Deviant Sexualities and Artistic Representations in Contemporary India

Introduction-2

Indeed be it the Kerala government’s initiation of facilitating free s*x-change surgeries, hosting transgender beauty pageants and launching transgender run G-taxi service or the hiring of twenty-three hijras by the Kochi metro, the Bengal government’s move to let transgenders vote as third gender or the Karnataka government’s remarkable effort to bestow upon Akkai Padmashali (a transgender activist) the Rajyotsava Award, the affirmative media coverage of all these initiatives has contributed greatly in building the positive image of transgenders. However, despite the religious sanction through widely popular stories like Shikhandi/Amba and the mass acceptance of the myths surrounding Goddess Bahucharaji in North Gujarat (specially worshipped by eunuchs as this Goddess is associated with s*x-change) and the immense popularity of Aravani festival celebrated at Villipuram, the social subjugation is perennially present in hijras’ lives. Little wonder the first reported case of Section 377 in 1884 was against a so-called trans-s****l known as Kharati. This case is known as Queen vs Kharati2). Even in the world of sports, the negation of liminal gender is visible in Soundarajan’s stripping of Asian medal in 2006 (Doha) due to her trans-s****l identity.

Hence in the light of the above discussion it is safe to assume that the Supreme Court’s recent judgement, because of which transgenders are now recognized as third gender and they should be able to assert their citizenship rights, is a path-breaking judgement in terms of trans-s****l revolution. But as Steven Sideman affirms that the citizenship rights definitely provide state protection but as every right is fraught with responsibilities, it will be interesting to excavate as what will be the expectations of the state vis-à-vis transgenders’ contribution towards the nation. But can this affirmative stance taken by the state mitigate the social and cultural stigma attached with hijras because in the cultural memory of people hijras are associated with criminality due to the imposition of “The Criminal Tribes Act of 1871” (now abolished)? This Act was amended in 1897 and was subtitled as “An Act for the Registration of Criminal Tribes and Eunuchs”.

However, despite its abolishment, the cultural and social implications of this act can be seen even in today’s time as Mahesh Dattani asserts in Seven Steps Around the Fire:

The two events in mainstream Hindu culture where their presence is acceptable — marriage and birth — ironically, are the very same privileges denied to them by man and nature. Not for them the seven rounds witnessed by the Fire God, eternally binding man and woman in matrimony, or the blessings of “May you be the mother of a hundred sons”.

— 2000: 239-40

Significantly it is not a matter of great surprise that Manvendra Singh, the first open gay from a royal family who has fought incessantly for the rights of the queers, narrates as how the queers in a royal family have been most derogatorily called hijras instead of gays or lesbians as being a hijra is considered the worst and the most marginalized identity even within the queer community. To quote his words:

Growing up in royal family has made me come across many royal members who have been lesbians and gays but termed as hijras by my own family members and I used to wonder as how can Maharaja (the ultimate symbol of “ultra male”) be a hijra.

— Unpublished interview given to me

Although the organizations like SIDA Foundation (Priya Babu), Sahodari Foundation (Kalki), Trichi Transgenders Association (Sonali) and Aravani Welfare Board (constituted in May 2008) have done considerable amount of work to blunt the subjugation of transgenders, but most of these welfare works are by and large limited to the southern part of India. In fact, the seminal work by Gayatri Reddy is also on the ethnographic study of Hyderabadi hijras. Thus apart from the state recognition, the annihilation of the cultural and social stigmatization is one of the most significant aspects of the empowerment of the transgender community. For that their personal histories and their tales of subjugation need to be placed in the public domain. The invisibilization of their ostracization has worked hugely to their disadvantage. No wonder, apart from Revathi’s autobiography, The Truth About Me (2010), the first hijra anthology, Our Lives, Our Words: Telling Aravani Lifestories (2011), A Life in Trans Activism (2016), autobiographical treatise, I Am Vidya: A Transgender’s Journey (2007) by Living Smile Vidya; Me Hijra, Me Laxmi (2015); and Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life (2017) by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi and A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi (2017) by Manobi Bandyopadhyay and small pieces and poems about transgenders (coming out of writing workshops conducted by Pudiya Kodangi), there are very few recorded statements of their lives and times. In fact, other than Serena Nanda’s Neither Man Nor Woman (1999), Gayatri Reddy’s With Respect to s*x (2006) and Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850–1900 (2019) by Jessica Hinchy, there are only a few articles on this subject such as Sandeep Bakshi’s “A Comparative Analysis of Hijras and Drag Queens: The Subversive Possibilities and Limits of Parading Effeminacy and Negotiating Masculinity” (2004); Maria Boccia’s “Physical s*x and Psychological Gender: Neither Man nor Woman, The Hijras of India” (1995); Joseph T. Bockrath’s “Bhartia Hijro Ka Dharma: The Code of India’s Hijra” (2003); Lawrence Cohen’s “The Pleasures of Castration: The Postoperative Status of Hijras, Jankhas and Academics” (1995); Kira Hall’s “‘Go Suck Your Husband’s Sugarcane!’ Hijras and the Use of s****l Insult” (1997); Kira Hall and, Veronica O’Donovan’s “Shifting Gender Positions among Hindi-speaking Hijras” (1996); Serena Nanda’s “The Hijras of India: A Preliminary Report” (1984), “The Third Gender Hijra Community in India” (2009) and Gayatri Reddy’s “Men Who Would Be Kings: Celibacy, Emasculation, and the Re-Production of Hijras in Contemporary Indian Politics” (2003) and most of them are written either by foreigners or Indians who have primarily got funds from the European universities and mainly published in the Western books and journals. Also most of these works are ethnographic and anthropological studies. The awe, fear and myths surrounding them need to be burst and for that their own recorded histories can work as an elixir. However, the issue of the violence against hijras needs to be addressed from the other disciplines as well in order to not only document a holistic picture of their opprobrium but also to cater to the larger readership and audience which consequently give impetus to the plural consumption and representations.

