hijra community

Growing up Outside the Gender Binary: The Much-Needed Power of ‘Guthli Has Wings’

Books like ‘Guthli Has Wings’ could mean that the next child might not have to struggle for decades before realising that the only thing abnormal about their story is society’s inability to accept it.

The first time I read Kanak Shashi’s Guthli Has Wings, I cried. Not a solitary tear nor a gentle whimper, but a full-blown outpour.

The book is a beautifully simple tale of a girl who just needs for everyone else to see her as she sees herself.

Guthli is a young girl who lives with her parents and siblings. When festival season comes, Guthli looks forward to a beautiful dress as she’s excited to be a fairy like many young girls. After being told she is not permitted to wear a dress, Guthli is heartbroken and can’t understand why.

Guthli Has Wings
Kanak Shashi
Tulika Books

Guthli insists she’s a girl, but her mother calls her a boy. Guthli grows sadder and sadder by the day and her lively presence is replaced by gloom. Finally, her mother sees what’s happening and puts an end to it by allowing Guthli to flourish just as she should.

In our world, we are neither encouraging of trans people, nor in any way allowed to see them as anything but a class of oppressed people who steal children, curse you and are ‘men pretending to be women’.

This is usually the limited narrative that subverts gender normativity in India of transwomen of the hijra community.

But from the 2019 movie Super Deluxe and it’s excellent storytelling, to the Vicks ad with Gauri Sawant playing a mother, the hijra community is pioneering its way through a lot of hardships of structural oppression, violence and medical negligence.

But there is very little representation for trans men, non binary, gender fluid, gender queer, agender or even of those trans women who do not belong to the Hijra community.

Trans children are the most vulnerable in regard to mental health and sexual violence, with many not having access to formal education.

Guthli Has Wings is not only a way for parents to understand the simplicity of accepting their child, but also for kids to understand that there’s absolutely nothing wrong in their trans identity. World over, parents are trying to find ways and means to educate themselves and be more responsible for the supported and loved growth of their children.

Some more excellent books for trans children are When Aidan Became a Brother by Kyle Lukoff and They, She, He Easy as ABC by Maya and Matthew. What all these books have in common is familial support – something that can literally be a life-or-death difference in the lives of trans children as they are among the most at-risk demographic for death by suicide, but that likelihood reduces significantly with supportive family members.

Being accepting of a child the way they would like to be accepted doesn’t mean their life would be harder – society has already decided their life will be hard. It just means in the hard life they would inevitably lead, they will have parental love, strength and support. Most intersex children are still medically gendered at birth, except for recently in Tamil Nadu. Most trans adults are ostracised and even disowned.

It’s also essential for cisgendered kids to be introduced to trans children in a way that permits them to accept trans children, as they would any other child who conforms to the gender binary. Children have always had the ability to learn compassion and kindness early on, and the existence of this book gives us the hope that children can grow up with representation of trans children being their new normal.

Growing up in a gender binary society means you had limited choices: either you’re a girl, a boy, or a weirdo. As a non-binary person, I remember hating being called a ‘tom boy’ in school. I hated it because I hated being called anything but the effeminate princess I was told I should want to be – it was a label that came with an implicit understanding of inadequacy. I remember dressing myself in a make-shift dupatta saree for a play, and my dearest friends bursting into laughter because I looked like a “chakka” – derogatory slang for a trans woman from the hijra community.

I remember the strength and power I felt everyday at hockey practice where I was encouraged and appreciated for being slightly masculine, and slightly larger than rest of the team. I remember knowing clearly that I wasn’t going to be as elegant and as beautiful as my mother, the Indian embodiment of Princess Diana, or my sister.

The first time I cut my hair short, my extended family had a fit. My parents are supportive of my gender expression – they know, when I wanted to be femme, I would, when I don’t, there wasn’t a thing that could convince me.

My extended family did not understand, and to this day, react to me cutting my hair as if it’s the first time. They ask me why, when and how, as though they have forgotten I do this every few months. They ask me this as though I am obliged to look the way they want me to, and as though cutting my hair is an unthinkable act, and not an ordinary activity. Every time this happens, I’m obliged to explain for the millionth time that this is me.

My identity didn’t just mean odd hairstyles – it meant that I rejected the guilt and shame that society demands when you do not fit into its boxes. Why wasn’t there a box for both? Why was it that I could understand this so clearly and nobody else did? Why would my family still be the most complimentary of me on performative femme days?

Growing up outside the gender binary means that you know a fact that the world, society, your darling parents, and friends will tell you is not a fact. That fact happens to be yourself – something nobody else will have as much of an expert view on than you.

