27/12/2025
JUST PUBLISHED
The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India
by Rumya Sree Putcha
ABOUT THE BOOK
In The Dancer’s Voice, Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha 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, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rumya Sree Putcha is Assistant Professor of Music and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.
REVIEWS
“Rumya Sree Putcha powerfully conveys the tangled transnational threads of Indian femininity and its many instantiations and contradictions through her own family history and ethnographic, archival, and critical scholarship. There is compassion, nostalgia, anger, and joy at work here, and by providing a vividly remembered and lovingly detailed account of being South Asian in a conservative town, Putcha shares the experiences of a generation of South Asian girls and women in a way I have not seen before. The Dancer’s Voice will be of interest to readers in dance, film studies, South Asian studies, feminist studies, and ethnic studies.”
—Elizabeth Chin, Professor of Media Design Practices, ArtCenter College of Design
“The Dancer’s Voice seamlessly interweaves multiple eras and geopolitical stances to present a sophisticated and nuanced exploration of performance. Rumya Sree Putcha’s incisive analyses of cinematic representations, media coverage, and ethnography reveal mechanisms of caste, race, and white supremacy in India and in the United States. Employing a trained dancer’s lens and feminist reflexivity to challenge essentialist binaries, she offers a powerful and revealing look at the transnational values that underpin Brahmin womanhood, dance, and gendered virtue.”
—Shalini Shankar, author of Advertising Diversity: Ad Agencies and the Creation of Asian American Consumers
“What is unique about Putcha’s book is that it centres the desires and agency of the women dancers, rather than the cultural gatekeepers or the institutions that seek to control the art form. Her book also follows the figure of the dancer beyond the formal classical dance arenas to give us a more comprehensive idea of who the dancer becomes for multiple audiences. This is not an easy book to read, but it is an intriguing one.”
—Tapoja Chaudhuri, International Examiner
“This book is highly original in its effortless movement between the personal, popular, archival, and ethnographic, and is written from the unique standpoint of a practitioner-theorist. The book insists on the importance of attending to the Global South in dance studies, integrating transnational feminism, South Asian studies, and pop culture. It reads across disciplines, including film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies.”
—Dance Studies Association's de la Torre Bueno First Book Award Citation
“The Dancer’s Voice is a welcome addition to South Asian dance and film scholarship. It offers a useful intervention into where and why the researcher’s own voice is needed within the ethnographic methodology.”
—Ranjini Nair, Performance Research
“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.”
—Madhumita Biswal, Pacific Affairs
“Combining ethnography with a transnational archive of film, legal documents, advertisements, performances, and family and personal memories, Putcha uses dance as a powerful entry point for understanding the interrelation between womanhood, caste, citizenship, and silence. As she demonstrates, the separation of the woman’s body from her voice is foundational to her citizenship. The book employs a sophisticated interdisciplinary methodology that offers fresh insights and perspectives to a wide set of audiences, as well as a welcome bridge between the studies of South Asia and its diaspora. This book should be read far beyond its immediate field.”
—Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize Citation
“The Dancer’s Voice shows that it is not just possible but imperative to read Indian classical dance beyond the borders of race, culture and nation.”
—Pavitra Sundar, South Asia
SPECIFICATIONS
ISBN: 978-93-95474-16-0
Number of pages: 208 with 33 illustrations
Size: 16 x 24 x 2 cm
Year of publication: 2026
Binding: Hardcover
Weight: 485 grams
Price: ₹1495
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