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Paper short abstract

Examining narratives of encounters between human and hunman (gray langur) in Bengal, this paper explores how these wild animals negotiate sacred, domestic, and ritual spaces while interacting with humans and shaping narratives of religiosity, wilderness, power, and interspecies coexistence.

Paper long abstract

Gray langurs, popularly known as hunman (from Sanskrit, Hanuman) in Bengal, occupy a curious position between nuisance and contested reverence in everyday life. Their mythic association with the divine figure Hanuman in the epic Ramayana grants them a privileged place in sacred imagination, yet in lived practice, they are as likely to be feared, mocked, or tolerated. In rural Bengal, hunmans appear as unruly spectators at temples, roaming freely, snatching offerings, and even witnessing sacrificial rituals, blurring the line between ritual order and profane disruption. They also intrude into domestic space, bewildering householders, stealing vegetables, sometimes, puzzled by their reflections in mirrors. Folk narratives describe moments of uneasy hospitality, such as when female hunmans with newborns seek shelter in human homes to escape aggressive infanticidal males. Villagers, otherwise wary of them, extend temporary refuge in these moments of crisis. By drawing on oral accounts and field observations from southern West Bengal, this paper explores how humans and hunmans negotiate shared space across private and public domains. Situating these encounters within broader contexts of vernacular narratives and lived religion, I demonstrate how human–hunman encounters illuminate the porous borders of sacred and profane, domestic and wild, challenging conventional dichotomies between culture and nature. Across contexts, these animals emerge not as passive presences but as agents actively negotiating space and shaping narratives. These narratives prompt us to rethink the conception of “wilderness” through interspecies relations in shared ecology and negotiations of power and space for survival.