Introduction

Indigenous societies outside of the Western world weren’t always heterosexual, or cisgendered. The rigid heteronormative boundaries brought about by Christian values are not historically a globally accepted phenomenon. Hundreds of indigenous languages and native mythologies have consistently contained language referring to same-sex practices, and non-binary, fluid understandings of gender and sexuality long before the emergence of international activism for LGBTQ rights in contemporary popular culture (Picq 2019). This fluidity is exhibited across the world, from the third gender known as muxe in Mexico, to the five genders in the Burginese society in Indonesia, to that which I will focus on in this essay, the Indian hijra. Widespread contemporary understanding of gender as the male-female binary has arisen from colonial imperialism by the Western world. The codes of heteronormativity were central tenets of the colonial oppressive power, as these are consistent with what is taught in the Bible, where men and women must act in the image of Adam and Eve. Sexuality was a terrain to frame the Native as pervert and validate European violence against the non-Christian other, labelled as savage, violent and sodomite (Picq 2019).

This essay will attempt to present a diachronic evolution of the Indian hijra, also known as the ‘third gender’, in Indian popular culture through the oppressive political regime brought by British colonisation and the subsequent existence and resurgence of this subculture in post-colonial India. The essay will first introduce the hijra, who they are as a subculture, and their representation and association in, and with, Indian mythology and popular culture. Next, this essay will explicate the modes of political oppression of the hijra community during the time of British colonial rule, specifically during the mid-nineteenth century, and how these exemplify instances of the Foucauldian concept of biopower (Gannon 2009). In the final paragraph, this essay will analyse the ramifications for the hijra community after India gained its Independence in 1947 and decolonisation occurred, how they have been able to re-enter society and also the political sphere, in particular in relation to Hindu nationalism, and what effects this has on contemporary understanding of the social constructedness of gender and sexuality in the context of concomitant LGBTQ activism (Reddy 2003). This diachronic perspective of the hijra is to be understood through Klassen’s (2014) category of the relationship between religion and popular culture; ‘Religion and Popular Culture in Dialogue’.

Pre-Colonised India and Hindu Mythology

In India there is an institutionalised third gender, defined as ‘neither man nor woman’, known as the hijra (Nanda 2007). Most commonly, they are men who are intersexed and sexually impotent, who have been called upon by Bahuchara Mata, a Hindu Mother Goddess, to dress and act like women and to undergo emasculation through an operation called nirvan (Nanda 2015). This nirvan is seen as their ‘rebirth’, after which they are sexually impotent and ideally renounce any sexual practices. Through this asceticism and sexual abstinence, they are bestowed with the divine power of fertility, much in the image of the ascetic Shiva in Hindu mythology.
Traditionally, hijras earn their living through collecting alms and for performances at weddings and births. The purpose of these performances is to bless the family with fertility and fortune. However, hijras also have the power to curse the family with infertility and misfortune by exposing their mutilated genitals to the audience if they feel they have been disrespected or not paid fairly for their performance (Nanda 2015). The hijra community is spread over the entirety of India, and they live in small, hierarchical subgroups consisting of guru (leader), and chela (the disciple) relationships (Nanda 2007). When a new chela is initiated into the community, they must first undergo their operation, and they are given a new, female name. These tightly knit communities are often marginalised in Indian society, however, they do maintain some level of respect from the wider Hindu society due to their representation in Hindu popular culture.

Hijras may not be represented in Hindu popular culture necessarily as they are understood today, however, transvestism has existed in Hindu mythology even before the conception of humankind. These Hindu myths have been decoded in specific ways by the hijras who, from the myths, legitimate their existence. This ‘decoding’ of Hindu mythology to favour the particular narrative necessary to legitimate their existence within the wider public arena can be understood through the theory of Culturalism (Klassen 2014).

