Hanuman’s tunnel

Sheikh Othman (Hanuman) in Yemen

Many years ago, one Sir Syed Ahmad Taqvi bin Syed Muhammad Muttaqi KCSI, commonly known as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, an Islamic pragmatist, reformist and philosopher of nineteenth century British India wrote thus at Aden, circa 1870, in his ‘A voyage to Modernism (Safarnama-i-musafiran-i- Landan)’.  While out of the mosque we were sitting in, we met a Hindu and sat with him. He was a Marwari. He had come to Bombay and ran a money lending business. He had lived here a long time and traveled by ship. He informed us that there were three Hindu temples in Aden - Mahadev, Hanuman and one more I don’t now recall, they were built by donations from the Hindu travelers to Aden. I was delighted to know that Hindus traveled across the ocean in steamers as far as Aden without polluting their caste and religion. May god bless the Hindus of our part of the country also with similar wisdom!

You may wonder why I mentioned this in starting. Well, one the Hanuman temple and its relevance in distant Aden and secondly the fact that Hanuman according to legend, reached Aden through a tunnel under the sea. Surprised? Well, there was such a myth, and recorded so among others, by the 13^th century traveler Ibn al-Mujawir.

And with that, I will introduce you to a certain Arab version of our epic Ramayana.

Ibn al-Mujawir’s Tarikh is a wide-ranging work, framed in large part as a typical rihla or travel account of his journey through the Hijaz and Southern Arabia. In it he narrates - The Indians have reported as follows – Aden was the prison of Dassir, the name of a djinn with ten heads,  one of them al-Ghazl Dasir. He used to live in the Jabal al-Manzar and take a walk on the sands of Huqqat. After his death Hanuman lived in Huqqat. It was Solomon, son of David- PBUH- who drove them out when he arrived in the land of the Yemen for Bilqis, since the people mentioned above are spirits….Aden was called Samran by the Hinds…

Jabal irah is a lofty mountain in the sea opposite Aden and Jabel Al Manzar… In the mountain is a well called Anbar and called by the Indian sages Fu Bar, was turned upside down and continuously puts out smoke… No one can look into it because it is too hot, of difficult access and dark. There are broken stones around the well, also sleeping vipers and snakes are rearing up. The Indians said that Hanuman, i.e. the spirit mentioned above dug this well. It is not really a well, but an underground passage leading under the sea to the town of Ujjaini Vikramaditya, the seat of King Malwa in India.

I was informed by Mubarak al Sharabi, the client of my father Muhammad B Masaud, as follows – The reason of the digging of the well to Fu Bar was that a spirit Hadathar stole Sita from the regions of Ayodhya, took her off and settled with her on the summit of Jabal Sirah. He said he wanted to change her shape to that of a Djinni. While they were engage in argument, Hanuman heard of what was going on, he being another spirit in the shape of a monkey. So he dug this underground passage from the middle of the town of Ujjaini Vikramaditya beneath the sea. The ends of the excavation reached the middle of Jabal Siran and he did all this in one night. He left the hole and found her asleep on the summit of the mountain under a thorn tree. HE picked her up on his back and took her down the underground passage, journeying by night until he reached Ujjaini. As dawn shone brightly, he handed her over to her husband Ramachandra. She bore him two male children one called Lava and the other Kusa. There is a long story full of incident attached to her, the telling of which would take too long, but the underground passage has remained till now.

Now he continues to mention that this is not the only tunnel to India – A certain Indian dug an underground passage in Devalvara in the regions of Al Sumanat the end of which led to….. in the regions of Devagiri the first part of the borders of which are Malwa. It also ran under the sea and sand and is said to be the work of a djinn, there can be no doubt about that! And then he talks about another Indian tunneler who dug a complex tunnel for a noble man so he could secretly tryst up with the daughter of the king. Ibn al-Mujawir, also notes that Aden was often referred to as Habs al-Fir’awn—Prison of the Pharaohs—and Muqam al-jinn—Abode of the jinn. Ibn al-Mujawir apparently cited his anecdotes from a local Yemeni chronicle, Kitab al-Mufi d fi Akhbar al- Zabid. In the book, Ramachandra is Ram Hyder, and Hanuman is Hanumat (hanuman) an ifrit - a clever and powerful form of the djinn. 

