Hanuman's Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey - Hardcover

Anything Philip Lutgendorf creates-and he has created a lot-is eagerly awaited and long treasured. Ever since the publication of his prize-winning book The Life of a Text, we've been looking forward to Hanuman's Tale. Now here it is, and it was worth the wait. Somehow Lutgendorf manages to keep the life of his massive subject ever fresh while sharing perceptions whose subtle contours and sometimes radical edges betray many years of thought. He warns us early on that we are not to receive this as The Book on Hanuman in English-but frankly, it is. (John Stratton Hawley, Barnard College, Columbia University)

This rich, lavish, broad-ranging book on the Indian figure of Hanuman will be the standard guide and reference source on the Indian monkey god for years to come...A readable narrative that never fails to engage as it informs. (Choice)

More than fifteen years after his first masterful book on teh vernacular Ramayana of North India, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramacaritmanas of Tulsidas, PHilip Lutgendorf returns with another superb book on a closely related and yet vastly different topic: the divine and charismatic monkey Hanuman...This is a major achievement in the study of South Asian religions. (Journal of Religion)

Hanuman, the Hindu monkey-god, is best known in the west for his role in the epic Ramayana, in which, as the devoted servant of Rama, the tale's hero, he leads a ferocious monkey army to help defeat the evil Ravana and rescue Rama's wife Sita. Philip Lutgendorf examines Hindu popular literature, art, and ritual, and shows that Hanuman is perhaps the most beloved deity in the Hindu pantheon. Drawing on an enormous treasure trove of previously untapped sources that he has gathered through years of fieldwork, as well as on interviews with devotees, he traces the history of Hanuman's character, teases out the many variations on the story, and examines the sources of his enormous appeal.