Vanara वानर

What a vanara is

A vanara is one of the forest people who become Rama’s allies. In body they are monkeys: they have tails, they leap from tree to tree and fight with rocks, trees, teeth and nails. Yet they speak, reason, keep promises, crown kings and grieve for their dead. The poem calls them by many names, often in the same sarga: vanara, kapi, hari, plavaga or plavangama (“leaper”) and shakhamriga (“branch animal”). Our English often simply says “monkey”, which is faithful to the Sanskrit but should not make the reader forget how much more they are.

What Valmiki’s text says

Their origin is told in Bala Kanda 1.17. When Vishnu has been born as Rama, Brahma tells the gods to create mighty helpers for him, sons “in the form of vanaras”, fathered on apsarases, gandharva women, yaksha and naga daughters and female vanaras (1.17.5-6). Brahma had already made the bear chief Jambavan, born from his mouth as he yawned (1.17.7). Each leader has a divine father: Indra fathers Vali, the Sun fathers Sugriva (1.17.10), Brihaspati fathers Tara, Agni fathers Nila, Vishvakarma fathers Nala, and the Wind fathers Hanuman, whose body is “hard as the thunderbolt” (1.17.16). They can take any form they wish and fight “with rocks” and “with trees” (1.17.25). So from the start the vanaras are not ordinary animals but divine power in forest shape, gathered “for the sake of helping Rama”.

Rama first meets one in the Kishkindha Kanda. Hanuman, sent by Sugriva, puts aside his monkey form and comes as a mendicant (4.3.2). After hearing him speak, Rama tells Lakshmana that no one untrained in the Rigveda, Yajurveda and Samaveda could speak like this, and that he must have studied grammar thoroughly (4.3.28-29). The first vanara Rama meets is praised for perfect Sanskrit.

The alliance is sealed in a human rite. Hanuman kindles a fire from two sticks, and Rama and Sugriva walk around it as witness to their friendship (4.5.14-15). Kishkindha is a jewelled cave city with mansions and palaces (4.33.4-5). When Vali dies he is given a royal funeral (4.25), and Sugriva is crowned with full ceremony (4.26). Hanuman’s own mother, Anjana, is said to be an apsaras named Punjikasthala living in monkey form through a curse (4.66.8-9).

The animal side is never hidden, though. In the hard argument after Vali’s death, Rama answers Vali’s complaint partly by saying that kings may hunt animals, and that Vali may be killed “since you are a branch-deer” (4.18.40). Readers have debated this answer for centuries; the text gives it plainly, alongside Rama’s other reasons about Vali’s wrong to his brother’s wife.

The vanaras’ great deeds fill the second half of the poem. Hanuman leaps the ocean, finds Sita and sets Lanka on fire with his own burning tail (Sundara Kanda 5.53 and 5.54). The vanara army builds the bridge to Lanka with trees and rocks under Nala’s direction (Yuddha Kanda 6.22), and fights the rakshasas to the end.

Where the word comes from

The word vanara is usually linked with vana, “forest”, so a vanara is “one of the forest”. A popular explanation also reads it as va nara, “perhaps a man”, a play on words that fits these half-human beings, but it is a later learned pun, not the certain origin of the word.

The Vedas do not know the Ramayana’s vanaras. The Rigveda does contain a strange and much discussed hymn in its tenth book about Vrishakapi, a monkey who is Indra’s companion, but there is no clear link between him and Hanuman’s people. The vanaras as a nation of divine allies appear first in the epic itself. Later traditions, such as the worship of Hanuman as a god in his own right, grew from the Ramayana and are much later than it.

Why it matters in the story

Rama is exiled from his own city and loses his wife to the most powerful king in the world. Help comes not from other kings but from forest people whom the cities would call animals. Readers often see this as one of the epic’s deepest choices: friendship, loyalty and devotion are shown most fully by the vanaras, and the greatest servant of Rama in the whole poem is a monkey who speaks perfect Sanskrit and leaps an ocean for him.