Who are the Hijras?
Contrary to popular belief, the Hijras are not merely transgenders. Transgenders and Hijras do not occupy the same space on the gender scale in South Asia. The Hijras do not fit into the scale of the LGBTQ+, and western terminology is not appropriate for describing the community. However, Hijras most often identify as transgender, intersex or asexual people.
The Hijra people are the third gender of India, Pakistan, Nepal, and some other parts of the Indian Subcontinent. For a long time before the colonisation of India by the British, this community was regarded as the third gender of India.
The Hijras were a well respected community before the colonisation of India which crossed cultural boundaries. Certain segments of the Hindutva, keen to display their progressiveness, try to deny the fact that Islamic Rulers were just as tolerant of the Hijras as previous Hindu Rulers. In actuality, the Mughals were often benevolent patrons for them.
However, the Hijra Community is not a development of relatively recent history, like the Mughals. There are important gender-fluid characters in Hindu Epics written over 2,400 years ago, such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata- a particularly famous example being Shikhandi, who is instrumental in the killing of Bhishma during the Mahabharata war. Even the Hindu God Shiva had a genderfluid form, Ardhanarishwara, where he fuses with his wife Parvati, forming a human with half their body male, and the other half female. However, the first explicit mention of the third gender came roughly 200 years after the epics, during the Kama Sutra period.
European travellers and trans-continental traders from the 17th century recorded to have seen ‘men and boys dressed like women’ across the Indian Subcontinent. However, they took the very existence of these people to be a sign of ‘the city’s depravity’.
When the British finally took control over Indian Administration, they passed laws to impose their queerphobic mindset on the people. In 1871, the Criminal Tribes Act was passed, which included Hijras among the many tribes made illegal. They were publicly declared ‘immoral and corrupt.’ Child removal occurred at a rapid pace for them, to ‘prevent the spread of unnatural elements’ in the country.
In 1949, the criminal tribes act was repealed, but the damage of 200 years of its existence had already shattered the tolerance of Indians, Pakistanis, and Nepalis towards genderfluid people and those who were not cisgender or heterosexual.
Hijra Culture
Despite popular belief claiming such, Hijras are not always eunuchs, for many of them merely adopt female characteristics, and are not castrated.
Historically and culturally, Hijras have the power to bless and curse, which is why they were often present at weddings, birth ceremonies and funerals. But with this comes the downside of many holding superstitious beliefs about them.
The word ‘Hijra’ emerges from Turkish word ‘hjr’ which means ‘to leave one’s tribe’. Hijra people leave their homes and join organised Hijra communities when they feel is appropriate, or when they are rejected by their birth family. There, under the guidance of a Hijra Guru, they learn various art forms- music, dance, painting, martial arts, etc.
Though Hijra people historically were very religious, some Hijra communities today are adopting more secular philosophies, with some even following relatively modern leaders, like Ambedkar, Lenin, or Anuradha Ghandy.
Culturally ‘feminine’ symbols and expressiveness are very important for them. They often exhibit dramatised ‘feminine’ lifestyles. Often, they marry within their own community.
This Hijra Identity evolved a great deal during the time of the Delhi Sultanate- where Hijras occupied important posts of valets and maids to rulers, and were often guardians of harems. This is one of the reasons why Islam accepts Hijras (albeit barely) but not others on the genderfluid spectrum in the Indian subcontinent. However, just like with the Hindus, tolerance to Hijras is not high among Muslims due to colonisation.
Hijra communities show us a way out. We, in the urban setting, think of ‘family’ as the relations of kinship and marriage. The Hijra setting is completely opposed to such thinking- for it is a heteronormative concept, a tool of suppression for both genderfluid people and women. As Arijeet Ghosh and Diksha Sanyal wrote at the EPW:
The idea of the marital and procreative family is at the heart of regulation of intimacy by the state. Yet, there are many individuals and relationships that do not fit into this idea. Recent reports show that single person households constitute 12.5% of the all households in India (Pandit 2019). Moreover, 7.5% of all the households are lone-parent families of which majority (4.5% or approximately 13 million households) are headed by women (Pandit 2019). However, a lesser researched question is how such individuals live and define family outside of the traditional structures of marriage and blood ties.
Their lifestyle makes the privileged ones insecure, for it challenges the idea of the traditional family and heteronormative concepts that keep them at the top of a patriarchal, queerphobic and capitalist society. In short, it is a threat to the privileged upper-castes.
Decolonising the Hijra Gender
Despite the repealing of the Criminal Tribes Act in 1949, mainstream intolerance to the Hijras continues to be. Most of them find it difficult to find ‘legitimate’ forms of work which can sustain their lives in India’s capitalist environment. This situation has only gotten worse following the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, most Hijras in the Indian subcontinent today rely on sex work in various forms or begging to stay alive, a portion of which is given to their gurus, as a symbol of solidarity to their community.
Also, it must be noted that Hijras were not identified as a biological sex until 1994 in India, and 2009 in Pakistan. Today, both countries recognise Hijras as the official third sex (India uses the term ‘transgender’ to refer to Hijras. Though inaccurate, laws applying to transgenders apply to Hijras too).
Though activists are working hard to create safe avenues for Hijras to work, progress is slow. With not even homosexual marriage legal in India, creating a safe environment for Hijras is years away. On top of this is the fact that sex work and begging are criminalised across South-Asia, so their only source of income comes at the risk of abuse, persecution, and violence by police and other law-enforcers.
Non-violence is a bubble for the privileged- for those who shall never be impacted by violence themselves. Non-violence only works when there is a common goal, and public support. But even with all its virtuous leaders, the Indian Independence Movement was a rather conservative movement on the grassroots level, where women, dalits, and tribals were sidelined and often even abused.
If an entire country’s unified opposition to colonisation came at such a cost, how can we expect the Hijras to stay peaceful for any longer? They will use authoritarian, violent means, if such be at all, to displace the state, for at every moment of their lives, they are at risk to suffering from upper-caste bourgeoise violence. This same theory applies to Dalits and Adivasis too. Yet, the State wonders why people turn to violence!
Urban, elite schools and colleges, too do not have representation of Hijras. Though it is illegal to discriminate against Hijras in India, who is stopping anybody from performing the act?
Due to the unique situation of the Hijras, they are unable to find solidarity from the LGBTQ+ community itself. Though it is true that the LGBTQ+ existed in India at the same time as the Hijras, the LGBTQ+ movement in India itself is a colonial legacy- for it excludes those genderfluid/non-conforming people who had existed for long before Europe realised their existence. This is why intersectionality is an important aspect of making the LGBTQ+ movement less exclusionary to non-western genders and sexualities.
Decolonising Gender, Sex and Sexuality is a critically important step for creating an equitable society, given the Indian context.