Welcome back. After Ram rids the forest of the demons, the demon king Ravana takes revenge and abducts his wife Sita and takes her to his kingdom in Lanka. This is the central narrative event of the Ramayana. It's the event that forces all the action to happen. Ram enlist the help of the god Hanuman, leader of a monkey army, to rescue Sita. The army of monkeys and bears is large, and they're strong enough to build a bridge all the way to Lanka. They tear apart mountains and use them for the bridge construction materials. This is the 17th century Rajasthani illustration by Sahibdin, which depicts the ensuing battle between Ram's army and Ravan's demon army. In the 19th century painting on the right, shows Ram and final encounter with the ten-headed demon King Ravan, during which Ram slays Ravan and rescues Sita. Naturally, this battle is a feature of many performance traditions. The final video we're going to watch in this lecture tells of the army building the bridge of, of Hanuman's monkey army. It's an army of monkeys and bears in the story. So the monkeys and bears are bringing the bridge. But in this, in this performance, the performance focus on a much loved and well-known story of a tiny squirrel who contributes to the best of her ability. So this song was performed by a group led by Ram Sagar Singh, my host in Banpurwa village. And he'd been watching me work with various performers in the village, and he showed a great interest in my recordings and in my transcriptions. Ram Sagar's an accomplished musician himself. He's the leader of a men's devotional Psalm group. And one evening, he arranged for the group to perform at the house. He attached a loud speaker to the, to the roof. He attached a loud speaker to the roof, and the group sang well into the night, until around 2 a.m. So they broadcast their singing of various devotional songs, including a series of Ramayana songs out to the whole neighbourhood in the village. One of the songs was from a genre called kajali. Kajali are songs performed during the rainy season, and this was a Ramayana-themed kajali. So you'll only hear an excerpt of this. It's an excerpt from a longer performance that's about 20 minutes long. And you hear that the monkeys and the bears, they're strong enough to haul a huge mountain to break into pieces and build a bridge for Ram to traverse the ocean to Lanka and rescue Sita. But there's a forest squirrel arrives, and she's so small. She's so small. She doesn't how she can contribute. How can I contribute to this giant task, she says. When she does find a way, this squirrel comes up with a way, she is rewarded by Ram for her devotion. Ram arrives and sees what she's done and rewards her. And he reminds her that the smallest among us can make great contributions. So this was a message that Ram Sagar and his group wanted to broadcast to his village via loudspeaker in the middle of the night, but it's also message he wanted to communicate to me. This is after he was observing all the song material that I was collecting from his community over a period of months. It was Ram Sagar's community that hired Surender Kumar and Tulsi Kurkuriya drumming group to perform at Banpurwa village weddings. Tulsi, Tulsi the joker, used his Ramayana related platform to highlight issues of caste and issues of inequality. These messages were heard by all present, and one wonders what an extended ethnographic analysis of of audience reactions would reveal in Bunpurwa, in the village. Whatever those reactions are, we can be sure that they will be diverse. They will be diverse and varied. So as you listen to Ram Sagar's group sing about the contributions of the small and the weak among their community, you may, you might wish to consider this as one of many possible village responses to Tulsi the joker's critique.