Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  This means that all Hindi- and Urdu-speaking manly Indian men are grammatically transgendered.

  Even more, the most prominent nouns signifying desire in Hindi and Urdu—ishq, pyaar and prem—are gendered male. This means that a woman expressing desire is automatically a transvestite. Since the noun signifying a woman’s desire is masculine, a woman in love in Urdu and Hindi is a woman-man.

  All Indian women who desire in Hindustani are grammatically transgendered.

  Indeed, the lingering allegiance of Sanskrit and Sanskritic languages to non-gendered desire might be the reason why Jain texts and the Kamasutra allow for so much variety in gendered being. Gender is not as important to desire in the Kamasutra as it seems to be for us today. In that text, gender refers to and is a reflection of sexual position rather than sexual desire. As in the Jain texts, being penetrative or receptive determines the gender of your biological and grammatical case rather than the presence or absence of certain genital markers. Masculinity depends on whether you are sexually penetrative or penetrated. This is why the ancient texts, though written in gendered Sanskrit, had a strong sense of the masculine and feminine neuter.

  These expansive definitions of gender have been present in the languages and peoples of the Indian subcontinent for over 3,000 years. The napunsakas are mentioned in ancient Sanskrit texts like Patanjali’s 2nd-century BCE grammar that predate Hinduism and also in what are considered Hindu texts, like the Ramayana. Indeed, if all the tales of cross-dressing men and women and gender-shifting gods and goddesses are any indicator, then the ‘neuter-masculine’ and the ‘neuter-feminine’ have been abundantly and visibly present in India for centuries. And the neuter in person has inevitably been presented as steadfast, loyal, intelligent and reliable. Legend has it that Rama dismissed his subjects who were ready to accompany him into 14 years of exile by exhorting all ‘the men, women and children’ to go back home from the edge of the forest. The neuters, fitting into none of these categories, remained where they were for 14 years, awaiting the return of Rama. Touched by their devotion, Rama granted them the special powers of benediction for which they continue to be known today.

  The Mughal courts regularly understood ‘hijra’ etymologically as a term describing the Prophet Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD. The Islamic calendar—the hijri—begins from this date in 622, and the subsequent years are denoted by the appendage of an H for hijra or AH for anno hegirae in Latin. This association with a flight from persecution has historically marked hijras as a noble people, seeking sanctuary and freedom from barbarism, and standing steadfast in the face of ruthless political pressure. Hijras are people who flee persecution—whether of royal whims, religious sects, or the draconian orders of gender.

  Indeed, so high was the religious regard accorded to hijras/napunsakas across languages that it is quite possible—had my counter diagnosis taken place in 1476 rather than 1976—that my mother would not have been as terrified by the possible ‘demotion’ of my gender from the feminine to the neuter. But the lower social status would still have been a problem for her, though, since hijras were in lived reality subject to many depredations, including at the hands of slave traders, and sometimes were boys who had been forced to undergo castration.

  There is very little historically that has been written by hijras themselves (A. Revathi’s The Truth about Me and Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s Me Hijra, Me Laxmi are recent exceptions to this rule), and so it is difficult to glean historical details about their lives in India apart from the religious myths that surround them. While they were appointed to high positions in court—in the Mughal courts, they were regularly keepers of the harem—they were also subjected to normative jokes. They were trusted as loyal soldiers, but also regarded as lesser beings because of their lack of lineage. They were invoked as auspicious people, but also shunned for being undefinable. Linguistically too, their path is strewn with irony. While the fiercely gendered Sanskrit and Urdu languages celebrate gender-bending napunsakas and hijras in their literatures, the English, with their non-gendered language, started the process of prosecuting the hijras in person.

  Indeed, shocked by the gender ‘confusion’ displayed by the hijras, the British passed the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, under which hijras were classified as belonging to a ‘criminal caste’, a category of caste invented by the British themselves. This category included individuals who ‘are reasonably suspected of kidnapping or castrating children, or of committing offenses under section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, or of abetting the commission of any of the said offences’; or ‘who appear, dressed or ornamented like a woman, in a public street or place, or in any other place, with the intention of being seen from a public street or place’; or ‘dance or play music, or take part in any public exhibition, in a public street or place for hire in a private house’.