Cultural studies are interested not only in how producers of popular culture encode the intended meaning, but also in how consumers decode and interpret cultural products (Klassen 2014). The predominant example is the Hindu Goddess Bahuchara Mata who has two different representations in popular culture; the traditional, and that which is produced by the hijra community. In the traditional representation she is a distinctively feminine deity, sitting on the back of a small rooster. She holds a sword in her upper right hand, a Shri book of scripture in the upper left, an open palm in the form of the blessing abhay hasta mudra as her lower right hand, and finally a trishul in her lower left which looks like a trident and represents the trinties of creation, preservation and destruction (Kanodia 2016). The differences between this traditional representation and the hijra representation are minor to the unfamiliar eye, but their meaning is significant. Instead of sitting on a small rooster, the rooster she bestrides is much larger than herself. Other representations of Bahuchara Mata in hijra culture depict her vehicle as a yoni, the conventional symbol for a vulva. This may be related to the emasculation of the hijras which grants the devotee a closer identification with the female deity (Nanda 2007). The hijra Bahuchara Mata holds the sword, the trishul, and the book of scripture similar to the traditional representation but instead of the abhay hasta mudra, she holds a five-edged mango leaf in her lower right hand. The mango leaf represented here is often used with vermillion in sindoor ceremony during Hindu marriages. This is significant as one of the main roles of hijras is to perform at marriage ceremonies to bequeath the newly-weds with the blessing of fertility as the hijras are exempt from both marriage and childbirth themselves (Kanodia 2016).

The significance of the goddess Bahuchara Mata in hijra culture is that, according to Hindu mythology, she is symbolic of transvestism and also divinity. According to myth, her caravan was attacked by Bapiya which was seen as a heinous sin against her. In retaliation, she cursed Bapiya with impotency which stripped him of his masculinity, and then self-immolated and cut off her own breasts in fear that they would dishonour her modesty, leaving her neither man nor woman. The only way to lift the curse was for Bapiya to worship her by acting and dressing as a woman (Kanodia 2016). This act of sacrifice, and her ensuing death, led to her deification and the practice of self-mutilation and sexual abstinence by her devotees is understood to bestow her power of fertility upon them (Nanda 2007). Hijra devotion of Bahuchara Mata is significant in that it grants their otherwise marginalised subculture a certain degree of social acceptance in broader society since the goddess belonged to a divine upper caste.

Other instances of intersexuality and transvestism are exemplified throughout Hindu popular culture. For example, the deity of Shiva, also known as Ardhanariswar, meaning half man-half woman, who carried out the act of self-castration. Another example is Arjun, a powerful warrior in the Mahabharata who took on the disguise of a woman and practices sexual abstinence under the guise of feigned impotence.

The acceptance of the hijra community within the broader Indian social context is due to the recurring themes of transvestism and intersexuality in popular Hindu mythology. They are associated with Bahuchara Mata who sacrificed her body and sexuality in favour of sexual abstinence and creative asceticism. The similar sacrifice of the hijras grants them the respect of the wider Indian public. This social acceptance changed drastically under British colonial rule, which this essay will now explore.

Colonial India and Foucauldian Governance

Though British Rule began in 1612, the period of colonial rule that is most consequential in this discussion of the hijra follows the 1857 Great Rebellion in India, which brought about a state of moral panic for the colonial rulers, leading to a merciless crackdown by colonial governance. The nineteenth century was a momentous period in the development of insidious Foucauldian forms of governance through which the British legitimated their oppressive regime, with the hijras as the targeted signifier of the ‘Other’. In the early nineteenth century, there was a tolerance and curiosity towards the hijra, with variation in their representation, albeit through disgust for their practices. During the mid-nineteenth century, they were brought under increased civil restrictions, though still allowed certain rights which allowed them to make a living. Following the moral panic and the 1857 Great Rebellion, hijras were increasingly criminalised, were excluded from the public sphere and were seen as a problem in need of extermination (Gannon 2009).

Two methods of Foucauldian governance were used by the British colonists during the height of their oppressive regime which manifested themselves in the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act/ Eunuch Act (Hinchy 2014).

