This remarkable and impressive book, which ably brings together such diverse disciplines as religious studies, political science, anthropology, history, and ethnomusicology, marks an important and distinctive contribution to scholarly discourse on the difficult topic of Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism. The text is rich with firsthand descriptions — drawn from the author's extensive fieldwork in India — and in the application of theory, both of which the author accomplishes deftly. Appropriately for a work with a focus on music, the text also makes use of current technology, having an accompanying website through which the reader can access the author's recordings of performances that she observed — a feature that enables the reader to listen to the performances while reading their descriptions in the book. This maximizes the reader's sense of immersion and participation in the musical culture under study, further enriching the experience of reading the text.

Singing a Hindu Nation is noteworthy not only for the richness of its descriptions, the depth of its analysis, and the added feature of enabling the reader to experience actual performances, but also for the clarity of the author's stance toward the material that she is describing and analyzing and the struggles that this stance involves. Hindu nationalism is a difficult topic for many reasons, not least of which being the fact that most academic writing on it is far from being objective or unbiased. For the most part, scholars of Hindu nationalism either explicitly or implicitly adhere to political views that are quite different from, and are often sharply at odds with, those of Hindu nationalists. If one's scholarship is — again, either explicitly or implicitly — a sample of negative apologetics directed against one's object of study, questions may well be raised regarding how fair of a representation it is able to give. This is not to say that critical works directed at political ideologies with which one disagrees are not a legitimate form of scholarship. Far from it! But when a work aims not at only critique, but also at representation of a culture likely to be largely unfamiliar to one's readers — particularly a culture to which both the author and the reader stand in a relationship of power and privilege — then it is incumbent upon the author to ensure that her representation be both fair and accurate, and that the relationship between ethnographer and consultant be an honest, and not exploitative, one. One difficulty in which Hindu nationalism places those who would represent it both fairly and critically is its “in between” position as, on the one hand, the ideology of a majority community that is, in its setting, privileged (though many Hindu nationalists would contest this — which is precisely what makes them Hindu nationalists), and on the other, as the anti-colonial discourse of a community which, in a global context, can still be seen as underprivileged and oppressed (though this may be changing rapidly as the Indian economy continues to develop and India becomes an increasingly important player on the world stage).

Anna Schultz does not hedge this issue, but is quite frank about the fact that she is coming to her project from a stance that is uncomfortable with at least some aspects of Hindu nationalism. “When I began fieldwork in Pune, India, in 1998 … my interactions with informants/research associates/friends/acquaintances fell outside of models I had been expecting. I was prepared to treat my consultants with relativistic fairness while responding with my own ideas in a cross-cultural dialogue … I found it easy to approach open-minded [consultants] with a similarly open mind, but my relativism was tested as I reflected on the words of Hindu nationalists … I struggled to find the right balance between honesty and silence so that I could maintain harmonious but authentic relationships … While I did not need to go ‘undercover,’ as some other ethnographers of Hindu nationalism have done … I was positioned uneasily on the edge of informed consent ... I have had to come to terms with the paradox that although I — like many ethnographers — do ethnography in part to foster tolerance for different lifeways, the people with whom I work may not share the same level of tolerance” (8). This openness about the position in which Schultz has found herself as an ethnographer seeking to give a fair representation of her subject matter, but who finds the very ethos that has led her to the practice of ethnography to be in conflict with that of her consultants in the field, is a refreshing departure from work that is either openly antagonistic to Hindu nationalism or that conceals this antagonism behind a veneer of scholarly detachment.

Regarding the material itself and the analysis that Schultz presents, her thesis is both original and supported by the abundance of data that she provides and the theoretical analysis that she brings to bear upon it. Her focus is rāṣṭrīya kīrtan, a form of devotional musical performance that weaves together religious and nationalist themes in a manner that its audience finds highly potent and that successfully evokes feelings of religious devotion that have the nation as their object. This is often done without the listener being precisely aware of how this feat has been accomplished. Exploring what makes rāṣṭrīya kīrtan effective is a large part of Schultz's work. Rāṣṭrīya kīrtan is presented by artists called kīrtankārs. Kīrtankārs are skilled at blending traditional Hindu, local Marathi, and modern nationalist images and tropes into musical forms that have a powerful emotional resonance for their audiences. As Schultz outlines, although there was a major effort by largely middle-class political organizations, particularly during the Indian independence struggle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to cultivate rāṣṭrīya kīrtan “from above,” turning traditional musical devotional performances of a largely religious nature into a vehicle for cultivating nationalist sentiment among the Indian masses, the kīrtankārs have been effective agents as well, using their art form to shape the nationalist discourse “from below,” infusing it with local ideas and themes not always in complete alignment with the agendas of Hindu nationalist parties. In the process, she reveals the complex reality that underlies and infuses what is all too often presented as a monolithic Hindutva ideology.