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