Recognising Hanuman
Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik – Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist
As per Hindu lore, to make the Veda accessible to women and ‘lowerʼ castes, the sages told stories — the Fifth Veda. The Fifth Veda includes Mahabharata, Ramayana and the vast corpus of Puranas.
In Ramayana, there are two Vedic scholars, experts in Sanskrit. The first is Ravana, son of a Brahmin migrant, leader of forest-guardians (raksha-sa), king of the island-kingdom of Lanka, who separates Sita from Rama. The second is Hanuman, forest-dweller (vana-nara), who serves the monkey-king, and helps unite Sita and Rama. The poet-sage Valmiki carefully presented these characters to communicate a point. Knowledge of Sanskrit, or Veda, is not enough to make you wise. Having a Brahmin father does not make you wise.
Stories use metaphors. Concepts become plots. Ideas become characters, even landscapes. Forest is the world where no one cares for anyone: you eat and get eaten. Fields are cultivated to create spaces where we feed and get fed. Sita, ploughed out of the field, embodies the best harvest of material reality (prakriti). Rama, gift from the sky, embodies the best of psychological reality (purusha).
Sita is ‘foodʼ that we all crave; Rama is ‘wisdomʼ that makes us content. When the two are separated, we are consumed by our own hunger. When the two are united, we experience empathy for other peopleʼs hunger. Ravana, who separates Sita from Rama, has wealth, power and knowledge, but is not content. Hanuman, who unites Sita and Rama, is so content that he has no craving for wealth, power and knowledge.
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