The God who Ate Sun: Integrating Myth and Landscape Ecology in Hanuman Narratives

Madhuparna Maity* and Bina Gandhi Deori

Hanuman, one of the most popular Gods in the Hindu pantheon, has been offered various food offerings across different geographies and cultures. In northern India, it is laddu, and in southern India, it is vadā. On the eve of Hanuman Jayantī, many temples are decorated with fruits and vegetables. People in urban areas often offer bananas and peanuts, considering them symbols of the monkey-God Hanuman. The VālmīkiRāmāyaṇa, gives several examples of Hanuman’s food preferences, including sweetly ripened fruits. The later epic versions also continued to mention this choice of his in several parts of the story. This shows that an extensive reference of food and fruits are found in the Hanuman corpus encoded with detailed knowledge of the flora and the forest ecology of the Indian subcontinent (including Sri Lanka). This paper aims to examine the food and plants mentioned in the Hanuman narratives with the archaeo-botanical remains of the seed and fruit assemblages from sites associated with Hanuman and also to highlight the botanical knowledge mentioned in the corpus of literature that deals with Hanuman with the real ecological knowledge of the communities that produced them.