity. I mean apart from the name Superman. But even that was a name that was given to Clark Kent by others, it’s not something that he chose for himself.
Hanuman is incredibly wise. Something that we’ll demonstrate in future episodes.
One minor bit of contradistinction: Hanuman gets his learnings in a very hot environment. Superman at his fortress of solitude is exactly the opposite. It’s incredibly cold there.
Both Kesari and Ma and Pa Kent pretty much drop out of the plot once the child has grown up into a man, though I’m sure both Hanuman and Superman were very grateful to their poor respective foster parents.
The attack on Hanuman by the other gods and the idea of the child’s parent threatening to destroy the world is similar to the mistaken identity theme in Ganesh’s birth story. See Episode 6.5 – All in the Family.
We’ve encountered Sugriv before when discussing his brother Vali. Vali was the character of the week during Episode 21 – Final Destiny
(Edit: Multiple versions of Hanuman’s origin story exist In the Shiva Purana for example, he’s an avatar of Shiva, as you said. In other Puranas, he’s called an avatar of Vayu, rather than the son of Vayu. In some other regional variations(particularly around south India), Hanuman is a combination of Shiva and Vishnu. In some variations in Odisha, Hanuman is thought to be a combination of all three – Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Maybe all of them are correct to a degree, or maybe none of them – It’s hard to tell!)
The Character of the Week
The character this week is a person from the same court as Emperor Akbar and Birbal, but who sometimes got the better of both of them!
Mulla Do Piyaza was another clever person in King Akbar’s court.
Most people think he was completely fictional. Some believe that given the Muslim majority in Akbar’s court, Mulla was created as a reply to Birbal stories that were floating around.
Given Mulla was fictional, there isn’t much to say about his life. But I’ll mention an anecdote that’s often attributed to him.
Once having wasted all his money and being down to his last copper coin, Mulla was devastated to learn that he’d dropped it somewhere in court. He frantically began hunting for it all over for it. A rival courtier took this opportunity to point out to Akbar that Mulla was being stingy looking for a single copper coin. Wasnt he receiving a salary and all kinds of gifts regularly from the Emporer?
Mulla didn’t want to admit to the whole court that he’d wasted away all his money.
“Your majesty” he addressed the Emporer “I don’t care about the monetary value of the coin.
This is a coin that has your face printed on it. I worry that someone might step on it”.
Flattery can get you out of an embarrassing situation.
That’s all for this week.
Next Week
Next week we’ll do a folk tale from Eastern India. It’s about two sisters who go to great lengths to retrieve a little cotton when it gets blown away by the wind. And by that I mean seriously desperate measures. Including running for miles and flying into the Sky.
The character next week is actually two characters, not one. Because they are twins. These brothers are associated with medicine. And not just for getting getter when sick, but they can also bring people back from the dead! Something even the genie in Aladdin couldnt do
I’ll see you next week!