Hanuman

Hanuman is the bhakta by whom every other bhakta is measured. Mahavir, the great hero; Bajrangbali, whose limbs are the thunderbolt; Pavanputra, son of the wind, and Anjaniputra, son of Anjani; Sankat Mochan, the one who loosens what binds. Strength beyond measuring was given to him, and he kept none of it for himself: he laid the whole of it at the feet of Shri Rama, and so the Rambhakta's own glory and his Lord's name became one thing. Ask him for anything and he gives it in Rama's name; praise him, and he turns the praise over to the one he serves. Tradition holds him to be an avatar of Rudra — Mahadev descending into the form that could serve, since the lord of all lords would take no higher station in Rama's court than a servant's — and so the Shaiva and the Rama-bhakta bow at the same threshold here. He is chiranjivi, deathless: wherever the Ramkatha is sung he is believed to be present, seated somewhere in the assembly with folded palms and brimming eyes, and a seat is kept for him at every path of the Ramayana. That is the shape of this tradition. It does not gather the houses of a god who waits to be worshipped; it gathers the houses of the servant who is still at work, and who stands nearest of all the great ones to whoever calls.

His murtis are unmistakable. Sindoor covers them from head to foot, orange-red and thick, renewed as a chola over the whole body — and the temples tell why: seeing Sita put sindoor in the parting of her hair for her Lord's long life, Hanuman covered himself in it entirely, reasoning that if a little gives so much, the whole of it must give more. A bhakta's arithmetic became the offering that never changes, and sindoor, chameli oil, a red flower and a laddoo are still what is carried in. He is worshipped as the child on Anjani's lap and as the hero who carried the mountain; kneeling with folded palms before Rama's throne, and tearing open his own chest to show whose name was written within. The katha of Ahiravana gives him the Panchamukhi form, five faces turned to the five directions at once, so that five lamps could be put out in a single breath and Rama and Lakshmana brought back from the nether world. Tuesday and Saturday are his days, kept across Bharat with fasting, red flowers and a reading of the Hanuman Chalisa — and the Chalisa is itself the thread that binds two of the great houses gathered here: Goswami Tulsidas, who began the Ramcharitmanas at Ayodhya and completed it at Kashi, and to whom long tradition gives the Chalisa's forty verses, is remembered as having had darshan of Hanuman where Sankat Mochan stands today.

The dhams of this tradition run from the Shekhawati sand to a Himalayan summit. At Salasar in Churu he is Balaji, and the darshan is like no other: a face of sindoor bearing beard and moustache, risen — as the temple tells it — under a farmer's plough at Asota and enthroned where the bullocks halted on a dune. South-east of it, at Ghata Mehandipur in Dausa, Balaji is worshipped in his child form between two low hills, and to that darbar people have brought the afflictions of body and of mind for longer than anyone can date. In Ayodhya he keeps the gate: Hanuman Garhi is a fort on a mound above Ramkot, and the city's own order of precedence sends the pilgrim up its steps before the darshan of Ram Lalla — the courtesy a bhakta owes the greatest of bhaktas. In Kashi he is Sankat Mochan in a walled grove beside the Assi, his murti turned towards Rama and his bhog the besan laddoo. Outside Patna Junction, Mahavir Mandir holds twin murtis in a single sanctum and keeps hospitals out of what its naivedyam earns. And above Shimla, on the peak that took the rishi Yaksha's name, Jakhu remembers not the Sanjivani flight but the promise that turned it back.

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