Recent decades have seen a notable proliferation of enormous public Hanuman statues across India, with multiple states and towns competing informally to build ever taller monuments, some rising well over one hundred feet, and some explicitly promoted by their sponsors, whether temple trusts, state governments or political organisations, as the tallest Hanuman statue in the country or the world at the time of construction, a scale of monument building that goes well beyond the traditional roadside shrine or temple image the deity's ordinary worship describes.
These large statue projects are often financed through a mix of government tourism development funds, temple trust donations and, in a number of documented cases, direct sponsorship or promotion by Hindu nationalist political organisations for whom Hanuman's association with devoted strength and service has particular symbolic resonance, so that the building of a new giant Hanuman statue today can carry a civic tourism function, a straightforward devotional function and a more explicitly political and cultural-identity function simultaneously, three motivations that are not always easy to separate in any single project.
The regional variation in dating is concrete rather than vague: Tamil Nadu keeps Hanuman Jayanti on the new moon of the month of Margazhi (December-January), Andhra Pradesh and Telangana mark a forty-one day Hanuman Vratam culminating around the same winter new moon, and it is only in the Hindi-speaking north that the spring full moon of Chaitra described above is used, so that a single deity's birthday falls at two entirely different points of the year depending on which linguistic region is keeping it.