The initial effort of the British rulers was to govern the natives using indigenous laws, a technique known as ‘Oriental rule’, thereby legitimating their rule and positioning themselves against the despotism of previous rulers. To achieve this goal, they translated several Sanskrit and Pali texts which they used as the basis for colonial law, but with the express purpose of enabling colonial governance in India (Gannon 2009). The use of translation to create language is not to be understood as a violent exertion
of power, but rather as a deceptive, coercive exertion of the Foucauldian knowledge/ power relationship (Gannon 2009). This language was employed to utter subtle colonial ideologies that favoured the superior Western-Christian values over the inferior, deviant native, a distinct method of Foucauldian governance. With relation to the hijra, these ideologies particularly manifested themselves in ideals of masculinity and sexuality, where anything that strayed from the British Imperialist masculine and heterosexual ideals was deemed abhorrent, immoral, and to be exterminated.

The second method of Foucauldian governance was through censuses which were essentially technologies of biopower which constructed regimes of truth to facilitate colonial governance. The censuses were designed specifically to fabricate an empirical social reality that the colonial rulers wanted to see. Indeed, the production of the social realities placed members of society into categories from which they can be governed. Hijras were the targets of extermination and the measure of their numbers in the censuses would evaluate the success of the colonial regime itself (Gannon 2009). Significant in the success of the use of technologies of biopower, the hijra became an aggregated, discrete social entity, a familiar technique used by Western powers to compound all indigenous variety into a single monolithic whole, captured in the notion of ‘Orientalism’ (Said in Klassen 2014). The Imperial censuses synthesised all members of society that were deemed immoral, effeminate, criminal, sodomite, homosexual and in any way deviated from the Western-Christian two-sex model under the categorical heading of the hijra signifier. This Orientalist approach of creating a single mass of social deviants is central to British legitimisation of their colonial rule as they necessitate governance and control due to their inability to participate obediently in society.

The 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) had the ultimate aim of preventing emasculation and thus causing the eunuch-hijra social group to eventually die out. The short-term goal however, was simply to remove them as a visible socio-cultural category and gender identity (Hinchy 2014). The CTA deprived the hijras of all their civil rights, including the right to write a will and to be the guardian of a child. Further, the criminalisation of street performance or public exhibition of any eunuch who is dressed like a woman stripped the hijras of their primary source of income (Hinchy 2014). This forced the hijra community to seek other methods of earning a living which led most of them to prostitution, a choice that wholly opposes one of their main means of earning the respect of the broader Indian population; their asceticism. The hijra community thus experience tensions between their religious, ascetic ideal community and the reality of the individual human’s sexuality and sexual practice. They deem sexual activity to be offensive to their goddess Bahuchara Mata, however most hijras consider prostitution a necessary evil (Nanda 2007).

The hardship and marginalisation suffered by the hijra community throughout British colonial rule has had chronic impacts on their social acceptance within the wider social context. Though they no longer have to suffer the threat of extermination, the conflict between their ascetic ideal and their reality of prostitution hasn’t improved even in post-colonial India and thus their lower-caste status has seen minimal sign of recovery.

Post-Colonial India and Gender Performativity

India, since her Independence in 1947, has become decidedly more permissive towards the hijra community. Immediately after India regained her Independence, Nehru became Prime Minister. His goal was to create a nation-state and thus launched momentous political, social and economic changes, along with a new Constitution in 1950 to achieve an independent Indian republic (Mankekar 2002). His goal was striving for the ideal image created by his mentor Gandhi, to create a diverse, multicultural society in which all are welcome, and nationalism surpasses religious affiliation. This goal was not realised. The 1980s and 1990s has been deemed a crucial period in post-colonial Indian history, when constructions of nation were rearticulated and religious identities renegotiated (Mankekar 2002). Across the non-Western world, this period of decolonisation, followed by the end of the Cold War, was characterized not only by the rise of new economic forces, but also by the resurgence of parochial identities based on ethnic and religious allegiances (Juergensmeyer 2008). Religious activists in the non-Western world see the secular nationalism brought by the West as a new form of Western Imperialism. This sentiment has been repeated in hate speech against the Western world by many religious leaders including Osama bin Laden who made the comparison of Western presence in the Middle East with the Crusades and colonialism, and when the Ayatollah Khomeini associated contemporary Western influence in Iran with that of the colonial era (Juergensmeyer 2008). Though the religious powers across the non-Western world are innumerous and variable, they are united by a common enemy – Western secular nationalism – and by their wish for the revival of religion in the public sphere. This desire for the revival of religion in politics is echoed by the increasing popularity of Hindu nationalism since the 1980s when the Hindu-nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, appropriated some elements of Gandhian nationalism and acquired public symbols of authority in the Indian political sphere (Mankekar 2002). This wave of Hindu nationalism wished to align itself with Indian nationalism, so as to be seen as the hegemonic force, casting out those who were then deemed as the ‘other’, such as the Muslim community. This dangerous desire of the Hindu nationalists in power to exterminate the Muslim ‘other’ is only becoming more pronounced in contemporary politics. However, this revival of Hindu culture has granted the hijra community some respite from their struggle by inviting them back into the Hindu-dominated public sphere. Hijras have been entering the political arena since 1998 when Shabnam Mausi was elected as a member of the legislative assembly, and the hijra was legally recognised as the third gender in the Indian Constitution in 2014. In the past few years, six hijras have been elected to public office at the local and state level, defeating more prominent candidates from national political parties, thereby heralding the path to hijra political emancipation (Reddy 2003). Their path from pariah to model minority in the Indian political landscape and their potential for further electoral participation and subsequent victory will enable them to renegotiate popular understanding of citizenship, gender, sexuality and politics (Reddy 2003).

