Abstract
At first glance, this is not a book that most communication scholars would find relevant to their research, let alone if they are predominantly interested in Europe-related research. However, the title of the book does not do justice to the complicated array of issues that Rumya Sree Putcha explores in her deeply personal ethnographic account of the intersections of citizenship, gender, caste, race, anticolonialism, nationalism, dance, performance, and indeed culture and communication. Through the example of Indian womanhood and the persona of the Indian dancer, Putcha demonstrates how ‘separating women's voices from their bodies has been central to the practices of national citizenship since at least the early twentieth century’ (p. 2) as well as ‘how the dancer's voice reveals quiet strategies of resistance and subversive acts of compliance’ (p. 3). Her focus is on ‘how performances of Indian womanhood—public expressions of citizenship—have relied upon, recycled, and, in some cases, subverted the victim-heroine dynamic and in doing so have animated what it means to identify as an Indian woman’ (p. 4). The book is split into Introduction, four chapters on womanhood, caste, citizenship and silence, and Epilogue. It makes for a fascinating read for communication scholars with an interest in gender and identity issues even with no prior experience of dance/performance-related topics.