Hanuman Chalisa

The Hanuman Chalisa is a hymn of forty verses (chalis, forty) in praise of Hanuman, the monkey deity of the Ramayana, composed in the Awadhi vernacular by Tulsidas, the sixteenth-century poet who also wrote the Ramcharitmanas, the immensely influential Hindi retelling of the Rama story. It is among the most recited devotional texts of North India, said on Tuesdays and Saturdays, in times of fear or difficulty, and by countless people who know it by heart, and its accessibility, vernacular rather than Sanskrit, short, and easily memorised, is central to its reach.

The hymn praises Hanuman as the ideal devotee, whose strength, learning and courage are entirely placed at the service of Rama, and it is precisely this subordination of great power to loving service that makes him a model. Hanuman is invoked as a remover of afflictions and a giver of strength, and popular piety attaches protective force to the recitation itself. That a poem in a spoken vernacular, by a bhakti poet, should have become one of the most repeated of all Hindu texts illustrates the devotional turn that reshaped Hinduism in the second millennium, in which the vernacular hymn to a personal deity came to rival the ancient Sanskrit liturgy in living importance.

Tradition credits Tulsidas, the sixteenth century poet whose Ramcharitmanas retold the Rama story in Awadhi and remains the most influential vernacular Ramayana in North India, with composing the Hanuman Chalisa as well, and the two works share language, meter conventions and devotional outlook closely enough that the attribution is broadly accepted in popular practice. Scholars working on the manuscript history of Hindi devotional literature have nonetheless noted that the earliest surviving manuscript evidence for the Chalisa specifically is not as early or as continuous as the manuscript tradition behind the Ramcharitmanas, leaving some genuine uncertainty among specialists about whether the shorter text in its currently known form was composed by Tulsidas himself or assembled somewhat later by a devotee working within his poetic style, a question popular devotional practice has not needed to resolve in order to treat the attribution as settled.

The text's reach expanded enormously in the twentieth century well beyond its earlier regional North Indian devotional use, helped considerably by the rise of devotional audio recordings and by television, particularly the sequences devoted to Hanuman in Ramanand Sagar's hugely watched 1987 television adaptation of the Ramayana, which introduced or reinforced the Chalisa's recitation for a national audience watching a single broadcast serial together on an unprecedented scale. Its continued use as a protective recitation, recommended by many devotees specifically at times of fear or difficulty, has traveled with the Indian diaspora into communities far from the text's North Indian origin, carried by recordings and printed pamphlets rather than by the oral regional transmission that first carried it.