The hijra challenges the Western-centric, Christian understanding of binary gender norms and consequently destabilises these accepted norms to reveal the contextuality and imitative structure of gender and heterosexuality. This brings to public debate Judith Butler’s proposition that gender is constructed around the gender anticipation of compulsory heterosexuality, led by our evolutionary prioritisation of reproduction for survival. Gender is not intrinsically essentialised, rather, it is continuously performed, with each person reinforcing the ‘naturalness’ of their gender. Gender eventually becomes ‘naturalised’ as one continues to perform it in order to maintain one’s gendered identity (Butler in Klassen 2014). The introduction of hijras into the political arena in India is momentous, not only for the rejuvenation for the marginalised, downtrodden hijra community, but also for challenging the hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality and the changes this will bring in the worldwide LGBTQ movement. Judith Butler has contrasted hijras and drag queens, highlighting how they both help us to realise that gender is not an essentialised binary, but rather a philosophical category created not by what we are, but by what we do (Bakshi 2004).

Thus, hijras have succeeded in re-joining Indian popular culture after being disparaged for so many years under colonial rule and in the following decades while the country adjusted to the decolonisation process. They are now recognised as legitimate citizens, the Hindu mythologies with transvestite and intersexual characters are being recreated in contemporary popular culture such as TV programmes like ‘Ramayana’ (Mankekar 2002), and the challenge they represent to the hegemonic gender binary is being recognised in ‘queer theory’ and in LGBTQ activism.

Conclusion

This essay has established a diachronic perspective of the evolution of the hijra in Indian popular culture; how their community fluctuated in social acceptance before, during, and after British colonial rule. Though I will assert this essay doesn’t cover the entire livelihood of the hijra community over time, it has shown how their acceptance in the dominant religion is consequential for their standing as a subculture within the broader hegemonic social order. Before British colonisation, they were broadly accepted in the Hindu context due to their creative asceticism, sexual abstinence, and their representation in Hindu mythology. During colonial rule, they were increasingly criminalised, which led them to prostitution as they were no longer permitted to perform and earn a living in the public sphere. Finally, in post-colonial India, we have seen a resurgence of Hindu nationalism which has benefitted the hijra community, at the expense of the Muslim community, by prioritising all aspects of Hindu culture and aligning them with the notion of Indian nationalism. Hijras are penetrating the political sphere at a rapid pace now that they are gaining voter confidence, presenting themselves as a trustworthy alternative to the corrupt politicians that are rife in contemporary Indian politics. They have even been heralded as the ‘new emerging force in Indian politics’ (Hindustan Times in Reddy 2003). They are making similar progress in LGBTQ activism, bringing to the fore how a ‘third gender’ can be widely accepted in a diverse society, and can make political gain. The next step for the hijra community is to fight for the establishment of a new, tolerant and de-binarised order in which hijras would be accepted not only as transgender people, but as hijras in their own right (Ghosh 2018).

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