Vanara

On the ridges of Mount Ṛkṣavat, in the grey before sunrise, a sound goes up that is neither roar nor laughter, and the birds crossing overhead fall out of the air. Below, the forest moves. Thousands of shapes are coming through the sal and the fig at the speed of weather, shouldering trunks aside the way a man wades through long grass, and the smell that follows them is crushed sap and wet stone.

They were made on purpose, and recently. Vishnu had just gone down into the household of a king of Ayodhya, taking sonship in the line of Dasharatha, and Brahma understood that the god would need hands. So he called the assembly together and gave an instruction that reads, in the Sanskrit, less like a blessing than a procurement order: let mighty guise-changing helpmates be begotten, wizards of miracles, equal to the wind in speed, versed in policy, indestructible of body, tireless as gods who live on nectar. The gods went and did it. They fathered sons on the foremost of the apsarases and on the bodies of gandharva women, on the daughters of yakshas and nagas, on she-vidyadharas and kinnaris, and on she-monkeys, langurs and bears, and every son came out wearing his father’s shape, his father’s bearing and his father’s particular valour. One of them arrived earlier and by a stranger road. Brahma yawned, and Jāmbavān the great bear walked out of his mouth.

The word itself is a modest one. *Vanara* is glossed *vane carati iti vānaraḥ*, he who ranges the forest, and read another way it is simply *vana* plus *nara*, forest-man. Valmiki is careful with it. The verses do not call the new race monkeys; they call it *vānara-rūpiṇaḥ*, monkey-shaped, which is a different claim and a deliberate one. What the gods produced was something standing in the gap between the animal, the human and the divine, and the poem keeps it there.

They were bred for one war.

Physically the epic reaches for scale rather than detail. Their bodies are elephantine and mountainous, resembling clusters of cloud and the peaks of hills, and when the whole race is assembled the earth from the mountains to the coastal provinces is described as simply overspread, the way a floodplain is overspread. Their limbs carry the marks of their particular stock, so that a vanara’s parentage can be read off him. Their weapons are their own nails and fangs. Some have the long tails of the sacred langur, some the heavy build of bears, and in pride and force they are compared to lions and tigers, which they subdue in the forest without troubling to kill them.

The roster reads like a list of the sky’s minor nobility. Vali, son of Indra, with a body sheened like Mount Mahendra. Sugriva, son of the sun. Nīla, fathered by fire and blazing accordingly. Nala, son of Vishvakarma the divine architect, which will matter later. Mainda and Dvivida, begotten by the Ashvin twins and given beauty as their inheritance, because beauty was what the Ashvins had to give. Suṣeṇa from Varuna, Śarabha from the thunder, Gandhamādana from Kubera the lord of wealth, and Tāra from Brihaspati, cleverer than any of the rest. And Hanuman, direct son of the wind, matching Garuda for speed.

Left to themselves in the hills they behaved like what they were. They rocked great mountains apparently for the pleasure of the thing, ripped firm-rooted trees out of the ground, walked into the teak after rutting elephants and caught them, and cleared the air of birds with nothing but a shout. The ocean could be made to shudder if enough of them ran at it.

Their politics went badly. Their citadel was Kishkindhā, traditionally placed in the boulder country along the Tungabhadra, a landscape of hot granite and green river, and it was ruled by Vali with Sugriva beside him. Then the shape-shifting asura Māyāvī fled into a cave and Vali went in after him, leaving his brother at the mouth. Sugriva waited more than a year. Blood eventually came out over the stone, he took it for Vali’s, rolled a boulder across the opening so nothing else could follow it out, and went home to be crowned by ministers who had to talk him into it. Vali, who had spent that year killing Māyāvī in the dark, forced his way out by another route, found his brother on the throne, and read the whole thing as theft. He drove Sugriva into exile, stripped him of everything, and kept his wife Rumā.

