In the age of global citizenship, South-Indian dance forms unarguably, serve as India's signpost for cultural identity. Among many Indian immigrant families residing in the First World, Bharatnatyam or Kuchipudi are not just dance forms or a matter of choice. It is a performance of allegiance that these families perform to the host nation through their women's dancing bodies. Evidently, this arrangement raises a series of questions about the intersecting aspects of race, gender, the art form of dancing and its representation. The present book by Rumya Sree Putcha attempts to answer these questions from historical, political and at times deeply personal quarters by closely attending to the diverse experiences of Indian women dancers in India and the US from the 1930s to the present times.
Putcha's critique is based on the premise that traditionally, performances of national citizenship for an Indian woman demands her presence only as a dancing body without voice. That is, the dancer's voice is systematically constrained once she enters the public culture of performance. In the West, for instance, the Indian woman proves her allegiance through her 'traditional' dancing body and her 'modern' English speaking voice. In other words, her performance of national loyalty demands an Indian immigrant woman to look traditional and sound modern, one of the processes through which bodies and voices are differentiated. Often, such differentiating agencies reside with the privileged white race in the context of the US, and the privileged upper-caste men in the context of India. The book, at large, is an insightful attempt in deconstructing these bodies of knowledge from within the arena of South-Indian classical dancing that either passes as 'multiculturalism', or 'tradition' and 'culture preservation', but in fact are derived from the biases of the privileged race and caste respectively.
From performing in a classical dance arena to dancing in a pub or dancing in cinema, a woman's body acquires several different meanings for different audiences. Considering these dance cultures as mutually constitutive, the author also examines the role of dance spaces in shaping the agency of Indian women. For instance, a nightclub like Pasha offers a compelling contrast to a traditional dance space like the Kuchipudi Centre in Chennai, in terms of the aesthetics expected of a woman's dancing body. Reflecting upon her experience at these two dancing spaces, Putcha writes;
The dance studio felt like an alternative reality during the hours I spent at Pasha. My body was held to different, yet related, standards at Pasha—standards that revealed the myriad ways a woman's body is sexualized and socialized in everyday, urban south India today... I learned very quickly, for example, that the torso must be held still so as not to attract unwanted attention. As one companion, Megha, explained to me one of the first times I joined them at Pasha, "If you move like that, you'll get a lot of people staring. That's fine if you want that, but if you don't want that, keep your arms down and close to your body and don't swivel your hips that much." This warning resonated since I had received similar technical feedback from my fellow dance students at the kc. In other words, all of these women were articulating how they negotiated dancing in heteropatriarchal social spaces in ways that allowed them to blend in and to avoid expressing anything that might read as loud behavior. (111)Evidently, a disciplinarian politics regulated by caste, race and gender remains at play in the arena of public performances. However, despite such disciplinarian politics, women have time-and-again found agency for themselves. To highlight those moments when "the dancer's voice reveals quiet strategies of resistance and subversive acts of compliance" (03), remains one of the aims of the book.
Divided into four chapters and an epilogue, the book is laboriously multifaceted even though the arguments made are quite straightforward. Each chapter can be read as a standalone section beginning with an ethnographic vignette. In all these chapters the author sifts through Telugu culture industries to uncover their negotiations with a woman's identity.
The first chapter titled Womanhood, traces origins of modern national womanhood in India, which was solely understood as Brahmin womanhood courtesy, Telugu cinema of the early twentieth century. Here, the author examines the career of Sunderamma, an actress with courtesan's background, through whose onscreen performance as a singer and dancer, "a mythical courtesan was called into existence... in order to provide a counterpoint against which a modern and national Brahminical womanhood could be articulated" (24).
The second chapter titled Caste, follows reinforcement of this invented Brahminical womanhood through cinema, radio and advertising cultures. By combining her archival research with material history and memory within her own family, Putcha analyses how something as benign as songbooks with photos of singer-actresses could play a crucial role in establishing caste hierarchies and understanding of feminine beauty. Here, the author also traces the historical shift in cinema from the courtesan figure to the Brahmin woman as the embodiment of music and dance in the postcolonial period. Throughout the chapter she highlights the career of Bhanumati, a midcentury actress with an alleged courtesan background, who ironically enough, became a symbol of Brahmin womanhood in Telugu cinema after Independence. The two examples of Sunderamma and Bhanumati serve to demonstrate the politics of Brahmin dance cultures, particularly, their negotiation with a woman's identity based on her caste and gender within changing national contexts.
This negotiation of identity through dance is further complicated by the linguistic and cultural divisions in India in the postcolonial era. In the third chapter titled Citizenship, the author explores the language politics that shaped the Telugu dance industry in the late 1950s in India. In particular, it reveals how the government policies in the 1950s classified genres of performance by language and caste groups, creating a distinction between the aesthetic and the sexual. Thereby, a dance form like Bharatanatyam, backed by the Tamil-speaking population came to be recognized as south Indian culture's representative, while a dance form like Kuchipudi, backed by Telugu-speaking population was left out of the classical canon for being too explicit in expressing women's subjectivities. Likewise, film dance and classical dance came to be treated as separate realms for the same reason. The author also exposes the contradictions and complexities that emerged from the interaction between film dance and classical dance, and how they affected the status and livelihood of different groups of women dancers. For instance, despite the contempt that the film dancing received from classical dance teachers, who were mostly Brahmin men, many Brahmin women who learned classical dance in their academies went on to perform courtesan pieces in cinema. On the other hand, hereditary dance performers faced strict regulations and loss of income.
Chapter 4, titled Silence, uncovers the kyriarchal pedagogy of dance studios. Putcha argues that "[t]he regimes of silence that are cultivated in the dance studio coalesce around what is glossed as feminine beauty and its production in and as sexuality" (106). Thus, the image of the famous Indian classical dancer, who represents India globally in the twenty-first century is molded around such aesthetic practices that promote cisgender heterosexuality and rewards silence and obedience as attractive dance qualities. The epilogue brings together several other ongoing processes in public cultures of entertainment that continue to contribute towards problematic constructions of beauty, and silent but desirable women.
In conclusion, The Dancer's Voice is a valuable contribution to the field of South Asian Performance Studies, and Asian American critical race studies, as it offers a nuanced and critical examination of the role of the dance industry in shaping the identities and experiences of women across borders and boundaries. Rumya Sree Putcha skillfully combines various research designs ranging from ethnographic analysis to archival methods, her personal insights as a trained Indian classical dancer, and her family memories, to present a rich and engaging narrative that challenges the dominant discourses on Indian classical dance and its relation to gender, caste, and nation. An intersecting study of gender and culture and its implications upon women's lives is a favorite within South Asian academic circle. For instance, due to the huge role that caste plays in India, Dalit Studies from South Asia has for a long time now, focused upon the complex processes involved within caste-class-gender intersection and its implications for Indian women. The Dancer's Voice efficiently extends this conversation to the realm of the culture industry of dance by situating it in a transnational frame. In the process, it builds on the scholarship of thinkers like Sharmila Rege, Susie Tharu, Gayatri Gopinath, and Pavithra Prasad. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history, politics, and aesthetics of dance as a form of cultural expression and resistance.
— Reviewed by Diksha Bharti, Ranchi University (Jharkhand, India)
