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1The Ethnographic SettingIt wasn’t until a few weeks after I began fieldwork among hijras in theSouth Indian twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad that I had myfirst inkling of their perceptions of me. I was sitting on a mat, chatting withMunira, who later became one of my closest hijra friends. She was tellingme proudly about her last visit to Mumbai when she had been approachedby a journalist for her story, and how she had rebuffed him. Munira thenturned to me and said, somewhat apologetically, “I hope you don’t mind mysaying this. But you know, Gayatri, when I first saw you, I thought, ‘She hasthe body and face of a woman, she is wearing female clothing, but she hassuch short hair. Maybe she is a young boy of thirteen or fourteen.’ That is thereason I spoke to you initially, you know. I thought maybe, maybe you wereone of us at first.” Then, laughing aloud, she added, “Frankly, I don’t knowhow I thought that you might be. You are, you know, different-looking, sothat is what I thought then.”I begin with this incident to highlight two issues of access and representation: First, of course, was hijras’ perception of my appearance—as ayoung Indian, somewhat “different-looking” from them, with uncommonlyshort hair for a woman. Second, as I gradually learned over the course ofmy fieldwork, they attributed this difference not to my sexuality or sexualorientation, but to my upper-middle-class status. My short hair, my “ethnically chic” Fab India salwar-kurta,1 my educational background, my statusas an unmarried woman, especially given my age, and my engagement inthis academic project with hijras—factors that lead to a presumption aboutmy sexual identity here in the United States—were, for hijras, signs of myclass identification.Quite apart from privileging a particular theory, history, and politics ofrepresentation, I raise this issue to underscore a fairly simple point: the notion that sexual difference is not the only lens through which hijras perceive

2 / Chapter Onethe world and expect in turn to be perceived. In other words, as I maintainthroughout this ethnography, hijras are not just a sexual or gendered category, as is commonly contended in the literature (e.g., Vyas and Shingala1987; Sharma 1989; Nanda 1990). Like the members of any other community in India, their identities are shaped by a range of other axes. Thoughsex/gender is perhaps the most important of these axes, hijra identity cannot be reduced to this frame of analysis.2 Through a description of hijras’lives, this book explores the domain of sexuality as well as its articulationwith broader contexts of everyday life in South Asia, including aspects ofkinship, religion, class, and hierarchies of respect. Before exploring issues ofrepresentation and hijras’ historical and geographic representation in particular, however, I provide a brief introductory note about hijras for thoseunfamiliar with these metonymic figures of Indian sexual difference.the hyper (in)visibility of hijrasFor the most part, hijras are phenotypic men who wear female clothingand, ideally, renounce sexual desire and practice by undergoing a sacrificialemasculation—that is, an excision of the penis and testicles—dedicated tothe goddess Bedhraj Mata. Subsequently they are believed to be endowedwith the power to confer fertility on newlyweds or newborn children. Theysee this as their “traditional” ritual role, although at least half of the current hijra population (at least in Hyderabad) engages in prostitution, whichhierarchically senior “ritual specialists” greatly disparage.3 In recent years,hijras have emerged as perhaps the most frequently encountered figures inthe narrative linking of India with sexual difference. As the quintessential“third sex” of India, they have captured the Western scholarly imaginationas an ideal case in the transnational system of “alternative” gender/sexuality.In such analyses, the hijra (or Thai kathoey or Omani xanith, among others)becomes, as Rosalind Morris notes, either an “interstitial gender occupyingthe liminal space between male and female,” or “a ‘drag queen’ who [is] ahero(ine) in a global sexual resistance” (1994, 16). With this specularizationhas come an intense gaze directed at hijras by both scholars and the press.By their own accounts, hijras in most major cities—including the SouthIndian city of Hyderabad, where I did my research—have been drivencrazy by foreigners or, to translate the more colorful Hindi phrase, havehad their “minds eaten by foreign [ firangi] people” desperate to capture astory for their audience. In the last decade or so, there have been at leastfour documentaries or news features (Kalliat 1990; Prasad and Yorke 1991;