Just to see how different people view the same story, take a look at this Mughal painting depicting a scene showing Sita shying away from a differently dressed Hanuman, thinking it is Ravana in disguise.

As we can see, this version is quite different from the Lanaka Ramayana which we are all familiar with where Rama, Lakshmana and Hanuman are involved in the rescue of Sita from Ravana living in Lanka.  In this version, Ravana is replaced by Hadathar in Aden. 

The temples in Yemen which Muttaqui mentioned are actually the Tarichmerga Temple which was built in 1862, the Ram Temple built in 1875 and the ‘Sheikh Othman’ Hanumanji Temple was built in 1882. This was spread over an area of five acres in the Sheik Othman district. It reportedly used to have a garden with a pool which was used by the devotees for bathing. It also had two lodgings for the Indian community. The temple no longer exists now. Another temple named Shankar Hanuman Temple used to exist: It was built in the nineteenth century and was located inside a large cave in the Dashmi Bazar, Khusaf Valley in the Crater area.

But Hanuman as some readers already know was indeed involved in tunnel travel in Indian versions of the Ramayana and perhaps multiple events and stories got mixed and corrupted by the time it reached the Arab traveler. Let’s see one of the many versions to see a possibility.

The war with Ravana is raging. Ravana sends for Ahiravana for help. Ahiravana arriving disguised as Vibhishana, abducts the two sleeping brothers, Rama and Lakshmana at night and carries them off to Patala, the netherworld. Hanuman who was responsible for the security despairs and takes it upon himself to rescue the brothers before they are sacrificed to Mahakali by Ahiravana. He enters Patala through a crack in the sea floor and goes through a tunnel to the netherworld. As Hanuman trudges along to the palace, he is stopped by a monkey guard looking just like him, only to understand that this is his son Makaradhawja, conceived from his sweat (Hanuman was celibate) through a fish Makara which swallowed the sweat drop! But his son would not let him in, so Hanuman has no choice but to wrestle and subdue him. Hanuman soon assumes the form of the goddess and starts to consume every offering that is served, and awaits the offering of Ram and Lakshmana by Ahiravana. As Ahiravana is about to slay Rama for the goddess, Hanuman pounces on Ahiravana and lops off his head. On the way out, Rama asks Hanuman to untie his son and makes him the new lord of Patala.

In other versions, we have Ahiravana digging upwards to the location where Rama and Lakshmana are sleeping and eventually manages to kidnap them. Hanuman tracks them later going through the tunnel and rescues them. I guess that is how tunnels and the connection to the Djinn in Aden came about. Was Hadathar the Ahiravana or the Ravana with ten heads? Difficult to surmise.

You may wonder how Ujjain came into contention in this story. Even though the world map depicts a relatively straight line from Aden to Ujjain, I can see no practical reason for the connection since dhows shuttled between various western sea ports in Malabar and Gujarat to Aden in the past. Ujjain was of course very important to the Hindus and was part of anything mathematical, navigational and astrological, because that is where India’s ancient Prime Meridian zero longitude and the Tropic of Cancer once crossed. Lord Mahakaal, the presiding deity of Ujjain is considered to be the God of Time. Even today, wherever a horoscope is made according to the Hindu almanac, Ujjain time (roughly 29 minutes behind IST) is usually its basis!

Why was such a fable created? Intermingling of cultures, traders and tales over cups of coffee, the elixir of Yemen? Who knows? Then again where and what was Patala and who was a Rakshasa? Some knowledgeable people have connected the area south of the Deccan to Patala and the darker skinned matrilineal Dravidians to rakshasas. We will discuss all that another opportune day and later, we can also take a look at the Chinese versions of the Ramayana.

Reference

A Traveler in Thirteenth-Century Arabia / Ibn al-Mujawir's Tarikh al-Mustabsir edited by G. Rex Smith

An Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia - By Frederick Mercer Hunter

Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937 by Scott S. Reese - Hanuman’s Tunnel: Collapsing the Space between Hind and Arabia in the Arab Imaginary

The rich Hindu temple heritage in Aden – Embassy of India Yemen