Rumya Sree Putcha's "The Dancer's Voice"

Rumya S. Putcha is an assistant professor in the Institute for Women's Studies as well as in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music 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.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Dancer's Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Dancer’s Voice describes the way the religious ritual of thambulam (ceremonial offering) operates for Indian dancers:

The surreptitious gifting of money within the practice of thambulam is consistent across nominally Hindu settings. The same practice is observed, for example, when one seeks the blessings of a priest… The exchange of money and financial support in general is something that flies under the radar in the transnational classical dance scene. During my time in Chennai, it became clear that the impact of NRI (non resident Indian) wealth is particularly important to any understanding of how power operates for women who consider themselves dancers. Dancers are paying for their class time, and this can mean more than simply dance training. It can mean being cast in a new production or being asked to help with choreography, and it can also mean the permission to talk back—to have a voice—in class. For some, this ability to speak and to have agency also extends to the right to an independent artistic life. Access to recorded music is carefully controlled and guarded. Only some students are allowed to bring a device to rehearsal and record the music. These recordings allow dancers not only to practice on their own but also, in some cases, to perform without their guru. A dancer’s freedom and ability to grow as an artist and to develop their own artistry thus depends on access to music. This access, in turn, must be granted by or purchased from the guru.

I think the Page 99 Test works! It helped me see, from a different perspective, how I listened for “the dancer’s voice” on this one page, and more generally across this particular chapter, which is titled “Silence.” The book is about the media-driven forces that animate Indian womanhood. Specifically, I explore how the public persona of the Indian dancer reveals that citizenship for women operates as a performance. I argue that such performances require and normalize separating women’s voices from their bodies. By theorizing “the dancer’s voice,” this book uncovers how performances of Indian womanhood since the early 20th century have relied upon, recycled, and in some cases, subverted a victim-heroine dynamic and in doing so have come to characterize what it means to identify as an Indian woman. Toggling between India and the U.S., between film, archival, and ethnographic analysis, and the past and the present, the personal and the public, the book shows how the dancer’s voice reveals quiet strategies of resistance and subversive acts of compliance.

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--Marshal Zeringue