Hanuman on the Mountain

At Pampa, by Rishyamukha, the exiled monkey king Sugriva saw two armed men walking toward his mountain and assumed the worst — that his brother Vali, who had driven him out and would kill him on sight, had sent warriors. He sent his minister down to find out who they were, and the minister came in disguise, as a humble wandering monk, and that is how the Ramayana introduces Hanuman: not with a leap or a feat, but with courtesy and exact speech.

The epic is deliberate about this first impression. Hanuman approached the strangers as a soft-spoken brahmin, praised them precisely, drew them out, and the thing Rama noticed first — and said aloud to Lakshmana — was the quality of his speech: that no one could speak so well who had not mastered the whole of language and disciplined the whole of himself; that this was a being of rare cultivation wearing a modest shape. The Ramayana wants the reader to meet Hanuman’s mind before his strength, because the poem’s claim about him is that the strength is the least of him. He is the son of the wind, immensely powerful, but what makes him the heart of the epic is devotion joined to intelligence — capability that has given itself, completely and by choice, to a purpose outside itself.

When the disguise had done its work and trust was established, Hanuman did the small revealing thing: he resumed his own form, set Rama and Lakshmana on his shoulders, and carried them up the mountain to Sugriva himself. The gesture is the whole character in miniature — strength used instantly, without display, in service, the moment service is what is called for. The Ramayana will repeat that pattern at every scale, up to the leap across the sea and the carrying of a mountain, but it establishes it here, on a hillside, with two tired men lifted up a slope.

It is worth marking what the poem has done structurally by waiting this long to bring him in. The Mahabharata’s indispensable ally, Krishna, is present from early; the Ramayana withholds Hanuman until the hero is at his lowest — kingdomless, wifeless, half-broken, passed forward by a chain of the dying. The friend the whole poem was waiting for arrives precisely when Rama has nothing left to offer a friend, which is the Ramayana’s way of defining the friendship: Hanuman attaches himself not to a prince with a throne but to a grieving man in bark in a forest, and never once, in the rest of the epic, asks anything back.

Hanuman brought the two parties together at the top of the mountain — Rama and Lakshmana, dispossessed of a kingdom and a wife; Sugriva, dispossessed of a kingdom and a wife by his own brother. Two ruined men, each holding exactly what the other needed: Rama the strength to restore Sugriva’s throne, Sugriva the people who could comb the earth for Sita. The chapter ends on the threshold of the pact, with the figure who will carry it already established as what he is — and the Ramayana, having spent four books taking everything from its hero, begins, here, on a mountaintop, through a minister in a monk’s disguise, the slow business of giving him the means to fight back.