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Article Excerpt
IT was a hot summer afternoon in the south Indian city of Secunderabad, where I did my fieldwork among hijras, better known as India's "third sex" (Nanda, 1999) or "eunuch-transvestites" (Vyas and Shingala, 1987). I was sitting near the railway station with Sujata, one of my hijra friends and talking about her future as well as the future of hijras more generally, when she said proudly, "Within this kaliyug [current cosmic period], hijras will become kings and rule the world. That is what [the Hindu god] Rama decreed thousands of years ago when he blessed us."
"When is that time going to come?" I asked.
"That time will come very soon. You see, that time will come very soon," Sujata replied.
Perhaps "that time" in Sujata's reckoning is now. Although hijras have not become kings, they are rapidly gaining visibility in the South Asian political sphere. For the first time in Indian politics, hijras are standing for and winning election to local, state, and even national office, and are being actively courted by mainstream political parties for these positions. And they are entering the public imagination as hijras, explicitly highlighting their identity as gender-neutral, asexual figures. As one of their campaign slogans reiterated, "You don't need genitals for politics; you need brains and integrity" (Karp, 1998). Apparently, as the newspapers declared, hijras are "the new emerging force in Indian politics" (Hindustan Times, 2000), heralding the "reign of the middle order" (Outlook, 2000) or, as my hijra friend Sujata noted, a new, divinely ordained era of the Hijra Rajya (kingdom).
How is this recent event of significance in analyzing marginalized minorities? The answer, as anyone familiar with these metonymic figures of Indian "sexual difference" would assert, is that hijras have long been social pariahs in India, stigmatized explicitly on the basis of their apparently transgressive gender identification and their location beyond the domain of procreative sexuality. (1) Their recent election to office is significant because it heralds a "new chapter of enfranchisement in the history of India's eunuchs," as one news columnist noted (Jacinto, 2000). In this article, I explore hijras' emerging position as the "third wave" (Mishra, 2000)--their path from pariah to model minority as it were--in the Indian political landscape, and the potential for their electoral participation and subsequent victory to reformulate not only their place in society but also prevailing constructions of citizenship, sexuality, and politics in India.
While I am clearly not disputing the emancipatory potential of hijras' political gains in recent elections, I am questioning the automatically presumed relationship between hijra marginalization and their social emancipation by virtue of electoral participation. To gain political status, hijras explicitly highlight their social marginality on the basis of sexuality, religion, and kinship. But as I argue in this paper, it is these very mobilizations of marginality that, far from remaking normative institutions, reinscribe their hegemonic importance, thereby undercutting hijras' emancipatory and subversive potential and allowing for their incorporation within existing frameworks of political and moral authority. In other words, this paper is a cautionary note, arguing that hijras apparent increase in political visibility and social status could be illusory and could ultimately serve to remarginalize them within the new social order. In the end, if, as their campaign slogan contends, "you don't need genitals for politics," neither it would seem, does the permissible lack of genitals herald a radically new or liberal social and moral order in India.
Hijra (In)Visibility and the Space of Difference
In recent years hijras have emerged as the most commonly encountered figures in the juxtaposition of "India" and "sexual difference." Most recent analyses locate hijras--as the so-called third sex of India--outside the binary gender framework; they are "neither men nor women" as the title of Serena Nanda's popular ethnography proclaims. According to the predominant literature, hijras are phenotypically male individuals who wear female clothing and ideally, renounce sexual desire and practice by undergoing a complete physical genital excision in order to be "reborn" as hijras (Vyas and Shingala, 1987; Sharma, 1989; Nanda, 1999; Jaffrey, 1996; Hall, 1997; Reddy, 2000). (2) Because they are believed to be endowed with the power to confer fertility on newly weds or newborn children, many hijras see this as their "traditional" asexual role, and derive religious and social legitimacy from this basis. However, a significant proportion of the hijra community engages in sex in exchange for money or otherwise engages in sexual activity with men they refer to as their "husbands." (3)
Stemming in part from this engagement, but perhaps more importantly from their ambiguous gender identification and their confrontational everyday practices, hijras are often constructed in the popular imagination as "dirty," socially marginal outcasts who "do not have any sarm (shame)." (4) Because hijras explicitly reject the centrality of procreation, they are widely perceived to be outside the normative social order. Although this position locates them, in anthropologist Kira Hall's words, as "a people freed from the constraints of decency that regulate the rest of society" (1997: 445), this "freedom" is accompanied by a corresponding social, moral, and until these recent elections, political marginalization in contemporary India. As one of the first hijra ethnographers, Satish Sharma contends, it is by virtue of their genital excision and subsequent gender liminality that hijras are considered outside the social mainstream and consequently, as "having no sarm" (Sharma, 1989; cf. Pimpley and Sharma, 1985; Vyas and Shingala, 1987). (5)
