In this multigenre text, Shripad Sinnakaar traces three trajectories to understand the Hijra communities in India. Flitting across beauty parlors, local trains, TikTok videos, street protests, goddess’ temples, and Dalit bastis, these trajectories introduce us to identities and socialities that refuse to be subsumed under the Western definitions of trans.
Alfia, a Hijra from Hyderabad would start every TikTok in her sing-song enunciation of Dhakini, clipping words to their roots: “Duniya mein kya hai? Kitta pyaara, mein hoon, tum ho, aur ye…” (“What’s there in this world, anyway? So lovely, I am, you are, and this…”) continuing by pointing out to the most ordinary: purple-pink plumes among season harvest, inviting the viewer to share her keema pav, a scenery at the picnic spot with her sister, sometimes dancing in an empty train compartment, a well-wisher who came to meet her from afar, the jackfruits she sells by the roadside… We can tell by the pitch of her voice, the shift in her moods, that the ordinary has ceased to cause its usual intended mystification, that she is about to share a matter of some grave discomfort. Sanjeev Bonam from Banjara Hills, Hyderabad, like most Kothis—femmes—would affix her name to the place she came from and start her video by addressing herself as “Yours, Banjara Hills Sanjeev.” Yours, as if luring in without an invitation to come. Posting reels with her mother and sister day-tripping to Golconda fort in a tractor, she later became dedicated to the Goddess, inducted as a disciple, celebrating Bonalu, a feast offered to the Goddess as a form of gratitude. The festival involves mainly transwomen dancing with a whipcord, carrying an earthen or brass pot adorned with neem leaves, turmeric, and vermilion over their heads. Now she is a Nirvan Hijra, with fat lovehandles cascading down her hips from the tightness of her saree. Sanat, another Hijra from Mumbra, shaped like an alphabet P and on glutathione overdose, had a series of men she made reels with. None of them were good for her and they are now all married to cis-women. But she appeared unfazed—she filmed a reel to a classic late 90s and early 2000s betrayal song from Bollywood alongside one of those boys, even as his fiancée stood in the background at their engagement. I always thought she wanted to be an actress of the caliber of Aishwarya Rai, but perhaps saved her beauty from diminishing in the heterosexual trappings of marriage. Whether it is the inauguration of beauty parlors or gymkhanas across India and Dubai, she remains a frequently invited guest. She’s no less beautiful even if not documented or picked by the attention of Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Since her will to abandon the normative ideals is so sharply undervalued, only within the socialities of the excluded demographies can she be appreciated. Another Hijra named Jogini Netra lipsyncs to Telugu songs, exhibiting an extraordinary prescience that she once suppressed out of faith in a man—a faith that led to betrayal. The clean consciousness of her words: not of a victim, but a resolution of standing by her gut, where certainty turns into cynicism. Nothing can stain her, not even a cheating lover. But a Madiga transwoman alleged caste-based discrimination against her in the distribution of their ritual alms. Some young Hijra Joginis, whose gurus are affiliated with the right-wing Hindu monastic sect Mahamandeleshwari Kinnar Akhada, presented offerings to God to stop the spread of Coronavirus in India. And then there was Ammai, a clairvoyant and priestess in the slum at Maariamma’s Chakka Mandir, who had no business with the trends in the medical-industrial complex; she knew just the right leaves to treat chickenpox and unrest in children. For her, the telos of medical knowledge that we hold as a qualification was primarily our need for possession and she thought of it as an encroachment into her world.