Indeed, a major section of this study attempts to catalogue the varied representations of hijra identity in art in the last two decades. This will include the articulation of their queer selves through literary representations, the hijra identity explored through cinema and the exposition of the trans-identity in other art forms such as photographic series. But unfortunately even within the queer academic and artistic explorations, hijras have not been much represented. Therefore, the first section of the book aims to excavate the multiplicity of the transgender lives by analysing various art forms like cinema and photographic series of the last two decades that explore trans-identities. There are two chapters in this section. The first chapter is on transgender cinema and the second one is on photographs.

Trans-Identity and Spatial Fissures

Through these works of art a special emphasis has also been laid on the spatial fissures created by the trans-feminist identities of hijras as well. These artistic signatures entail an expansive understanding of the spatial and social dynamics of the trans socio-s****l life. According to Longhurst (1995), the body is both corporeal and symbolic. In this connection it is pertinent to note as how the queer geographers have emphasized the point that it is the enactment of the body through spaces that redefines the gender and s****l identity irrespective of biological s*x. The symbiotic relationship between space and identity has been thus effectively catalogued by these scholars. To quote Bell and Valentine

… The kiss of two men on the night bus home can fracture and rupture a previously seamless (we might ironically say homogenous) space. … The straightness of our streets is an artefact, not a natural fact, and Pride marches, zap protests and other non- or anti-heteronormative acts make this clear by making it queer.

— 1995: 19

In this way hijras by dint of their ambiguous corporeal self and the enactment of it at public spaces through dhandha (s****l work), badhai (dancing in public) and begging reinvest the normative spaces. Here the corporeal self and the enacted embodiment of fluid gender get blurred and in this sense the reorientation of the normative spaces through hijra identity adds an interesting tangent to this discourse. In this way the destabilization of the normative spaces by hijra identity is very different as compared to the homosexualization of heterosexual domains by lesbian and gays. This punctures the idea of “homo-alternative” as the only way to create fissures in the normative spaces. Julie A. Podmore in “Lesbians in the Crowd: Gender, Sexuality and Visibility along Montreal Boul. St-Laurent” (2010) states that since lesbian geographies appear to be more “private”, “discursive” and hidden, the trans-feminist identities of hijras make normative spaces gender queer and in this fashion make lesbian spaces also more porous and explicit. On the other hand, the separatist divide created by the exclusive gay spaces is also at times hazardous for the fluid negotiations between gender queerness and spatial identities. Quoting Julie Podmore, Paul Boyce in “Dislocating Male-to-Male Sexualities in Calcutta: Subject, Space and Perception” warns against this danger in these words:

… In terms of geographic analysis the effect is to produce an image of the heteronormative and “homo-alternative” as parallel and therefore separate discourses. This has underscored the tendency toward what Julie Podmore has described as a “mosaic model” in queer urban geography, a stance that perpetuates an artificial, reductively visualist distinction between heteronormative and non-heteronormative space.

— 2007: 404

Thus this reductively visualist distinction created by the exclusive gay spaces is catalogued as the homo-alternative space as opposed to the heteronormative one. In this way the dismantling of the homo/hetero binary by the trans-hijra identities on account of their queer presence in heterosexual households on the occasion of the childbirth and marriage, the s****l work on roads and in parks, and begging at signals tends to disrupt this separatist divide between homo-alternative spaces and heterosexual domains.

The s****l spatial dimensions of the streets have also been constantly reframed by hijras (as mentioned earlier) by altering the streets through their presence (begging on streets and s*x-work at night), sexually suggestive behaviour and verbal insinuations. Apropos of this, M.W. Turner states that streets in one way defeat our purpose to define them in a certain way when it comes to the exploration of the alternative s****l desires and he gives the example of an incident reported in 1876 in The Times where a man Arthur Cunningham was charged of obscenity on account of making an advance at a man on a street. Taking a clue from this incident, Turner talks about the uncertain nature of streets vis-à-vis homoerotic desires because of the predominance of the heterosexual nature of the streets. Despite the fact that streets are primarily masculine homosocial spaces, as in India even now the streets are invested with men predominantly, the dominance of heteronormativity cannot be countered. It is this aspect of the streets that has been revealed by Turner in these words:

What remains is a textual trace of an urban encounter in 1876, but a trace that seemingly defeats our desire to define the streets, at least with any certainty. We are left here, again, with the question: how does a man distinguish a man cruising a street in search of another man from any other stroller moving through the streets of London? ... It is precisely because of this uncertainty in the streets with its many kinds of strollers that our cruisers are able to wander.

— 2003: 54