Rewriting Cultural Stories, or Trying To
On Monkey Man, Hindu nationalism, and the struggle for better motivating legends
For possibly up to 2,000 years—and at least up to 1,400—many humans have held dedicated festivals and offered up prayers to a being both divine and terrestrial, whose sacrifice yielded the gift of eternal life, and who is prayed to in fervent belief in his connection to a greater divinity.
His name Hanuman.
And thanks to Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, a lot of Westerners more familiar with Abrahamic religions now know a very strange version of his story.
It’s not that artistic license isn’t important (of course it is), but this film—which struggled mightily to be made at all, amid budget cuts, pandemic, and distribution issues; a perfect creation story for an actor/director best known to the world from Slumdog Millionaire [2008])—now occupies a fascinating space in our cultural discourse. It might seem like “India’s John Wick”, because of its core story of one man rising through layers of corrupt society to seek vengeance on people associated with a violent act upon an innocent. But this tale of a quiet, unassuming underdog taking out the worst of society contains a great deal of social commentary beneath its classic action-flick gloss—much more, at least, if you’re familiar with aspects of the Hindu faith, and some hard political truths about India today.
Indeed, if you’re from India, or part of its diaspora, and you’ve spent the last few years looking at the rise of Narendra Modi, the BJP, and Hindu nationalism with dismay, this film might have reached you as a much more explicit call for spiritual reform.
The thing is, what makes Monkey Man so striking is both what it includes and what it excludes, with respect to Hinduism and contemporary Hindu culture.
What the film includes has been the subject of quite a few Western articles remarking on the prominence given by Patel to the Hijra community. The Hijra are a longstanding intersex, trans, and drag-inclined “third gender” collective that exists in a complex liminal space in South Asian cultures. Its members are both venerated and reviled, honoured and driven to the readily exploited economic fringes. It’s not the only group in South Asia to carve out a special relationship with divinity, begging, and hard labour to make a living—but few others are simultaneously treated as such overt outcasts for the cultural stories they’ve built up around themselves to get by.
The Hijra are given a very positive representation in Monkey Man, which boasts a strong trans character in the cast, as the leader of a group of Hijra who shelter the protagonist in a shrine to an intersex god (Ardhanarishvara) after a brutal failure on the part of the Kid to seek vengeance on his own. In the safety of this shrine, shunned by most of society, the Hijra under Patel’s direction get to perform everyday joy in their community while they help the Kid train for the next phase of his battle. Then they don masks and weapons under the guise of Kali (a god whose wrath pours out in the name of the innocent), and help the Kid bring down those responsible for the brutal slaughter of many minority communities to make way for other Indians.
What’s also included in Monkey Man is, of course, Hanuman—but only one tiny slice of this deity’s story: the story of how he got his name. Depicted as a feisty little monkey with outsize strength and grand dreams, little Hanuman once mistook the sun for a ripe, juicy, glowing mango, and reached for it. For his impertinence, he was struck down by the gods up on high—an act that both broke and remade him into the divine being he was.
NB: In Sanskrit, hanu means “jaw” and man can mean “disfigured”, so even though he’s supposed to get his monkey attributes from his mother, based on a rich Indian mythic tradition of seeing men and a divine monkey species coexisting, you can see where facial deformity after this incident might have played a role in his name.
But who exactly was that divine being? What did Hanuman then spend the rest of his life doing, after being clocked by the gods for using his strength so carelessly?
Well, that’s where this film gets really interesting—because what actor/director Dev Patel has done is craft a story of one of Hinduism’s most beloved divine figures… absent the god to which Hanuman devoted his life in service.
Hanuman is so famous for how he serves Lord Rama, especially when Rama’s beloved wife Sita is kidnapped, that a common representation of this deity involves Hanuman opening his chest to reveal images of Rama and Sita scored on his heart. This story comes after another critical episode in which Hanuman’s strength and devotion are shown in equal measure, when he’s sent to find a precious herb to heal his Lord, only to return with the full mountain on which it grows. It’s no wonder, then, that this deity is invoked in relation to strength, courage, loyalty, and healing, among many other manifestations of virtuous conduct. He is the lesser-than-man divinity who is also holier-than-man, for how deeply and purely he committed himself in service to his master and friend.
