WERE HANUMAN AND THE VANARA, MONKEYS?

How do we explain the monkeys in Ramayana? If Rama was historical, how could people of those time converse with monkeys?

Monkey is a term that has been loosely used in last couple of 100 yrs to explain the term Vanara in English language.

The term Vanara when analyzed, can give us vital suggestive clues, some of them being:

•People of the forest or Vana –Vana nara
•Vanara could be an exclamatory ! word as in “Are they human too?” Vah nara? So human like, yet so different !

This may have been the way to express different varieties of people as is evident from other words in our ancient texts such as Kinnara or Kimpurusha too. Kin, Kim here meaning, “Are they?” and Purusha and Nara meaning men or humans.

So there probably were some people in those days, very similar to what we now understand as normal humans, but who had a minor perceptible variance, which raised exclamation. This could well have been a part of the evolution process.

The word Hanuman has an etymological root in the Samskrt language, meaning, “one with the long jaw”. Anjaneya is another name for Hanuman, meaning son of Anjana, who was the mother of Hanuman. Anjaneya had a long protruding jaw and hence got the name Hanuman too.

In British records of the Gazette of Bellary district, which is very near modern day Hampi, i.e., Kishkinda of earlier times, the then collector has noted that the forest tribes of that area, call themselves the Vanara people & used Monkey as a symbol in their totem pole & flag.

Kishkinda was the land of the Vanara in the Ramayana text. So, perhaps monkey was the emblem of the Vanara of those times too, which possibly led to them being referred to as Monkeys and subsequent imagery only reinforced the same.