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Hanuman Gayatri Mantra

ॐ आञ्जनेयाय विद्महे वायुपुत्राय धीमहि । तन्नो हनुमान् प्रचोदयात् ॥

In Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English — with the meaning of every word, and the one syllable most people pronounce wrongly.

What the Hanuman Gayatri is

Hanuman, addressed in this Gayatri as Āñjaneya and Vāyuputra, is the vanara son of the wind-god and the apsara-born Anjana, whose conception is narrated in the Uttara Kanda traditions and in the Ananda Ramayana. The Gayatri form does not present him with mace raised or chest torn open; it places him inside the ancient Vedic syntax of vidmahe and dhīmahi, the frame of the deity Gayatris collected in the Taittiriya Aranyaka. Here the intellect is turned toward the messenger who found Sita in the ashoka grove, who spoke Rama’s name into her despair, and who afterwards refused every boon except continued service. The verse follows the three-line Gayatri pattern arranged for contemplative recitation, yet every epithet is drawn solely from Hanuman’s parentage and from the wind that is both his father and his own nature. No other deity is called both Āñjaneya and Vāyuputra inside a single Gayatri.

Anjana’s Penance and Birth

According to the account preserved in the Ananda Ramayana and echoed in regional tellings of the Shiva Purana, the apsara Punjikasthala was reborn as the vanara woman Anjana after a curse. She performed severe austerities on the mountain later called Anjaneri in order to obtain a son who would be deathless and devoted to dharma. Vayu, the wind, carried to her a portion of the divine pudding that Dasharatha’s queens had received from the sacrificial fire; that portion had been snatched by a bird and fell where Anjana stood in prayer. From that grace Hanuman was born. The Valmiki Ramayana’s Kishkindha Kanda later recalls that the infant, mistaking the rising sun for a fruit, leapt toward it and was struck by Indra’s thunderbolt, receiving the name Hanuman from the injury to his jaw. The same wind that fathered him also healed him, and Brahma and the gods granted the child invulnerability and the boon that he would die only when he himself wished. The Gayatri remembers precisely this double parentage—Anjana’s penance and Vayu’s gift—when it names him Āñjaneya and Vāyuputra before asking that Hanuman impel the intellect.

The mantra, in six scripts

DevanagariSanskrit & Hindiॐ आञ्जनेयाय विद्महे वायुपुत्राय धीमहि । तन्नो हनुमान् प्रचोदयात् ॥

Tamilௐ ஆஞ்ஜநேயாய வித்மஹே வாயுபுத்ராய தீமஹி । தந்நோ ஹநுமாந் ப்ரசோதயாத் ॥

Teluguఓం ఆఞ్జనేయాయ విద్మహే వాయుపుత్రాయ ధీమహి । తన్నో హనుమాన్ ప్రచోదయాత్ ॥

Kannadaಓಂ ಆಞ್ಜನೇಯಾಯ ವಿದ್ಮಹೇ ವಾಯುಪುತ್ರಾಯ ಧೀಮಹಿ । ತನ್ನೋ ಹನುಮಾನ್ ಪ್ರಚೋದಯಾತ್ ॥

Malayalamഓം ആഞ്ജനേയായ വിദ്മഹേ വായുപുത്രായ ധീമഹി । തന്നോ ഹനുമാന് പ്രചോദയാത് ॥

EnglishRoman transliterationoṃ āñjaneyāya vidmahe vāyuputrāya dhīmahi | tanno hanumān pracodayāt ||

“We know Āñjaneya; we meditate on the son of Vayu; may that Hanuman impel our intellect.”

ॐ: oṃ — the sacred syllable
आञ्जनेयाय: āñjaneyāya — to Āñjaneya, son of Anjana
विद्महे: vidmahe — we know / we seek to know
वायुपुत्राय: vāyuputrāya — to the son of Vayu
धीमहि: dhīmahi — we meditate upon
तन्नो: tanno — may that one (for us)
हनुमान्: hanumān — Hanuman
प्रचोदयात्: pracodayāt — impel / awaken

The syllable people get wrong

In āñjaneyāya the conjunct ñja demands a true palatal nasal ñ, tongue pressed to the hard palate, before the voiced palatal ja. Speakers routinely substitute a dental n, producing the flattened “anjaneyaya” that erases the nasal colour proper to Anjana’s own name inside the mantra.

When the Hanuman Gayatri is chanted

Weekday. Tuesday

Festival. Hanuman Jayanti

Questions

The vidmahe-dhīmahi-pracodayāt structure is the defining syntax of a Gayatri mantra, found in the deity Gayatris of the Taittiriya Aranyaka; the Savitri Gayatri of the Rig Veda shares the metre but has no vidmahe. When later traditions composed Gayatris for individual deities, they retained that exact syntactic skeleton so that the deity could be contemplated inside the same meditative cadence already sacred to the Vedic seers. In Hanuman’s case the frame is filled with two parentage names—Āñjaneya and Vāyuputra—that appear nowhere else in the classical Gayatri corpus. The choice therefore does two things at once: it locates Hanuman inside the oldest metrical theology of India, and it insists that the intellect being impelled is turned specifically toward the son of Anjana and of wind, not toward a generic protector. Commentators in the Ramanandi and Smarta lineages note that the Gayatri does not ask Hanuman to perform any outward act; it asks only that the same awareness which once leapt the ocean now turn the reciter’s own buddhi. That inward orientation is why the Vedic frame was kept rather than replaced by a simple salutation.

Āñjaneya is the matronymic: it names him solely through his mother Anjana, the vanara woman whose penance drew Vayu’s grace. Inside the Gayatri it stands in the dative as the first object of knowledge—āñjaneyāya vidmahe—before the mantra moves to the patronymic Vāyuputra. The sequence is deliberate. By placing the mother’s name first, the verse recalls the human-ascesis side of Hanuman’s origin rather than the purely elemental side. Other common epithets—Maruti, Mahavira, Bajrangbali, Sankatamochan—emphasise strength, the body of vajra, or the removal of distress. None of those appear in the Gayatri. The mantra therefore isolates the two relational names that tie Hanuman to birth, penance, and wind, and it leaves aside the heroic titles that dominate the Chalisa and the Bajrang Baan. In temple liturgy the Gayatri is sometimes recited at the moment when the utsava murti is understood as the child of Anjana, reinforcing the matronymic emphasis that the verse itself encodes.

Vāyuputra rests on two intertwined layers. The first is the narrative layer. In the Valmiki Ramayana (Kishkindha Kanda 66) Vayu embraces Anjana and fathers Hanuman directly; later texts such as the Ananda Ramayana add that Vayu carried to her a portion of the divine pudding. The second is the theological layer in which Vayu is the cosmic life-breath, prana itself; Hanuman, as Vāyuputra, becomes the embodied movement of that breath. Medieval commentators on the Sundara Kanda, especially within the Vaishnava fold, read Hanuman’s ocean leap and his later flight with the mountain as visible proofs that the wind’s own power operates through him without obstruction. When the Gayatri places Vāyuputrāya in the dative parallel to Āñjaneyāya, it therefore invites meditation on both the storied father and the elemental principle. The intellect is asked to turn toward a figure who is at once a person with a mother and father and the living current of prana. No other Gayatri in common North Indian use holds these two registers—biographical and elemental—inside a single compound addressed to Hanuman.

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