Now, as with most depictions of religious figures, embellishment of course abounds in the aforementioned story—or maybe it’s better said that different facets of this deity’s tale matter more to different communities of worshippers, just as different facets of Abrahamic figures matter more to different believers in them, too. When it comes to this highly popular image of Hanuman with his chest bared, for instance, the part of the Ramayana best depicting this episode starts with a 15th-century Bengali translation of the ancient tale, which has Sita try to bestow the monkey-deity with a gift of fine gems and pearls that he crunches to bits, to criticism from another in the court, until Rama notes that Hanuman has his reasons for disdaining the material offering. In this version of the tale, Hanuman reveals that he has all that he needs from the divine pair by tearing open his chest, so that the court might see the name of Rama inscribed on every bone, and projecting out from them. Hanuman then proclaims himself “the slave of Rama” and Rama is amused.
But there is no Rama in Monkey Man.
There is a Sita—a woman trapped in the world of brutalized high-end escorts to the rich and well-connected, whom our “Monkey Man” longs to free from her captivity.
But Rama? The godhead to which Hanuman is supposed to pour out his loyalty and strength? The godhead for whom Hanuman is supposed to move mountains?
He’s not here.
There is only, in this loose fantasy-version of modern India, an ugly cult to an extreme religious leader who’s using the affectation of ascetic living and deeper spiritual wisdom as a cover for culling the undesirable from his vision of this country’s future.
And our “Kid” Hanuman, in Patel’s story, is a mere “monkey” in a world of powerful men. He might want to seek vengeance alone for what was done to his mother when he was a boy, but he cannot; it’s only with the help of other unwanted members of society that he can bring this whole notion of absolute power crashing down.
The lesson, and the yearning for change
Even though many in the Christian-shaped West only know Hinduism as a religion of “many gods”, that’s not necessarily how the latter faith is treated by all its members. The power and supremacy of Lord Rama is of overarching importance to many movements in this sweeping, 1.2-billion-strong tradition—and some extremists within that group have done a fine job these last few decades binding their notion of Hinduism (Jai Shri Ram! Victory to Lord Rama!) with a brutal political nationalism.
What others are doing—what Patel has done with this film, and what others raised in Hindu culture are valiantly striving to do as well, is return the pluralism of this faith to itself; and with it, to return a richer, more inclusive notion of society to India.
It’s not the only part of the world struggling with this tall ask. While there are many Christians who draw upon the nastier parts of the New and Old Testament to defend their poor treatment of people not like them, there are many Christians advocating fiercely for the culture of their faith to be a force for inclusion and healing instead.
So too does one find many Muslim and Jewish communities emphatically seeking care for their fellow human beings, and a more resilient state of coexistence, irrespective of what the most extreme slices of their ethno-religious umbrellas might say and do.
And we atheists aren’t immune from this struggle, either. We might not have to topple or erase whole war gods and stories of ancient spiritual conquest from the vocabulary that shapes our cosmology… but that doesn’t spare some of us from being hateful, selfish, warmongering, and tribalist under the veil of other ideologies instead.
The human condition is such that there will always be some among us who want to bend our stories into whatever shape grants them the most exclusive share of power.
And yet, the human condition is also such that there will always be some among us pushing back on that same attempt. Sometimes fruitlessly, yes. Sometimes, in ways only guaranteed to get us clocked and laid low by people wielding power up on high.
What makes Monkey Man so striking is that it doesn’t follow the Western script of “one man versus them all”. The Kid could never be strong enough to defeat what needs defeating all on his own—which is why his first attempt to do so fails spectacularly.
Rather, in Patel’s rewriting of ancient Hindu stories to serve India’s present crisis, real power doesn’t lie with any one god or man in particular. It lies with people motivated to refuse together whatever story of society fails to include us all.
We already know the “mountains” we need to move today—to tackle climate change, and rising nationalism, and stark rich-poor divides, and the challenges of migration.
But do we know whom we can call upon, to share in the staggering burden of this ask?
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
This really clarifies some of the allegorical parts of the film for me. I now get why at one point Patel opens up his chest during a surreal vision.
I've just been re-reading Milo Manara's THE APE, based on Sun WuKong, the stone monkey of Chinese legend.
https://sundayguardianlive.com/news/hanuman-sun-wukong-indian-chinese-literary-images-integrate