Hijras, one of India's third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination-in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life-often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic.
Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche. Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras make the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimens, reflect not ignorance or irresponsibility but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning distinct from secularized accounts within the horizon of public health programs and queer theory.
Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday-laughter, flirting, teasing to impossible longings, kinship networks, and economies of property and of substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.
That Limpid Liquid within Young Men
One of my earliest memories is overhearing a conversation between my mother and my aunt regarding hijras. Hijras are now translated as "trans- genders" or "trans women," but more on that in a bit. My aunt had asked my mother, "Where do 'they' come from?" after seeing them beg on the streets. and my mother replied, "They are born this way and when they come to bless the newborn baby, they check the genitals; if the baby is born like them then they take the baby away." I cannot tell you, dear reader, the sense of relief that this snippet of information inspired in my young self. This was in the mid-1990s, when I must have been six or seven years old, before the Internet had made the discourse surrounding sexual minorities more accessible. I knew by then that something was not right with me, I was born a certain "way"-not surprising, given the ordinary cruel teasing I was meted by everybody, every day. I knew at that moment that if I were kicked out by my family, or if I ran away, then I could seek shelter with hijras; they would take care of someone "born like them." Little did I know that, years later, hijras would not only help me survive but teach me how to thrive. Thus, this book seeks to describe the fullness of hijra lives in India. It documents the lessons I was taught on how to see, and how to receive the world, when everything seemed incomprehensibly cruel, as they often are for young trans people.
Hijras have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination- in myth, in ritual (particularly associated with rites of passage such as births and marriages), and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work.
Foremost, I would like to thank my teachers Roger Bowen, Veena Das, Aaron Goodfellow, Jane Guyer, Naveeda Khan, Harry Marks, Graham Mooney, Deborah Poole, Pamela Reynolds, Charles Sherry, Ashley Tellis, and Susan White. I would also like to acknowledge the help and support that was offered by all the members of the SAATHII (Solidarity and Action Against the HIV Infection in India) offices in Calcutta and Bhubaneshwar. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Pawan Dhall and Amrita Sarkar for the warmth of their decades-long friendship.
I would like to thank the Babli Moitra-Kanti Saraf and the Usha Ram- anathan-S. Muralidhar households for their food and hospitality during fieldwork. My friends and colleagues read multiple drafts of my chapters, provided incisive comments, threw dance parties, and listened to me ramble for hours. My gratitude to Khushboo Agarwal Raj, Ghazal Asif Farrukhi, Swayam Bagaria, Mariam Banahi, Dwaipayan Banerjee, Roger Begrich, Hester Betlem, Caroline Block, Andrew Brandel, Lotte Buch-Segal, J. An- drew Bush, Sruti Chaganti, Anila Daulatzai, Mansi Goenka, Anaid Citlali Reyes-Kipp Goodfellow, Serra Hakyemez, Fouad Halbouni, Richard Hel- man, Laura-Zoe Humphreys, Amrita Ibrahim, Andrew Ivaska, Nrupa Jani, Amy Krauss, Victor Kumar, Robert Lorway, Patricia Madriaga-Villega, Cal- lie Maidhof, Andrew McDowell, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Nick Mueller, Sameena Mulla, Zehra Nabi, Sahar Romani, Sirisha Papineni, Ross Parsons, David Platzer, Bican Polat, Maya Ratnam, Sailen Routray, Sandip Roy, Bis- han Samaddar, Megha Sharma Sehdev, Svati Shah, Dhanraj Shetty, Chinar Singh, William Stafford Jr., Sailen Routray, Aditi Saraf, Ishani Saraf, and Pooja Satyogi.
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