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Trans-lating Hijra Identity: Performance Culture as Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2019

ANKUSH GUPTA
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Abstract

This article discusses the Hijra community from South Asia, and examines their rituals and performance culture to argue that there is a multiplicity of expressions for gender identities in South Asia, and they have been performed in a variety of ways, in a variety of spaces beyond the political rhetoric of the West. The paper also tries to discuss questions and difficulties around situating these cultures within an already established concept and the possible negotiations that would be needed for such an effort to even be imagined.

Type
Theatre and Migration Dossier
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 71 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2019 

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References

Notes

1 Zanned, Lahzar, ‘Root Formation and Polysemic Organization in Arabic Lexicon: A Probabilistic Model’, in Alhawary, Mohammad T. and Benmamoun, Elabbas (eds.), Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XVII–XVIII: Papers from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Annual Symposia on Arabic Linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2005), pp. 85–112, here p. 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘hjr (main meanings): a) to break with, leave, forsake, renounce, emigrate, flee’.

2 Shannon Woodcock, ‘Globalization of LGBT Identities: Containment Masquerading as Salvation or Why Lesbians Have Less Fun’, at https://docgo.net/philosophy-of-money.html?utm_source=shannon-woodcock, accessed 14 December 2017.

3 Nanda, Serena, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999), p. 34Google Scholar.

4 In reference to how many hijras are born intersex, Serena Nanda claims, ‘Among thirty of my informants, only one appeared to have been born intersexed.’ See Nanda, Serena, ‘Deviant Careers: The Hijras of India’, in Freilich, Morris, Raybeck, Douglas and Savishinsky, Joel S. (eds.), Deviance: Anthropological Perspectives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1991), pp. 149–171, here p. 163Google Scholar.

5 Nanda, Serena, ‘Hijras: An Alternative Sex and Gender Role in India,’ in Herdt, G. (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (London: Zone Books, 1996), pp. 373–402, p. 391Google Scholar.

6 Ghazal gayaki is the practice of singing a form of poetry in Urdu called ghazal. Ghazal comprises multiple couplets which are set to a rhyming scheme that continues. Usually this form of singing is done in the Hindustani classical tradition following specific octave systems called ragas.

7 The older Hijras who have now stopped working or are working less and who train younger students, popularly known as celas, for the line of work that they were involved in earlier. They also provide them with shelter and security.

8 Nayak celas are the celas who follow their gurus religiously, almost copying their every move. The term nayak is derived from the Hindustani classical music tradition, where a student following his guru in style and tonality is called a nayak.

9 Akshay Khanna, ‘A Refracted Subject: Sexualness in the Realms of Law and Epidemiology’, PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, draft shared via email, 2010, p. 16.

10 Ibid., pp. 15–16.

11 Ibid., p. 17.

12 Ibid.