This is a carefully recorded, coherently related, and meaningfully interpreted anthropological study of an oral epic performed by lower-caste groups in the Braj region of northern India. As specialists would quickly recognize, the study solidly contributes to a neglected cultural sphere. It also highlights multifaceted cultural communication involving complex and contested social relations embedded in the rich moral-experiential sensibilities of the lower castes. The author, after a systematic long-term study, publishes on this subject just as the winds of economic and political globalization also pick up. At the core of the oral epic Dhola, however, are those perennial puzzles that Hindus (or, more generally, humans), their rulers, fate or destiny, and interceding gods and goddesses compose. In her distinctive study, Wadley convincingly shows how the lower castes (e.g., the oil pressers, acrobats, bangle sellers, and merchants) appropriate Raja Nal in their own distinct situations, thereby also showing, Wadley claims, “this tension between biology and culture, between birthright and achievement” (p. 146).

As Wadley’s two appendixes, one dozen illustrations, and two tables show, the recordings, organization, and interpretation of the regional Dhola performances attracted her unflagging attention (beginning 30 years ago). So engaged in a close, long-term cultural reading of the actual performances and performers in different regional locations, she conveys “the actuality of performance and the vivid imaginations, nuances, and humor” (p. xii). The study is presented in two parts: The first introduces Dhola, retells the epic in “a vastly condensed” form, and profiles the life stories and styles of the two Dhola performers Wadley had followed over time. The second part has four interpretive chapters devoted successively to the goddess, to “women and the issues of femaleness,” to the nature of caste (i.e., the issues of birth and achievement), and to Raja Nal “identity and humanness.”

Wadley’s work is clearly an anthropological study of a regionally well-known and complex cultural performance. An anthropologist’s shaping is evident, for instance, in condensing the epic Dhola story, six hours long even for a locally “knowledgeable storyteller.” Hence, “the resulting story must be recognized as my version of Dhola, not that of any one singer or teller of the tale” (p. 9). Still, together with sections on Dhola’s literary, cultural, and historical placement, including late 20th-century audiocassette versions, the story occupies about 55 pages of the book (pp. 9–64). The two major local singers–performers, comparatively rendered and interpreted via selected pithy dialogues, convey to the reader a distinct oral–musical–communicational style, embellished appropriately with an earthy local social, gastronomic, and emotional–aesthetic verve (pp. 65–92).

Fortunately, Wadley does not abandon this culturally textured stance in her interpretive part of the book, showing convincingly how the goddess, the women, and their femaleness pervade the epic, which must structure itself not only around the male central figure, Raja Nal, but also, interminably –and under contestation—¬ around “the nature of caste” or the problem of “birth versus achievement” (p. 143). Discussions of women’s status in the book show how the performance allows subversion of “the accepted forms of male dominance” (p. 121). Yet Wadley neither neglects lower-caste female sexuality, sexual desire, and aesthetic nor overlooks cunning and disguise while attending to social duty and propriety (pp. 122–140). These multiple social–moral motivations and actions get reflected in Wadley’s “puzzles” or the “conditions” that “fate, time, and being human” conspire to test the main characters and their identities (e.g., Motini and Raja Nal; pp. 140–141; 192–195).

More generally, Wadley asserts that Dhola players, the “‘organic intellectuals’ of Gramsci,” significantly comment on and contest “the traditional social order, whether the caste system, norms for women, or life itself” (p. 4). A similar critical stance echoes as Wadley concludes her discussion of Raja Nal’s identity: “Through Dhola, the singers question the rightness of caste, and of caste behaviors, especially those that keep the mighty in power” (p. 171). Any broader theoretical claims via Dhola on the actual processes and provenance of British colonialism in the region or on the available layers of Hinduism, however, must await a different kind of work. And such a study should be also as meticulous and careful as is Wadley’s work on Dhola.