Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. xvii, 190 pp. (Tables, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$25.00, paper; US$22.00, ebook. ISBN 9781478019138.
In this illuminating work, Rumya Sree Putcha systematically brings forth the complexities of power relations involved in Indian dance performance and connects them to questions of citizenship and transnationalism. Putcha’s meticulous blending of reflections on her positionality as a dancer—placed alongside her family’s migration journey from India to the United States together with the rigorous research work drawn on archival and engraphic sources—makes her analysis rich. The book is divided into four chapters excluding the introduction and epilogue.
The first chapter titled “Womanhood,” traces the silencing of the contributions made to Indian classical dance by the lower caste hereditary performing women of the Bhogam community. While tracing Indian colonial history, the author points out that during the early twentieth century, colonial administrative policies connected their agenda of reform to caste, identity, and sanitation, which made the hereditary performing communities objects of reform and a source of social disgust. The ideal Indian womanhood was modeled on upper caste Hindu patriarchy. Subsequently, the modern Brahminical womanhood of post-independence India could be articulated in juxtaposition against the courtesan identity of Bhogam women of the early twentieth century cultural industry. Women in the hereditary performing community came to be projected as objects of pleasure. While suggesting that Indian nationalist history has turned out to be Brahmin men’s history, the author argues that such history was exported to the US through the migration of upper caste groups in the post-1965 period. Thus, even within cultural nationalism and transnational discourses, the Bhogam women became examples of “spoil categories” of both caste and race, as they were dominantly perceived to have engaged in nonconjugal sexual practices.
The second chapter, “Caste,” takes an intersectional approach to caste and gender, as Putcha argues that public performative expressions such as cinema, radio, and advertising have been instrumental in erasing the role of courtesan community women as public cultural performers and have instead installed Brahmin women in their place. On the one hand, since cultural industries like film came to be dominated by Brahmin men due to their social networks, the model of Brahmin womanhood and the idea of beauty as defined by fair-skin, came to be dominant in cultural spaces. On the other hand, these cultural spaces allowed performers to perform at a safe distance from consumers, as opposed to the earlier era where physical proximity to the performers was essential for cultural performances. In such a scenario, Brahmin women found cultural spaces to be much more respectable. In this changing context, women from the courtesan community could become successful through their anchorage to Brahmin men, either by marriage and/or through training.
In the third chapter, titled “Citizenship,” the author interrogates the way language operates in the formation of gendered citizenship. She draws attention to the contestation over the hierarchical posturing between two genres of dance practices, namely Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, which are attached to the linguistic identity of Tamil and Telugu. The author also draws attention to assertions of the supremacy of classical dance over film dance, despite such claims of supremacy being filled with their own paradoxes. Although at the outset citizenship is projected to be the main focus of this chapter, on many occasions the central focus seems to drift away.
Chapter 4 is titled “Silence.” Here the author tracks layers of silences in classical dance performances. First, she draws attention to the silencing the presence of diverse religious groups in the representation of India in the US. Indian dancers’ representations have thereby helped to solidify such Hindu hegemony even outside India. Further, within such representations of India, there is overrepresentation of a dominant-caste narrative and a silencing of lower caste narratives. Secondly, the author moves on to discuss silences within the institutional space of dance training studios. According to her, there is silencing about misogynistic dynamics within the institutional space of classical dance performance. The misogynistic power of male dance instructors converges with other networks of hierarchies of power such as gender, race, and transnational identity. The idealization of a performer’s body and the endorsement of fair skin are a few expressions of such power plays. Subsequently, this also leads to subjecting the performers who do not meet such standards to mistreatment, body shaming, and hostility. Thirdly, Putcha interrogates how the disjuncture between dancers’ bodies and their voices is normalized and reproduced in contemporary times. This has led to silencing of the ankle bell sound of the dancer, for example. The silencing of the dancer’s body has a gender dimension as well, whereby women dancers are expected to silence their strength and the labour of their bodies during a dance performance under the pretext of demonstrating grace. And finally, there is silencing of any deviant notion of morality within the social space of performance since dominant notions of beauty are often anchored to notions of morality that are compounded with the image of silence and compliance; hence, ugliness in performance culture also connotates loudness and deviant sexuality.
Throughout the book, Putcha methodically argues that identity politics work in conjunction with social power in the space of public performance. While this book makes a significant contribution to gender studies and cultural studies, the silence about the delineation of caste structure remains a serious lacuna. Though the book’s aim of having a transnational readership remains clear, it assumes that readers would be well aware of the Indian caste structure. Further, as the Bhogam community is described as lower caste, the reader does not get a sense whether they belong to Shudra rank in the Varna model of caste or they belong to the category of ex-untouchable communities, who remain outside the Varna model. This leads to the impression that lower caste groups are a homogenous category.
Madhumita Biswal
Sambalpur University, Burla