It’s a phase, it’s a style choice, it’s a mental illness, it’s your confusion. It’s something that is represented in this book when Guthli asks herself why everyone says she’s a boy when she’s a girl.

Also read: At Hijra Habba, Transgender Persons Come Together to Share Their Experiences

Unnecessary gendering is a societal issue, and not just a familial one, and it’s one I’ve been able to witness firsthand as a teacher. The constant pressure to adhere to gender norms can go from boys being told not to cry, to girls wearing skirts that they have no idea how to sit ‘appropriately in’. Gendering is an ongoing, lifelong process, and not even parents are spared – even fathers are giggled at for attending parent-teacher meetings.

At a young age, children are forced to not only conform to society’s definition of gender but are also rewarded for this horrible performance. There was, however, one time that wasn’t horrible. Sonu was a four-year-old ‘male at birth’ in my kindergarten class. Sonu insisted on taking another girl’s sparkly pink sandals – with a slight heel – each time he went to the bathroom. Sonu loved those shoes and would take any excuse to walk around in them, very often walking straight into (the shoe free) classroom to show them to me.

Each time, I’d say, “So beautiful!”

Sonu’s mother was not happy about this, but after many a tantrum and conversation she bought Sonu a pair of shoes. Not identical, because how could she allow for her son to walk around in tiny pink heels? Sonu walked in to class proudly with his new bright blue, sparkly shoes with flowers on them. As per usual, I said, “So beautiful.” At the same time, it’s of utmost importance to tell you, his peers thought they were beautiful too.

It’s just that simple.

The world is preparing itself for a glorious new age of gender recognition, acceptance and celebration. I was 23 when I realised my truth, but I’m still learning. I’m non-binary and although the trans community is a safe place for me to be myself, I still don’t see very much representation of my people.

But this book is a start of our society understanding that the trans community is more than our hijra sisters, it’s also children who do not identify with their gender at birth, it’s young men who have been born in female bodies, it’s people who identify as both genders, it’s little girls like Guthli who just want to be seen the true beautifully special little girls they are.

The hope is that this book and the bold and thoughtfully created Guthli will stand tall as a beacon of hope for the trans community. It means that some children will grow up having acceptance in their families and classrooms. It means that the next child might not have to struggle for decades before realising that the only thing abnormal about their story is society’s inability to accept it.

Nikita Barton is a TFI alumni who is passionate about empowerment through education and is currently studying to be a comprehensive sexuality educator.

Featured image: Pariplab Chakraborty

RuPaul’s Drag Race: Can TV’s Most Radical Show Sell Its Dreams To Indian Audiences?

Even though drag is far from becoming the most accessible form of entertainment in India, for now we have the sanctuary of our screen to watch RuPaul glide up on stage each week.

When he’s a man, RuPaul Andre Charles looms over the average person at 6’4” – a lanky, bespectacled figure with a glistening bald head and commanding demeanour.

However, Charles is much more imposing as a woman.

Sky-high heels and giant blonde wigs backcombed to monstrous proportions push him up to seven-feet tall. Shimmering floor length gowns and makeup blended to perfection make for a statuesque presence who carries herself with charm and wit – a goddess with a penis.

Charles is a drag icon – nay, the drag icon of the world.

Aside from being an actor, model, singer, songwriter, and television personality who climbed to fame in the 80s and 90s, RuPaul is a marketing genius who’s managed to milk every bit of his stardom to create web series, TV shows, spinoffs and spinoffs of spinoffs. Charles is first and foremost the creator and host of 3-time Emmy award winning cult reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which hit Indian Netflix earlier this year with season 11.

Built on the styles of shows like Project Runway and Americas Next Top Model, Drag Race pits contestants against one another in weekly episodes that showcase talents ranging from comedy and dancing to sewing and makeup skills. The only difference, of course, is that the contestants are usually men, who shape-shift into caricatured version of women by stuffing themselves into corsets, hip pads and breastplates, and painting their faces into unrecognisable hyper-female versions of themselves.

The first five episodes of Season 11 have been released so far. Contestants include K-Pop princess Soju, loveable weirdo Yvie Oddly and the unintentionally hilarious frontrunner Vanessa Vanjie Mateo.

Drag in India

India’s a good 10 seasons of drag race behind America and Europe, where it’s gained a cult following like few other shows have. The only visible form of ‘drag’ in the Motherland is comedic – Cyrus Sahukar playing Semi Girebaal, or the various expressions of transvestitism on Comedy Nights with Kapil. But these shows don’t attempt to explain or understand gender fluidity and expression, they mock it.

