Hanuman is so Popular!

Last week, there was a talk about the popularity of Hanuman* across India, and an academic, who hails from a major American university, shows the audience a slideshow of pictures of the monkey-god in full-color, all leaping and mid-motion as he reaches towards the sky. In most stories, Hanuman jumped to grab the sun when he was a baby, and, later, he jumped across the sea to reach Lanka, where the abducted Sita is kept in captivity. The academic, who hails from a background of study in Hindi literature, has written a book that argues against dismissing the worship of Hanuman as a minor cult, due to the lack of canonical texts dedicated to him, and tries to show that the meaning of Hanuman as a “liminal” deity plays a major role in his popularity, shown by the number of shrines and temples dedicated to him throughout the nation. The hall, a slowly crumbling structure from the 1970s located in the old Pune neighborhood of Sadhasiv Peth, normally hosts Indian classical music concerts and official functions for a heavily Marathi-speaking local audience. 

The event, hold in English and attended by a very multilingual group consisting of Pune's cosmopolitan, young student population, and the “intellectual” clique, was a slight anomaly in the space. These audience members, proceeded to ask questions, but these questions were not about about how Hanuman became popular, but rather about how storytelling about Hanuman's supernatural feats are facing severe competition from “Western superheroes” in mass publications. The academic jokingly replied, “That's why. I'm here to tell you about the great stories about the Ramayana and the Mahabharata!”

The irony, however, is that the Indian audience already knew about the epics.** A young man, however, said that, “it's not a talk for an Indian audience. We already knew all that.” During a cigarette break outside of the building he mentions that the talk “was more for a Western audience.” 

Telling the epics as an artistic genre, therefore, in spite of assuming certain common elements that enables an Indian audience to recognize a Ramayana or a Mahabharata in them, requires a certain newness in it order to capture the mind of an Indian audience. As Romila Thapar suggests, the epics are not attached to “any singular historical moment.” In other words, the epics are not timeless. Most likely, a copy of the Ramayana or the Mahabharata is not ontologically possible, it is always a retelling. Each reproduction of the epic narrative carries the vernacularities of its own time and space. 

* Hanuman is a simian god who, in most Ramayana stories, performed miraculous feats in order to help Rama, the "protagonist," defeat the demon-king Ravana.

**Note: by no means I am arguing against the merits of the said academic's work. It is, in my opinion, a wonderful piece of scholarship. These are simply my thoughts on the audience's response after the talk.