In addition, as these authors maintain, hijras contribute to this "shameful" construction of themselves by explicitly engaging in practices that subvert norms of middle-class morality, such as threatening to expose themselves if their demands are not adequately met. (6) In other words, hijras serve as potential repositories of shamelessness, and by exposing that by which they are construed as shameless, as purveyors of this stigma to the public. (7) Given their perception as besarm (without shame) and knowing their potential for conveying this state to others, people are intimidated by them and wary of engaging them publicly (cf. Carstairs, 1957; Nanda, 1999). Indeed, for many Indians--especially upper and middle-class individuals--hijras exist, and to some extent have always existed, only at the periphery of their imaginaries, inserting their visibility only within certain circumscribed ritual occasions. At other times, as some of my non-hijra neighbors in Hyderabad stated, "It is better to have nothing to do with them, baba!" In other words, in the popular imagination, hijras are inarguably housed in an "identifiable margin," to borrow a phrase from Gayatri Spivak (1993: 155); by all accounts, they are indeed somewhat of a marginalized minority in India. (8)
Given this marginalized status, it is remarkable that in the past few years, at least six hijras have been elected to public office at the local and state level, defeating more prominent candidates from national political parties such as the Congress (I) Party and the Bharitya Janata Party (BJP), and thereby heralding the path to hijra emancipation as political citizens in their own right. As early as 1998, Shobha Nehru won the city council seat in Hissar, in the north Indian state of Haryana (Karp, 1998). More recently, in early 2000, one of the first hijra members of the legislative assembly, Shabnam, or Shabnam mausi--"Aunt Shabnam," as she is affectionately known--won the state legislative assembly by-election from the town of Sohagpur in Madhya Pradesh's Shahdol district. She not only won by a comfortable margin of 17,863 votes, but also polled more than the BJP and Congress candidates combined (Ramachandran, 2000).Just prior to Shabnam mausi's election, another hijra, Kamla, was elected the mayor of Katni, a prosperous mining town in central Madhya Pradesh (Bearak, 2001). Soon after Kamla's election, Meena was elected the president of the civic body of Sehora in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Both of these hijra candidates, like Shabnam, won more votes than those cast for the Congress and BJP candidates taken together (Bearak, 2001). Similarly, in the neighboring town of Bina, the independent hijra candidate, Gulshan, also won the municipal board elections with a comfortable majority. Two months later, Heera won the by-election in Jabalpur, the cultural capital of Madhya Pradesh (Mishra, 2000).
All these successful candidates ran for office and won as hijras, explicitly highlighting this identity. In other words, it is apparently hijras' sexual and gendered difference as "neutralists"--the term they previously adopted when representing themselves as people who rose above the fighting and nepotism typical of men and women (Hall, 1997)--that provides their transcendent morality in the political sphere. Explicitly constructing themselves as individuals without the encumbrances of a family, gender, and caste affiliation, and thereby freed of the impetus for nepotism, hijras are successfully declaring themselves as the perfect antidotes to the rampant corruption and immorality of Indian politics. It is the lack of genitals and any expression of gendered, sexed, and kinship-mediated ties that, apparently, makes hijras ideal political citizens of contemporary India. What do we make of this occurrence? What does it imply for the relationship between sexuality and citizenship? And what, if any, emancipatory value does the election of hijras hold for their social, moral, and political position as a marginalized minority in contemporary India?
The Fruits of Discontent: A Popular Revolt Against Corrupt Politicians
At the most obvious level, the election of hijras can be analyzed as a revolt against upper-caste privilege, nepotism, and rampant corruption. Initially, as several of the hijra candidates and their sponsors attest, putting a hijra on the ballot was merely a symbolic gesture to indicate popular disillusionment with local corrupt (nearly all male) politicians. As Lallu Singh, the defeated BJP candidate in Sohagpur--the constituency won by "Aunt Shabnam"--commented after the election, "The youth of the town were playing a practical joke, and we didn't take it seriously in the beginning. But as days passed, Shabnam began gaining ground.... Even women voted for her. True, there is anger against politicians, but I can't understand why ... the electorate did this to me" (Ramachandran, 2000). The answer is hardly surprising, and seems apparent to everyone but Lallu Singh and Brajesh Singh, the Congress Party contender for this seat.
For the last three decades, the same Congress Party candidate, Krishen Pal Singh, had occupied the Sohagpur seat. It was only his death that occasioned the present by-election. Not surprisingly, his son, Brajesh Singh, was the subsequent Congress candidate, and Shabnam mausi's opponent in this election. Shabnam's other opponent was the BJP's Lallu Singh. Both of these candidates, like most politicians standing for office in Madhya Pradesh, are Thakurs, or upper-caste (kshatriya) landed gentry. Except for a brief interlude when an (upper-caste) brahmin was elected, Sohagpur has always had a kshatriya member of the state legislature; this despite the fact that kshatriyas constitute less than a fifth of Sohagpur's electorate (Mishra, 2000). As a frustrated district official stated, "Thakurs hold key posts at every level, and their nominees are elected to the reserved seats [ostensibly reserved by law for the lower, non-brahmin/kshatriya castes]. This only perpetuates Thakur Raj. They control the purse strings, and the illiterate tribals or Dalits put their thumbprints on documents wherever these people tell them to....
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