Then there’s India’s historic and sizeable hijra community. It might be easy to slot hijras under the “men in drag” category but that’s incorrect – hijras represent an alternative expression of gender, whereas the drag subculture is a simultaneous performance and subversion of gender and identity, meant to entertain first and foremost. You have your dance queens, comedy queens, weird queens, conceptual art queens, lip-sync queens – all of whom represent a separate set of talents and individual iterations of a visual fantasy.

Of course, all of this is based in a rich history and culture of drag that goes way back to European pantomimes and American Vaudeville. Contemporary drag culture pulls its references from a variety of sources, from pageants, to pop-culture and the art world.

Also read: The Life and Times of Slumbitch Millionaire – A Desi Drag Queen in Chicago

The subculture of drag has been steadily growing in India too. Clubs like Kitty Su in Delhi regularly host drag shows that feature Indian and international performers, including Drag Race alumni like corseted burlesque queen Violet Chachki, Brittney Spears impersonator Derrick Barry and season 9’s trans runner-up Peppermint. But these shows are usually tucked away in the back rooms of clubs or reserved for the odd festival.

While the reigns holding alternative performers back have loosened over time, there’s still an undeniable stigma against drag in India. Which is why RuPaul’s Drag Race’s entry into Indian Netflix is so radical. Netflix is far from being the main source of entertainment in India, and its algorithms largely decide what the viewers watch. But it’s growing, and it’s interesting to imagine aunties and uncles clutching their pearls with shock as a man in a wig and bedazzled pasties lip-syncs to Cher.

For the deep-dive reporting required for this piece, I made my own parents watch a few episodes and saw their reactions carefully evolve from bemusement, to curiosity, to a promising “he looks the prettiest”.

Drag in the mainstream

But what makes Drag Race work at such a mainstream level isn’t its progressive stance – in fact, I’d say it’s more punk than PC given the amount of controversy over its representation of women and the trans community. It isn’t the boundary pushing aesthetics of queens like Violet Chachki and Sharon Needles, Sasha Velour’s inimitable artistic vision, or even the comedic prowess of Bianca Del Rio, Trixie Matelland Bob The Drag Queen. What makes Drag Race really work is its commitment to the formulas of good old-fashioned, trashy reality TV and utter silliness. It’s TV junk food – that big, greasy slice of pizza you know you shouldn’t eat but just can’t resist.

Over the top editing creates villains, clowns and winners who pepper each episode with theatrical displays of emotion. The drama is tempered with absurdity: each series features a challenge called Snatch Game, in which contestants have to imitate celebrities often resulting in wheeze-laugh inducing, innuendo laden comedy. In one episode, the queens dressed as MILFs and psychotic stalkers a la The Bachelor, for a remake titled ‘The Bitchelor’. Other performances include My Best Squirrelfriend’s Dragsmaids Wedding Trip, Beverly Hills 9021-HO and the supremely bad Welcome to Breastworld, The Gayest Place on Earth.

However, Drag Race’s campy comedy is often punctuated by very real moments of tragedy.

Every once in a while, a queen shares a horror story – of discrimination, bullying, abuse and rejection – not just by society but by their families. In one candid episode, a contestant revealed that she was meant to perform at gay nightclub Pulse, the site of deadliest incident of violence against LGBT people in US history, on the night that it happened. Another contestant spoke about being shot for being a female impersonator, another about being raped in college.

Also read: Lesbian Subtext In Bollywood, as Seen Through a Queer Eye

Despite the façade of its pink-walled workrooms and ridiculous story arcs, RuPaul’s Drag Race never lets its viewers forget the immense cruelty that the LGBTQ+ community experiences every day. Recent seasons have even become political, poking fun at the US president himself. In fact, the fourth episode of the current season featured a musical called Trump: The Rusical, where the offensively named Ginger Minj parodied the chubby, Cheeto-hued world leader as contestants pranced about in their roles as congress members, spokespersons and celebrities.

If you love reality TV, RuPaul’s Drag Race’s gaudy, bawdy, punk fantasies are hard to resist. It’s still too early to tell but so far season 11 lives up to its predecessors with its insane challenges, over-the-top personalities and that addictive, exaggerated, reality TV show editing magic. Only time will tell whether the show actually manages to sell its radical fantasy to Indian audiences.

Drag is far from becoming the most accessible or open form of entertainment in our cities. But at least now we have the sanctuary of our screen to watch RuPaul glide up on stage each week, raise a graceful arm and start the show with his signature catchphrase – “Gentlemen, start your engines, and may the best woman – WIN!”

