Photo by Jason Thrasher.
The Department of Music is excited to share that alumna Rumya Putcha (A.B. '03, Ph.D. '11) won the prestigious Bernard S. Cohn Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. Putcha received the award for her book The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke University Press).
The Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize, named after former UChicago Professor Bernard S. Cohn, honors outstanding and innovative scholarship across discipline and country of specialization for a first single-authored English-language monograph on South Asia, published during the preceding year. Books nominated may address either contemporary or historical topics in any field of the humanities or the social sciences related to any of the countries of South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal in the spirit of Barney Cohn’s broad and critical scholarship on culture and history in South Asia.
Rumya Sree Putcha’s The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India traces the shifting signification of the Indian dancer, focusing especially on Telugu dancers from “dominant caste” and “model minority” backgrounds. 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.