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Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance. 

Harshita Mruthinti Kamath is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Assistant Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature and History at Emory University.
 

"With intricate ethnographic texture and deep theoretical sophistication, this stands out as one of the most impressive books I have read.  By charting the complex practices of masculinity through South Indian dance, Kamath deconstructs hegemonic Brahmin masculinity and offers an intellectual tour de force that challenges Western epistemologies of gender while showcasing the fluidity, multiplicity, and contradictions of gender. This book intervenes in a timely manner on the landscapes of masculinity studies, religious studies, and South Asia studies."—Stanley Thangaraj, author of Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity

"Beautifully crafted and presented, this book fills a lacuna on scholarship on the figure of the brahmin man in relation to his gender identity and makes a compelling contribution to the field of Indian dance historiography, which often overlooks the critical role the dancing male body."—Vasudha Narayanan, Distinguished Professor of Religion, University of Florida

"Impersonations is a fascinating study of gender and performance in the South Indian dance form known as Kuchipudi. Focusing on male impersonation of female characters (stri-vesam), Kamath offers a compelling analysis of the declining value ascribed to the brahmin male body from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary context."—Anne E. Monius, Professor of South Asian Religions, Harvard Divinity School