The Ethnographic Setting / 3Cooper 1999; Shiva, MacDonald, and Gucovsky 2000), four ethnographiesor book-length monographs (Nanda 1990; Jaffrey 1996; Balaji and Malloy1997; Ahmed and Singh 2002), three books of fiction (Mann 1992; Sinha1993; Forbes 1998), at least two dissertations (Hall 1995; Reddy 2000), andseveral undergraduate honors theses that focus explicitly on hijras. Morerecently, hijras have also been “mainstreamed” into the Indian world of popular films.4 In some ways, this is in marked contrast to the earlier ambivalent yet arguably tolerant attitude of most Indians toward them. For manyIndians—both upper- and middle-class—hijras exist (and to some extenthave always existed) at the periphery of their imaginaries, making themselves visible only on certain circumscribed ritual occasions. Given thishistory of near invisibility, the recent attention focused on hijras has beenunsettling for both hijras and non-hijras.In response to this seemingly boundless interest, hijras have becomemore wary of scholars and journalists alike, and this attention has alsoheightened scrutiny by local disciplinary regimes, including the police.5Just before I arrived in Hyderabad for my fieldwork, a case was registeredagainst the senior hijras in the old city by a family that claimed their sonhad been abducted by the hijra community.6 Even though the case waslater dismissed, hijras told me they felt overly scrutinized for the first timein hundreds of years. Partly in response to this heightened sensitivity onthe part of the hijra community, but also, I suspect, out of a patriarchalconcern that this was not a “proper” topic for an Indian woman to beresearching (see Jaffrey 1996), I was explicitly advised by anthropologists,several relatives, and even strangers to steer clear of hijras in Hyderabad.Needless to say, the atmosphere within the hijra community, especially withregard to interactions with non-hijras, was somewhat tense when I beganmy research in the fall of 1995.For all these reasons, I was well aware that by undertaking this projectI might, however unwittingly, increase hijras’ visibility within disciplinaryregimes in India, resulting in greater scrutiny of their lives. In recent years,with the increasing visibility of hijras in global compendia of sexuality/gender and the growth of the gay movement in India, hijras, self-identifiedgay men, and men cruising for sex with other men in public spaces have become increasingly visible to the police, the media, and ruffians, or goondas.Just in the last few years, there have been at least two dramatic disruptionsand arrests of volunteers in nongovernmental organizations that work on issues relating to sexual health—and more specifically, the health of MSM, ormen who have sex with men—quite apart from the innumerable incidentsof everyday harassment and surveillance. Despite this greater vigilance and

4 / Chapter Onemy anxiety on this account, however, many hijras I encountered in Hyderabad explicitly reiterated their desire to get the real story of their livesdown on paper, as much in response to this scrutiny as to vindicate theirlife choices. Although aware of the irony of their positions and the potentialfor even greater vilification on account of the publicity, hijras with whomI worked most closely were eager to “tell [their] stories” so that “everyone[would] know about [their] lives.”In undertaking this project, I am also concerned that my focusing onhijras within the current frame of academic inquiry that explicitly emphasizes their sexual difference—even if my intention is expressly to refocusthis gaze—inevitably privileges this mode of discourse. I grew up in Indiawell aware of the existence of hijras, and even though I was not immersedin their lives, I have to question why my intellectual curiosity was notsufficiently piqued until I came to the United States for graduate studies. Or maybe the question should not be when and why did I remember,but when and why did I forget? What sorts of erasures—of class, caste,gender, or sexuality—were encoded in my previous silence and ongoingrefraction of the hijra “category” (see Patel 1997)? More specifically, whatkinds of occlusions of class and sexual privilege do these conceal/revealin both (upper-middle-class) India and the U.S. academe? In other words,perhaps we need to be aware of the history and politics of particular discursive and theoretical lenses—the marked categories/discourses that mightappear salient in one arena but less so in another (see Uberoi 1996; Thapan1997; John and Nair 1998). This is not to imply that sex and sexuality arenot important or even central to hijras’ lives. It merely emphasizes the needto contextualize our analytic and personal agendas in any representationalendeavor. Hence, viewing hijras solely within the framework of sex/genderdifference—as the quintessential “third sex” or “neither men nor women”—ultimately might be a disservice to the complexity of their lives and theirembeddedness within the social fabric of India.Further, although this project explicitly attempts to subvert the reification or commodification of a third category—making hijras’ lives count asmuch as it addresses various “categories” of sexual thirdness—to the extent that it multiplies rather than dismantles third genders/categories, I amsomewhat uneasy that it might reaffirm as much as it subverts, nominalizing, numericalizing, and naturalizing embodied difference in its wake.There is, after all, as Kath Weston notes, “a relationship of longstanding[sic] between counting and commodification” that one must be aware ofwhen embarking on such a project as this (2002, 41).