  This Act is the source from which my mother’s fear derived before my operation. This is why she was warned not to let news of my condition become common knowledge lest I be kidnapped. During the Raj, hijras were forced to be registered with the colonial authorities, and were arrested if they were caught doing any of the things that they had historically done. Under the British, ‘hijra’ became ungrammatical, a deviation at odds with the laws of the land, an example of the too-muchness of desire that inhabited this jewel in the British Crown. But despite the phobia generated by the Criminal Tribes Act, the Indian subcontinent continues to harbour the idea that there are more than two genders in the world. Indeed, at least the recognition of hijras is one of the few policies on desire that ties the partitioned subcontinent together. Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India all recognize hijras officially as ‘the third gender’, with varying access to civil and political rights.

  What is interesting, however, about the British attitude to the ‘confused’ gender of the hijras is its complete variance from the grammar of the language they themselves speak. English is not a gendered language, and stands out among the world’s prominent languages for its lack of commitment to gender. Even though Old English was an extremely gendered language, modern English only retains the gendered vestiges of ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’. Other than that, it has no gendered nouns or verbs. I am not gendered in current English, and neither are you. The clarity of separation that gender is supposed to provide for both people and grammar does not exist in English. Which makes it all the more surprising that the English colonizers could not tolerate in the realm of desire what they quite happily embraced with their tongues.

  And so, unlike gendered Sanskrit and Urdu, ungendered English responded aggressively to the neuter in person. It would seem that the history of India has had an inverted relation between grammatical and biological gender. The reign of Sanskrit and Urdu saw the sprouting of various genders, while the rule of English saw the shutting down of gendered possibilities. Hijras flourished for about 3,000 years before the English arrived, but have been in steady decline ever since then.

  This general genital-gendered confusion lies at the heart of present-day India’s love-hate relationship with hijras. Men in Hindi are feminized, and women’s desire in Urdu and Hindi is masculinized. Hijras are welcomed as harbingers of good luck at auspicious events because they embody both male and female principles, but they are also driven to begging and prostitution because they cannot make a living. But love them or hate them, hijras are marked by a profusion that defies the potentially denuding conventions of grammar. The grammatical neuter went by various names in ancient and medieval India, and hijras today too have various names in the subcontinent. They are known as khwaja saras in parts of Pakistan, aravanis (or thirunangai) in Tamil Nadu, hizra in Bangla, napunsakaa in Telugu. Then there are the zenanas—men who dress as women without undergoing surgical reassignment; kothi—men who take on the feminine role in sex without reassignment surgery, and do not live in communities; and khusras—transgendered individuals who do not necessarily live together. These are but a few of the many names by which hijras, trans
gendered, transsexual, non-gender normative people have been known in the Indian subcontinent for centuries. The Sanskrit and Pali terms used prior to the Persian hijra of the 16th century, and which continue to exist alongside hijra, include tritiyaprakriti, kliba and napunsaka.

  Despite being brought increasingly under disciplinary surveillance, hijras have if anything increased the degree of contradiction they carry in their bodies and tongues. Hijras across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal all speak a language called Hijra Farsi that seems to embody the rootlessness and restlessness of the word hijra itself. A blend of non-gendered Persian and gendered Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu, Hijra Farsi is syntactically close to Hindustani. Also known as Koti in some parts of the North, Koudibhashai among hijra communities in the South and Gupti (hidden) Vasha or Ulti (opposite) Bhasa in Bengal, Hijra Farsi has local variations in different regions, but the basic vocabulary remains North Indian and gendered. The irony that Hijra Farsi is a gendered language can perhaps better be understood when we remember that it was developed as a tool of self-protection at the time of the British criminalization of hijras in India. As happens with so many marginalized people who take on the categories of oppression used by their oppressors, the hijras too took on the masculine/feminine distinction that the colonizers used against them. But they kept it secret. And they called it by the name of a language—Farsi—that allows them to flee the persecution of grammatical gender.

