Hanumān — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it

Evidence dossier 097 — Hanumān. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Hanumān
• Original script: हनुमान्
• Pantheon: Sanskrit
• Convention: IAST — macrons for long vowels, underdots for retroflexes, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
• False forms on record: 1
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 97 of 287

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The attested form is हनुमान्, from the tradition's own record. The canonical transliteration is Hanumān.

Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. a → ā (Long ā on final syllable). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.

Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form hanuman is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.

What the fallback status forbids is promotion: hanuman may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — a → ā — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Hanuman. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ā→a) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

Exhibit 5 — the physical record. His oldest images are Gupta-period (5th c. CE) reliefs; the cult's medieval explosion runs through the Vijayanagara empire, whose emblem he was. The great modern colossi — Karol Bagh (Delhi, 108 ft), Nandura (105 ft), Paritala Anjaneya (135 ft, among the world's tallest statues) — continue the tradition of the Vijayanagara monoliths. The Sankat Mochan temple at Vārāṇasī (16th c., founded by Tulsīdās' tradition) and Hampi's Anjaneya hill anchor his pilgrimage map.

Exhibit 6 — the continuing record. The Hanumān Chālīsā — Tulsīdās' forty verses — is the most-recited hymn in the Hindi world; his Tuesday fasts, his sindoor-red idols, and his roar in a hundred TV serials make him the most-worshipped deity of North India. "Bajrang Bali" is the name shouted at heavy lifts and hard exams alike.

The Convention's Own History

Long before IAST was formalized in 1912, Sanskrit had Pāṇini — the fourth-century-BCE grammarian whose rules describe the language's sounds with a precision no other ancient tradition matched. That heritage is why the convention is so exact: retroflexes (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ) are not accented dentals but separate phonemes with separate meanings; long and short vowels (ā/a, ī/i, ū/u) change words, not just timing. IAST writes those distinctions down with underdots and macrons so that a reader who has never heard Sanskrit can still read it correctly. Dropping the marks is not transliteration at a lower resolution — it is a different, lesser claim.

The Protocol's Position

Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.

The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.

The Verdict

Case closed on Hanumān: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form hanuman rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /sites/hanuman/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Hanuman first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: a → ā; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Ramayana, Monier-Williams, Puranas.

The Register Continues

The register holds 287 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.

Continue the register — previous entry: Hádēs (read it) · next entry: Haurvatāt (read it).

The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.