[INDOLOGY] Thank you, Dominik+Hanumat as a musician

[DIEGO LOUKOTA SANCLEMENTE]

  Dear List,

  I would like to start by expressing my deep appreciation for Dominik, and
all the work that goes into INDOLOGY. Although I will miss the tangle of
the old bulletin-style reports, I think this last update has made the
functioning of the list much more nimble. Kudos also to Stefan for the
technical help.
  Now heading to actual indological matters, does anyone know about the
tradition of Hanumat as a musician?
  I am interested in the clay figurines of rhesus macaques (Macaca Mulatta)
from Yotkan, in the Khotan area. The figurines date to the early part of
the first millennium CE and the largest corpus was discovered by Aurel
Stein. Since, as far as I have been able to ascertain, the rhesus monkey
has never been endemic to the Tarim basin, and also since a version of the
*Rāmāyaṇa* was known in Khotan, I have been toying with the idea that there
should be an Indian referent here.
  The Yotkan monkeys come in two main modes: mithuna/erotic monkeys and
musician monkeys playing a variety of instruments (long-neck lutes,
traverse flutes, panpipes, harps, drums). The sexual aspect is not
surprising given the colorful mating behavior of the rhesus monkey (
https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Macaca_mulatta/, if you are curious).
As for the musical variant, I have found some references to what appear to
be Indian folk traditions that make Hanumat a musician, but I have found no
textual sources or else archaeological or art-historical material to
suggest that the tradition could have had any substance in the early
centuries CE.
  If one Googles "Hanuman with veena" *vel sim.* in Indian languages one
finds many modern commercial devotional figurines, but older examples of
temple bronzes can be found too (
https://temple.dinamalar.com/Popupimage.aspx?Photo=G_L6_1390.jpg).
  I have found in semi-scholarly sources from the early 20th century
references to two stories (I can give references to anyone interested) that
relate Hanuman to music. One involves Rāma teaching music to Hanumat and
materializing the seven *svāras* as beautiful women. The other involves
Hanumat melting a rock through the performance of a particularly fiery
*rāga* in the presence of the sage Nārada. The stories appear in a variety
of modern sources in English, but never with a textual reference, so that I
suspect that these might be fairly recent folk stories.
  Still, if anyone is aware of a premodern textual attestation of these
stories or else of archeological or art-historical material that points to
a connection between Hanumat and music I would be, as usual, exceedingly
grateful.

  *namaskaromi*,

  Diego
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20210413/9ca2b408/attachment.htm>