The Ethnographic Setting / 5Finally, my ambivalence in undertaking this research also relates to theexclusions sustained (or produced) by such a project. To what extent doesthe focus on hijras as male-to-hijra subject-positions contribute, even unintentionally, to the continuing discursive and systemic violence againstwomen? As Lawrence Cohen (1995b) observes, highlighting shifts frommale (rather than female) to a third-gender identity erases the politicaldifferences between male and female experiences and, ultimately, workswithin a two-gendered system—male and third—in which the female position has been virtually erased. In a somewhat similar vein, speaking forthe Thai context, Rosalind Morris (1994) points out that patriarchal narratives seem to have “effaced [if it ever existed] any expression of femalesexual identity that could not be subsumed under a reproductive mandate”(1994, 26). In this ideology, femaleness is thoroughly naturalized as reproductive capacity. Only in the recent past, with the emergence of sexualitiesdefined in terms of object choice, has the category of woman been differentiated into hetero- and homosexual identities. Perhaps the important historical and empirical question (as Morris asks with respect to the kathoeys ofThailand) is “[H]ow have sex/gender systems [in both Thailand and India,apparently] organized the somatic economy in such a way as to render both‘female’ and ‘male’ bodies as media of masculine subjectivities?” (1994, 25).While this is not the question I explore in this book, I argue that it is animportant one to keep in mind—along with the other issues of ambivalenceand (inadvertent) silencing noted above—as one explores issues of sexualdifference and the place of hijras within that context.framing the setting: the twin cities of hyderabadand secunderabadOn the flight from Frankfurt to Delhi on my way to begin fieldwork, Iwas sitting next to a British art historian who was a frequent traveler toIndia. In the course of conversation, he asked me what I did for a living andwhether Delhi was my final destination in India. “I’m an anthropologist andI’m going to [the South Indian city of] Hyderabad to do an ethnographicstudy of this one community—hijras—now fairly well-known as the ‘thirdsex’ of India,” I replied, expecting to expand on this theme.7 Instead, heappeared far more curious about the city of Hyderabad, having heard it was“different” from other Indian cities on account of its Muslim influence.8 Byway of an initial response to his questions about the city, I told him the