Diya Gupta is an art and culture journalist currently based in New Delhi. You can follow her on twitter at @dovagurp

Featured image credit: RuPaul’s Drag Race/Facebook/vh1

Caste and Religion Create Barriers Within the Hijra Community

On paper, hijras might appear to be a homogeneous group, but there are rising inequities within the community.

In 2014, the Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment, expanded affirmative action to apply to hijras, by collectively adding them to the other backward class (OBC) category. With this move, a superseding OBC identity was given to all the hijras irrespective to their official religion, caste and class. Yet, four years later, this has led to a series of complex issues within the community.

Prior to the hijras becoming OBC on paper, there was a popular assumption in academia that hijras are a casteless group. This was because the hijras become an ostracised caste in themselves, with their own performative rituals in private spaces. Moreover, within the community, when a hijra is initiated through a reet or ritualistic ceremony, there is also a renunciation of caste lineage, along with the gender assigned at birth.

Most hijras also drop their surnames, to hide their religion and caste identity. This protects them from identity-based discrimination. Other hijras, who are from privileged castes and religions, often don’t let go of their surnames.

After hijras were given legal recognition as a ‘third gender’ and quota as part of the OBC in 2014, there was greater visibility of the community in public spaces. One of the results of this increased access to public space was the establishment of the Kinnar Akhada for practicing inclusive faith and religion.

Laxmi Narayan Tripathi – the head of Kinnar Akhada, and also the first transgender person to represent Asia Pacific in the UN in 2008 – grew up Brahmin, and has openly claimed that there is no caste or religion in the hijra community. Contrary to such claims, Living Smile Vidya, the Dalit transgender feminist writer and theatre artist, expresses concerns, saying that “savarna transgenders who have NGO funding” claim to falsely represent the community and direct all the benefits towards themselves.

Such inequity within the hijra community was also pointed out by Sharmili*, a 24-year-old hijra from Dakshinipuri, who confided in me that she belongs to the Valmiki community. Despite her musical talent and dancing skills, Sharmili’s hijra guru does not allow her to accompany them on their hijra toli for collecting ritual blessings. Sharmili believes this is because of an inherent caste bias within some sections of the hijra community, as collecting ritual blessings is often seen as a prerogative of hijras who are savarna by birth.

Furthermore, claiming that there is no religion in the hijra community is both controversial and contradictory. There are many inter-religious hijra festivals and holidays that are legitimised by different hijra gharanas, which are celebrated together in the community. Despite multi-religious piety being a common practice in the community, a group of hijras told me that it was difficult to do the ‘new’ paperwork and documentation required to claim the ‘third gender’ identity officially as it would separate some hijras from their choice of religion.

I understood this more intricately while working with the hijra communities living in urban slums of New Delhi, where I was told that every Friday they would go to the Jama Masjid to offer their namaz in kurta–pyjamas. They told me that they would sit in the last queue and read their namaz but be careful of not casting their shadows over fellow namazis. I found out that the Muslim hijras I interacted with believed that they had sinned by castrating themselves and were trying to protect others from the darkness of their own shadows.

There were also those hijras who had been successful in completing their pilgrimage to Hajj. The hajji hijras had been successful in their pilgrimage to Mecca because they had a passport issued to them in their gender assigned at birth, which was ‘male’. This was before Saudi Arabia banned people identifying as transgender on paper from entering their country to perform Hajj and Umrah, without giving any reasons for the same. While preparing for their pilgrimage, the unspoken rule for hijras is to chop their hair short and try and sprout facial hair – often by stopping hormone intake – to pass off as a ‘man’. In this politics of paper, I understood that it is not any religion that discriminates against hijras; it is transphobia.

Therefore, on paper, the hijras might appear to be a homogeneous group but there are rising inequities between different groups of hijras belonging to different socio-religious backgrounds that need to be addressed. There are growing marginal voices in the hijra community in matters related to religious and caste-based identitarianism. Such unheard hijra voices bring out the complex experiences of exclusion from within the hijra community.

To put it in the words Paulo Freire from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the oppressed tend themselves to become their oppressors by resembling them and this culture of silence needs to be cracked open.

*Name changed

Ina Goel is a freelance writer and founder of The Hijra Project. She may be contacted at inagoel@gmail.com

The Lifestyle of Hijras Embodies Resistance to State, Societal Neglect

The hijra community’s system of social existence, based on non-biological kinship networks that provide them security and space for identity, needs to be accorded formal recognition.