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Namdeo Dhasal (1949–2014), a Marathi poet and founder of the Dalit Panthers, is credited for supporting a demonstration of sex workers in Bombay, and is often evoked as the pioneer of trans rights advocacy in India. On November 16, 1988, over 500 sex workers in the age group of 15 to 70—including transgenders, women saddled with children, and the old—marched from the red-light district Kamathipura lane 14 to the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra Sharad Pawar’s residence. They demanded relief from moneylenders in brothels who surcharged anywhere from 10% to 50% interest on loans amidst the growing threat of AIDS, renewal of their licenses, and access to medical facilities and residential schools for their children. Various Dalit and Savarna feminists presently point to the critique of prostitution as only a form of exploitation of sexuality, subsuming it into slavery and anti-trafficking stance, for the pleasure of the oppressor-caste men. Such standpoints informing the imaginaries of dignity and emancipation from caste are often imagined on the lines of modernity: good life and institutionalization of Dalits into society. Dhasal, through protests and poems, located their sexuality in the everyday struggles for labor rights and housing justice. For him, sex work was a day-wage struggle, it was a way to exercise autonomy in the informal economy with equitable and safer working conditions, especially in the context of rapid privatization of public goods. But in her memoir, Mala Udhvasta Whaychay (I Want To Destroy Myself, 1984), his wife, poet Malika Amar Shaikh, recounts routine scenes of violence with her husband. He beat her mercilessly, refused to use prophylactics, and transmitted venereal diseases to her, through which she realized his infidelity. What does it mean to advocate for sex workers’ rights to a safe working environment—one that includes safe sex and protection from STDs—while carelessly transmitting the disease to his wife? As a husband in the domestic sphere of a heterosexual marriage, Dhasal had a brutish manifestation of the flip side of his political commitment—or it would be more accurate to see his act as an extension of it. Malika writes very delicately about the conditions of love, which was not a shared-making of the two, but the sovereignty of a single man, who was left to negotiate with the world as a Dalit. Especially someone from the political ecology of Bombay slums and red-light district—places that were segregated by caste—who was known for writing about the vices and melancholies of the underworld, who was most hated by the brahmanical society, and yet who emerged as an authentic poetic voice of his time. In her 2014 speech, “Hi Goshta Tevhachi Ahe,” (“This is a Story of Those Times”) Disha Pinky Shaikh, a Hijra activist and poet, portrays Dhasal as a pioneer in the trans movement in India who dignified the vulgar collectivism of transgender sex workers. She writes, “for me, and for lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of Hijras and red-light women, back then and even today, you [Dhasal] are our maaybaap (mother and father). […] It was not possible to speak about condoms with respectable women, so sex worker women and transgenders were targeted, and they were made to understand what a condom is. We were used according to their convenience, and the day their targets were completed, the funding for these NGOs was stopped. There are many here today that work, they know that fundings for HIV projects have stopped. This means the starting and stopping of funding had proper capitalist aims behind it. But the one who fought for us without any such aims or strategies was Namdeo Dhasal.” If we have to make anything out of the violence Dhasal inflicted on his loved ones and the inspiration the trans community draws from his works, the lines between his biography and his politics should thin into one and be seen as mutually reinforcing. This is instructive of how to read his poems and the people he imagines in them. The surplus of the caste society—the vulgar, the errant, the wayward—are not morally pure members of the society and any expectation of it is also a form of violence on them. As much as the state is responsible for their backward conditions, attributing all their sufferings solely to it, as though it were the only source of their wrongs, is to remove the complexities of their individual lives and dispossess them of their personhoods. Dhasal writes in his poem collection Gandu Bagicha (Assfuckers Garden, 1986), his imagined commons—akin to anti-caste utopia Begumpura—where the “widow gladdens,” “The cripples play kabaddi / The lame sleep under rags / The leper cracks what’s left of his knuckles,” or where “Homosexuals screw each other / to the strains of the nation’s anthem,” and where he identifies himself as “a venereal sore in the private part of language.” His jolt of language is not merely rhapsodic transgressions to be celebrated by liberal frameworks. Rather, they emerge from aporic experiences of violation and social hurt—realities that need different parameters to gauge beyond moralism or aestheticization. Dhasal demanded us to sprout an eye from within the scene of his lifeworlds, to see language as his skin, even if venereal. To pay heed to him is to open a new lexical imagination of what it means to be a transgender. Dhasal sets the key for what a transgender is in his poem Golpitha, “हिजडे आभाळ झालेत” (“Transgenders have become sky”).