6 / Chapter Oneclassic tale of the founder of the city, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah,9 and hislove for his wife, Hyder Begum, after whom the city was named, a story thatin many ways captures the issues central to Hyderabadi hijra identity—loveor desire, religious pluralism, and the history of Muslim influence in thecity.As the popular legend goes, before his ascension to the throne, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, an excellent equestrian, often exercised his horse inthe area surrounding the fort of Golconda. One day, on one of his extendedrides, he stopped at the village of Chichlam for a drink of water.10 Passingby at that moment on her way to the temple was Bhagmati, the daughterof Lingayya, a relatively poor Hindu resident of Chichlam village. Muhammad Quli was immediately taken by her beauty and grace, and began tovisit the spot frequently, incognito, to catch a glimpse of Bhagmati and winher affections. When Muhammad Quli ascended the throne as the ruler ofGolconda a few years later, he sent for Bhagmati’s father and asked for herhand in marriage. Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah and Bhagmati were marriedin 1596 CE and, as the legend goes, lived happily together until MuhammadQuli’s untimely death in 1612.During his reign, Muhammad Quli founded a new city ten miles eastof Golconda on the southern bank of the Musi River in order to ease thecongestion and shortage of water in the crowded city of Golconda and, asfolk wisdom has it, to commemorate his love for his wife. The city wasinitially called Bhagnagar for Bhagmati, but its name was later changed toHyderabad following Bhagmati’s conversion to Islam and adoption of thetitle Hyder Begum. Hyderabad quickly became an important and bustlingcity. After the fall of Golconda to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1687and the subsequent dissolution of the Mughal Empire, the first Nizam(as subsequent rulers of Hyderabad were known), Asaf Jah I, chose thiscity rather than the walled fort of Golconda for his capital, with Charminarserving as the heart of the city. Charminar, which literally means “fourminarets,” continues to symbolize and function as the center of what isknown as the “old city” of Hyderabad.Quite apart from the documented antiquity of hijras in this city (Lyntonand Rajan 1974; Jaffrey 1996), the reasons I chose this city as the locus of mystudy are captured in some measure by this origin myth/historical folktale.Two issues are worth mentioning here: The first relates to the importance ofIslam for the larger part of Hyderabad’s history, although this influence hasalways been balanced by a significant Hindu counterinfluence. The mutual engagement and tension between the Muslim and Hindu presence inthis region is unique in the South Indian experience. Hyderabad and its

Map of Hyderabad and Secunderabad

8 / Chapter Onesurrounding region have constituted the only continuously Muslim-ruledarea in South India for the past five centuries, and this influence is apparenteven today. More important for the current context was my interest in therelation between present-day hijra identity and the history of Muslim patronage, given the recorded history of eunuchs in the Islamic royal courts ofthe Mamluk Sultanate and in the Byzantine and Ottoman empires (Peirce1993; Marmon 1995; Ayalon 1999) in addition to their presence in medievalIndian history. As several authors have noted, eunuchs in India were oftenaccorded respect in the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal courts, holding positions of eminence especially under the Khiljis of Delhi in the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries and under the Mughals from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Although many eunuchs were initially brought as slavesinto the houses of Muslim nobility in principalities such as Awadh and Hyderabad, they were accorded respect and trusted with sensitive positions,including guarding the harim, or inner/female spaces within the palace(Knighton 1855; Bernier 1891; Manucci 1907; Saletore 1974; Kidwai 1985;Chatterjee 1999, 2002).With respect to the second issue, perhaps as a legacy of MuhammadQuli’s love for Hyder Begum, Hyderabad is also popularly known in sometourist brochures as India’s “city of love,” complete with the local version ofthe Pont Neuf spanning the Musi River. Interestingly, some tension existsbetween this idealized love and other contemporary images of Hyderabad,as captured by the adage that a hijra laughingly related to me. She said,“Delhi dilwalon ka, Bombay paisewalon ka, aur Hyderabad randiyon ka”(Delhi stands for those who have love, Bombay for those with money; andHyderabad for whores). As I explain in the following pages, these idioms of“romantic” and “modern” love, or desire if you will, played out in interestingways in the lives of the hijras I came to know, not only in terms of theiroccupation, their position in the hijra kinship hierarchy, their dis/avowal ofsexual desire, and their degree of respect, but also in terms of their spatiallocation in the twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad.the spatial history of hyderabadi hijrasThe actual number of hijras in India is in dispute, ranging from ten thousandto two million (Bobb and Patel 1982; Jaffrey 1996). The popular beli

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