Hanuman Jayanti

Hanuman Jayanti celebrates the birth of Hanuman, the monkey (vanara) devotee and helper of Rama, revered as the model of selfless devotion (bhakti), strength, courage and celibate service. The date varies by region: much of the north keeps it on the full moon of Chaitra (March-April), while Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and other traditions observe it at different times of the year, a divergence that reflects the different local narratives of his birth. Hanuman is among the most widely and fervently worshipped of Hindu deities, his image present at innumerable roadside and village shrines, and Tuesday and Saturday are his special days.

The festival is kept with visits to Hanuman temples, the offering of vermilion (sindoor) and oil with which his images are anointed, the distribution of sweets, and above all the recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa, the forty-verse Hindi hymn of Tulsidas that is one of the most recited devotional texts in India; in many temples it is chanted continuously through the day. Hanuman's appeal lies in his combination of immense power with complete humility and loyalty, and he is invoked for protection, for the removal of fear and adversity, and as the ideal of the devotee who places all his strength at the service of the divine.

Recent decades have seen a notable proliferation of enormous public Hanuman statues across India, with multiple states and towns competing informally to build ever taller monuments, some rising well over one hundred feet, and some explicitly promoted by their sponsors, whether temple trusts, state governments or political organisations, as the tallest Hanuman statue in the country or the world at the time of construction, a scale of monument building that goes well beyond the traditional roadside shrine or temple image the deity's ordinary worship describes.

These large statue projects are often financed through a mix of government tourism development funds, temple trust donations and, in a number of documented cases, direct sponsorship or promotion by Hindu nationalist political organisations for whom Hanuman's association with devoted strength and service has particular symbolic resonance, so that the building of a new giant Hanuman statue today can carry a civic tourism function, a straightforward devotional function and a more explicitly political and cultural-identity function simultaneously, three motivations that are not always easy to separate in any single project.

The regional variation in dating is concrete rather than vague: Tamil Nadu keeps Hanuman Jayanti on the new moon of the month of Margazhi (December-January), Andhra Pradesh and Telangana mark a forty-one day Hanuman Vratam culminating around the same winter new moon, and it is only in the Hindi-speaking north that the spring full moon of Chaitra described above is used, so that a single deity's birthday falls at two entirely different points of the year depending on which linguistic region is keeping it.