In December last, the hijra family of Bhavitha, who was found dead near a dustbin in Warangal, was not allowed to lay claims on her dead body by the Telangana Police because non-biological kinship networks are not related by blood and, therefore, not recognised by law. Bhavitha’s dead body was, therefore, denied dignity and respect due to state neglect.

To ensure that Bhavitha’s fate does not befall thousands of other hijras in the country, the entire community needs to be guaranteed basic human rights, especially in matters related to their chosen hijra families. It, therefore, becomes critical to understand the social stratification in these communities across India.

Legally recognised as the ‘third’ gender after the Supreme Court judgment in April 2014, the hijras can be understood very simply as subaltern forms of trans-queer identities that exist within their own self-made systems of socially constituted kinship networks. The hijras in India are not a homogeneous group and are systematically organised as hierarchical communities within themselves. The social stratification within the hijra communities is multi-layered and complex.

The community works on a discipleship lineage system. To be accepted into the community, a hijra guru initiates a person through adoption into the non-biological hijra kinship network. This network is affiliated to a symbolically organised housing system of hijra gharanas that function as an internal system of segregation within the communities. It may be possible that because hijras are traditionally associated with performing music and dance, the practice of segregating the communities into gharanas may have been conceptually borrowed from the traditional gharana system of musical lineages in India.

According to Daniel M. Neuman, in his book. The Life of Music in North India, gharanas are stylistic schools or family traditions in North Indian Hindustani music, functioning as a system of apprenticeship between gurus (teachers) and chelas (disciples). Similarly, hijra gharanas are apprenticeship systems, and the burden of its maintenance rests on the relationship between the hijra gurus and their chelas. Though the relationship is mostly symbiotic, there has been controversy surrounding the nature of such guru-chela relationship, where some hijras have called to end this culture in the community.

Acceptance into the gharana legitimises hijra identity and gharana membership then becomes an indicator for separating the ‘real’ hijras from the ‘fake’ ones. Scholars have found that there are seven hijra houses or gharanas in India, although the exact number and their names in different cities is debatable. However, based on my research, the hijra community in New Delhi alone is believed to originate from four hijra gharanas, namely, Sujani, Rai, Kalyani and Mandi.

Though the hijras I interacted with claim that there is no hierarchy as such between the gharanas, which share power among themselves, it is often difficult to assess how power is divided amongst these vulnerable and marginalised groups. The gharanas are further headed by a hijra chief called nayak. The nayaks are jointly responsible for maintaining social order within the community.

The hijra ‘gharana’ system embodies an institutionalised lifestyle based on various forms of resistance to the heteronormative idea of a family. Credit: Reuters/Stringer.

One of the ways in which social order is maintained in the hijra community by the nayaks is by the regulation of internal councils, called the hijra panchayats or jamaats. These councils are powerful, self-conceived regulatory bodies that have the authority to both initiate and expel hijras. Expulsion of hijras from the communities is called huqqa-pani band (to cast out or ostracise). During the expulsion, an outcast hijra finds it difficult to re-initiate him/herself in the hijra community in any city. Once expelled, financial security through certain idiosyncratic livelihood prerogatives for the outcast hijra becomes limited until the council takes up an appeal for re-admittance into the community. The hijra panchayats and jamaats are artibrary councils and it is difficult to assess their intersection with law.

There is no written constitution that the hijra gharanas have to abide to. There is, of course, an ideal ‘expected’ hijra behaviour and unwritten rules to meet those expectations. This ideal of a ‘good’ hijra, based on behavourial expectations and an unwritten code of conduct, is similar to how gender roles are imposed in any society – though always in the process of transition, but often based on a norm.

Forty two years ago, in 1976, Veena Talwar Oldenberg first observed a similar gharana system amidst the elite female courtesans or tawa’ifs of Lucknow. In her research, she concluded that the tawa’if lifestyle was a kind of resistance to patriarchal values because in the privacy of their own world, the tawa’ifs celeberated womanhood in a way that resisted and inverted gender roles set by a predominantly patriarchal society.

Similarly, the hijra gharana system embodies an institutionalised lifestyle based on various forms of resistance to the heteronormative idea of a family. The unique internal customs and culture legitimised by the gharanas are based on a system of informality that provides a space for identity-negotiation for many, and contributes towards producing a counter-culture in India.

Such negotiations enable the existence of a pluralistic idea of gender for a community, which might not have the means to do so otherwise. The hijra community has a natural system of social existence based on non-biological kinship networks, which need to be accorded formal recognition.

Ina Goel is an HKPFS awardee based at the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.