The Dancer's Voice: Dance and Caste
In her recent book The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India, Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. She argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination – a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism. Young women of Indian background in the US diaspora are trained in the “classical” Indian dance forms such as Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi as a way of continuing artistic traditions and maintaining a connection to their cultural heritage. However, alongside dance training, caste privilege, and model minority narratives are reinscribed, without this being questioned or critiqued. In her discussion of the dancer’s voice, Putcha is joined by Harshita Kamath, scholar of dance and literary performance traditions at Emory University.
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Harshita Mruthinti Kamath is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Associate Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History at Emory University. Her research focuses on textual and performance traditions of the South Indian language of Telugu. Dr. Kamath's monograph, Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance (University of California Press, 2019), traces themes of gender, caste, and power in the South Indian dance form of Kuchipudi. Expanding on her work on gender guising and impersonation, Dr. Kamath co-edited the volume, Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising Across South Asia (University of Hawai'i Press, 2022), with Pamela Lothspeich (UNC-Chapel Hill).
Rumya Sree Putcha is an assistant professor at the University of Georgia. Her research interests center on colonial and anti-colonial thought, particularly around constructs of citizenship, race, gender, sexuality, the body, and the law.
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