During Rumya Putcha’s dissertation defense, a professor asked a question that has stuck with her throughout her career.
“How do you understand your role as a social science researcher when you’re conducting fieldwork?”
It was a question Putcha remembers vividly.
“I don’t remember exactly how I answered,” said Putcha, a jointly appointed professor in the University of Georgia Hugh Hodgson School of Music and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies. “Looking back, I now realize that was the question I’ve spent my whole career trying to answer.”
Over her decades-long career studying the role of music in international cultures, that question has been an ever-present motivator in understanding the power dynamics of research: Who gets to study whom? With what assumptions? And under what ethical obligations?
The role of culture
Music and dance came naturally to Putcha. Growing up in Houston, she learned Euro-American performance styles in school. She sang in choir, learned viola, and remained musically active throughout her life, even working as a professional soprano during graduate school.
For many Indian American families like hers, however, the arts provided a way to pass down cultural identity that public school systems often didn’t reflect.
“There were very few public spaces where the Indian community could raise its young people to understand their culture,” Putcha said.
Many young women like Putcha were encouraged to learn dance up to a certain age as a means of cultural continuity. She described it as a “double life”—she embraced both the Indian performance art she learned in local after-school programs and the Euro-American styles she learned at school.
Putcha left Texas to study history and music at the University of Chicago, where her love of dance influenced her to study how Indian classical dance functions as a cultural and gendered practice—particularly for girls growing up in diaspora communities—for her bachelor’s thesis. She argued that these performances carry layered histories of migration, gender expectations, and cultural identity, even as they are presented as heritage activities.
“It carries within it a very specific history of gender and sexuality,” she said.
The topic became the subject of Putcha’s first book, “The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India” (Duke University Press, 2023), which explores how the figure of the Indian dancing woman has become central to how Indian culture is perceived in transnational settings like the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Putcha argues that while the figure is used to symbolize national culture, it also enforces a foreclosed sense of self for Indian women.
“The central argument of the book is that separating the dancer’s voice from her body has been central to how citizenship operates for women,” she said. “Especially women who exist in spaces typified by a hyphenated identity.”
It’s a complex argument. Society often sees women, particularly dancers, as bodies first, not as individuals or musicians. Their physical performance is emphasized, but agency and musical knowledge often are ignored or silenced. This separation—valuing the body over the voice—plays a central role in how women, particularly those who face multiple layers of marginalization, are treated as citizens in terms of rights, recognition, and inclusion in society.
Nearing the end of her undergraduate studies, she planned to go to law school to study immigration and asylum law. However, after her professor and mentor George Chauncey read her thesis, he put her in contact with an anthropology professor who encouraged her to consider graduate school instead.
There, she blended her interests in music, culture, gender, and social theory in a field called “ethnomusicology.”
The role of music
Ethnomusicology is the study of music as a cultural practice. It’s like cultural anthropology but emphasizes how people create, experience, and assign meaning to sound and movement. Rather than focusing on Euro-American composers or formal canons, ethnomusicology explores music in everyday life—from performers and traditions to fan cultures and studio production.
Putcha described it as understanding music and dance as “sites of cultural production” and “cultural negotiation.” It’s not just studying formal composers and traditions, but how people in those cultures give meaning to music and how they use it in everyday contexts.
Through her own experience as a dancer, the field allowed her to bridge the gap between how music is treated as sonic art and dance as visual art.
“I knew intimately that dancers were musicians too,” she said. “Not just in terms of the sounds our bodies made, but how we worked with musicians—even in a live performance.”
Her research examines the intersections of performance, migration, gender, and colonialism, focusing on Indian classical dance and yoga. She uses ethnographic methods such as participant observation to conduct her research. This allows her to spend time within a community, watching and often taking part in their cultural practices to gain insight and nuance.
More recently, Putcha has shifted to focus on yoga, not just as a physical and spiritual practice, but as a vessel of historical and ecological significance. Through her research, Putcha demonstrates how the colonial-era botanical trade in India shaped the global perception and circulation of yoga.
While yoga might seem different from her music background, many of the underlying methods and questions are the same. The research allows her to continue to study how people perceive, embody, and respond to performance. Her questions focus more on how people feel about their practices in relation to the bodily movement or how they understand the music that’s often played in yoga studio spaces.
“Yoga and dance are two sides of the same coin,” said Putcha, who spent this past summer at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany, thanks to the Willson Center for Arts and Humanities Ludwig-Maximillians University Fellowship. “The idea of calling yoga ‘yoga’ and calling dance ‘dance’ is better understood as colonial classification.”
The project has allowed her to find a synergy between ethnomusicology and ethnobotany, the latter of which was new to her. She’s also had to draw on other fields to better understand the practice, such as religious studies and environmental humanities.
The role of the researcher
Today, Putcha has a better idea of how to answer the question that shaped her career. It’s not just her background and training that shapes her as an ethnographic researcher, but also her awareness of the unique access she has as a scholar based in the United States.
“Each of us brings our belief system into a space that shapes what we even see or value as research worthy,” Putcha said. “Ethical research requires that we, all of us, no matter our background, think about that.”
She says self-awareness, humility, and ethical accountability are key elements of any social science research. This approach is essential to both her fieldwork and classroom. In the classroom, Putcha avoids traditional lectures in favor of seminar-style, discussion-based teaching that invites students to actively engage in complex topics.
“I don’t want to position myself as the authority at the front of the room,” she said. “Instead, I like to think of it as a learning community.”
Her joint appointment at UGA allows her to create an intellectual balance between two passions: performance and social science.
“UGA and Franklin College are special. To my knowledge, I couldn’t have found another university that lets me be me in the same way,” she said. “The university is a precious space. One of the greatest things about being an American is having access to settings like this and having the chance to support them as the essential public goods that they are.”