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In the summer of 2019, protests surfaced across India against the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, which many viewed as a betrayal of the Supreme Court’s landmark NALSA v. Union of India (2014) judgment that had affirmed the right to self-identification for transgender people. The Act imposed invasive medical and bureaucratic procedures to screen one’s gender, turning a fundamental right into an administrative burden, and undermining the many ways transgenders in India identify themselves. Most not only resist fidelity to the Western definition of trans that tries to subsume local identities and socialities, but they themselves might leak from their own definitional scope and slip into another. These names that are introduced to us as derogatory, are turned around and made into something entirely different, evading their point of origin. For instance, Kothi means a femme who desires anal penetration—its origin is often associated with the efforts of NGOs to spread awareness of AIDS. And so, Kothi came to be known for femmes involved in anal receptivity. But its users are mostly oppressed-caste folks, revealing a distinct socio-economic location, who despise any association with the respectable cis-gays and necessarily capitalist drag queens. Kothi is anyone who isn’t part of Hijra gharanas. A Hijra is a feminine-identified person who forms lineage-based groups called gharana with Islamic roots, and who is supposed to engage in only two primary occupations: begging and blessing the newborns. Whereas those dedicated priestesses of Goddess Renuka Yellamma (like Netra) called Joginis are also often times Hijras, along with cis-women, of different tradition, who, on the full moon day that generally falls in either December or January, celebrate Randav Pournima (in Marathi) or Randi Hunimme (in Kannada), breaking bangles in fire to enact death and rebirth. According to many variations of the folklore most widely celebrated in Maharashtra and southern India, Yellamma’s celibate husband Jamadagni ordered their son Parashurama to ax her neck for committing effrontery. In another lore, out of love for his mother, after the failure to comply with his father’s order of matricide, Parashurama is cursed with the loss of masculinity. Those who follow his tradition are called Jogappas, often seen in Yellamma Temple in cotton veshti. At times, Hijras undergo castration in order to become Nirvan (Transcendental). Like Buddha. Back then all the Hijras underwent operation in Kadapa, Andhra Pradesh. If only Buddha, too, knew. Mona Ahmed describes her castration in a village outside Bombay, where someone cuts her in a hut, and it’s when she becomes a eunuch—which she laments with great regret. This regret is shared by every Hijra I meet in the local train and traffic; upon identifying me as a Kothi, they tell me to never go under the knife for a Panthi, they tell me that he’d leave me regardless of my body or what’s between my legs, so I might as well stay the way I am. Panthi is a top, the one who penetrates, also known as Girya, Dhurano. Double Decker is the one who flip-flops, a Versatile—or is it someone who is somewhere between sartorial and pant-shirt? I don’t know, but I do know that they are called Aqwas. These preferences and choices are distorted, like a nonlinear echo, by the dreamy interruptions of history and offbeat refrains. If they resembled refrains of a ghazal, they did not adhere to its formal meter, distorting its structure while still bent on clinging to its name. Like that scene in the 2022 movie Joyland, where the trans protagonist takes offense when her masculine-presenting Panthi lover expresses a desire for her to top him. I know Kothis who would have fucked him on spot. All these donkey dicks I’ve helped roll back and tuck under their saree pleatings, I know they would bend a man down, anyday. Who is to determine that two things cannot be true simultaneously, that a Panthi could desire penetration and still love a heterosexual woman? These are matters of self-identification that are beyond naming or struggles to legalise. In a conversation on the importance of self-identification, Living Smile elaborates on the historicity of her trans identity as she prefers the word Thirunangai, which is borrowed from a Buddhist text, over Aravani, which connotes a connection to Hindu mythology and is commonly used by privileged-caste transwomen. And then there are slurs and shame imposed on us by our kin and communities. When my friend Rushali and I walk through our Dalit bastis, the young boys call out Meetha (Sweetness) and Gud (Jaggery) as an antiphrasis behind our backs—the same boys who, as toddlers, were left in our care by their mothers. ■