Which is how a fugitive monkey king came to be sitting in the hills when a grieving prince walked out of the forest with his brother and no army at all. The pact they made was exact: Rama would put Sugriva back on the throne, and Sugriva would put the vanaras on the road to find Sita. Rama kept his half from cover, loosing an arrow into Vali during a duel between brothers so alike that he had first failed to tell them apart and had to wait for a garland to mark the right one. Vali died complaining, with reason. Tāra, his widow, then talked Lakshmana down from burning Kishkindhā when Sugriva sank into wine and forgot his oath, and Vali’s son Aṅgada grew up to carry Rama’s last terms into Ravana’s hall.

After that the race did what it had been built to do. Search parties went out to every quarter of the world; the aged vulture Sampāti, watching from a cliff, told them where Lanka actually was; and Hanuman crossed the strait alone. Then came the crossing of the whole army. Nala, with Nīla working beside him, took the ocean apart and put a road across it: trees felled and dragged by the thousand, boulders rolled in, reeds twisted into cable to lash the mass together, layer on layer of trunk and rock and sand and shell driven down until the surface came up out of deep water. A hundred yojanas long, ten wide, finished in five days, and an army of forest beings walked over the sea on it.

What they could do was very nearly unlimited. They changed form at will, moved with the speed of air, cleft the ground with their feet, leapt oceans, entered the sky and took hold of clouds. They knew every divine missile in existence, which is the strange part, because they almost never used one. Where they were fatally ordinary was everything else. They fought with stones, trees, claws and teeth, so against rakshasa sorcery they were always improvising. Hanuman, bound in Lanka by a Brahmāstra, knew the release and chose not to take it. Vali, who could subdue tigers by walking past them, died of an arrow shot by a man hiding in the trees. And the worst damage the race ever took was self-inflicted: two brothers at a cave mouth, one waiting too long and the other assuming the worst, a rock rolled into place with the best intentions, and a war between the strongest beings on earth that no god had to arrange.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Vanara?

A Vanara is a member of a race of monkey-shaped forest beings in Hindu epic tradition, created on Brahma’s instruction to serve as allies to Rama. The Valmiki Ramayana calls them *vanara-rupinah*, monkey-shaped rather than monkeys, and gives them speech, kingdoms, divine parentage and the ability to change form at will. The name means roughly “forest-ranger” or “forest-man”.

Where did the Vanaras come from?

The gods fathered them deliberately. When Vishnu took birth as Rama, Brahma ordered the assembled deities to beget mighty, shape-changing sons on apsarases, gandharva women, the daughters of yakshas and nagas, vidyadharis, kinnaris, she-monkeys, langurs and bears. Each son inherited the form and valour of the god who fathered him, which is why Vali is Indra’s son, Sugriva the sun’s, and Hanuman the wind’s.

Who are the most famous Vanaras?

Hanuman is by far the best known, and receives worship in his own right across South and Southeast Asia. The others central to the Ramayana are the brothers Vali and Sugriva, kings of Kishkindha; Vali’s son Angada; Jambavan, the great bear who came out of Brahma’s yawn; and Nala, son of the divine architect Vishvakarma, who engineered the causeway to Lanka.

What powers do Vanaras have?

They change shape at will, travel at the speed of wind, leap across oceans, split the ground with their feet, uproot mature trees, shift mountains and seize hold of clouds. They also know the use of every divine missile, though in practice they fight with boulders, tree trunks, nails and fangs, which leaves them at a disadvantage against the sorcery of Ravana’s rakshasas.

Where was Kishkindha, the Vanara kingdom?

Kishkindha is the vanara citadel in the Ramayana, ruled first by Vali and then by Sugriva, and it is the setting of the epic’s fourth book. Tradition places it in the boulder-strewn granite country along the Tungabhadra river in present-day Karnataka. It is where Rama and Sugriva swear the alliance that produces the search for Sita and the war on Lanka.

Related Entries

Hanuman, Rama, Sita, Ravana, Rakshasa, Sampati, Jatayu, Vayu, Surya, Indra, Brahma, Vishnu, Apsaras, Garuda, Sun Wukong