  Hijra Farsi is accompanied also by distinctive bodily gestures that challenge the regime of gender. Indeed, it is the specific way hijras highlight their relation to genitalia that brings the idea of bodily grammar to the fore. The hijra practice of lifting sarees and exposing the genital area to those who have been rude to them is an extremely effective mechanism for shaming people. In an inversion of the typical situation in which the exposure of the genital area causes shame to the person so exposed, the hijra exposure shames the person doing the looking. And why? Because if the hijra has retained her masculine genitalia, then the disjunction between the saree and the penis engenders shock. Suddenly we are in the presence of the ‘masculine-neuter’ of the Kamasutra. And if the hijra has gone through the ‘nirvana’ ceremony of excising the penis and testicles, then what is exposed is the hole where once the penis used to be. The neuter in what was once masculine. Or even the feminine in what was once presumably masculine. The ‘feminine-neuter’ of the Jain texts. Hijra genitals defy gendered and grammatical determination, and therefore seem shocking to our colonized selves. But rather than being a simple rejection of masculinity for femininity or a rejection of both masculinity and femininity—as the prefix ‘na’ in napunsaka seems to suggest—hijra grammar provides us with a profusion of options.

  This proliferation is unlike the terms used in the Rights of Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016, which is poised to become law in India. Even though the law marks a huge step forward in transgender rights, it cannot quite come to terms with the profusion that marks the grammar of hijras. Instead, it defines hijras as ‘...biological males who reject their masculine identity and identify either as women, or “not-men”, or “in-between man and woman” or “neither man nor woman”’. These proliferating definitions nonetheless keep intact the separate categories of men and women. But what about the beings that the Pali and Sanskrit texts describe as masculine-neuter and feminine-neuter—what we might term neither/nor/both/and? Not a third gender but a term that points to a proliferation of genders and grammars? This would take us closer to the idea of hijras who combine both masculine and feminine principles while simultaneously being neither male nor female. This is why hijras are considered auspicious in the first place: because they play with grammatical and embodied gender not by negation but, rather, by voluptuousness.

  And this voluptuousness shows through in everything having to do with hijra culture. From their clothes to their names, hijras are multiple. All hijras in India have at least two names, one male with which they are named at birth, and one female with which they are named during the hijra initiation rites. In Hyderabad, this duality gets doubled also with two religions. Here, hijras usually have one female Hindu name by which they are known in everyday life, and a male Muslim name by which they are officially entered into the hijra register. These are in addition to the male names they might have been given at birth. They practice sharia rituals prescribed for both men and women, but they also style themselves as devotees of a Hindu goddess who goes by the name of Bahuchara Mata, or closely aligned regional variations thereof. Hijras take on, then, not only the two major genders of the world, but also the two major religions of the subcontinent, and live to tell the tale. Far from being the embodiment of grammatical negation, they speak a language of linguistic excess.

  This excess is what Tamil hijras channel when they style themselves aravanis after Arjuna’s son, Aravana, in the Mahabharata. Aravana offers to sacrifice himself in order to ensure victory for the Pandavas. But as a reward for his sacrifice-to-be, Aravana wants to have sex before he dies. Since no woman is willing to marry him just for one night, Krishna comes to Aravana in his female form as Mohini, and has sex with him. Aravana is thus both sacrificial and acquisitive, a martyr and a married man, a celibate and a sensualist.

  Far from opposition or negativity, then, Aravana, like the aravanis, occupies a force-field of multiplicity. This multiplicity of the neuter in India extends to both desire and grammar; the neuter is prolific rather than empty or negative. Not conflicted, confused, uncertain, violent and criminal, as hijras are commonly described these days, but rather, plenitudinous, cultured and, above all, reflective of a lived reality of mobile desires that marks our everyday lives. The neuter in India has given us persons who defy the categories of two fixed genders. And it has given us grammars that every day mark our language as transvestite: grammars that recreate the exquisite echoes of English and the prolific passions of Persian. If we are Hindi- or Urdu-speaking men and women, then we are neutered by the grammatical effeminization of mardangi and and the masculinization of ishq or prem. In Hindustani, English, as well as in many Eastern and Dravidian languages, we are all grammatically hijras, and have been so for a long time. Perhaps it is time again to acknowledge that like our grammars, our desires too might not fit only one category at a time.

  6

  CELIBACY

  ‘My attitude is celibate. I don’t give a f**k.’

  —Anonymous

  Why should a book on desire pay any attention to celibacy? Let us ask Mirabai.

  A 16th-century devotee of Krishna, Mira was convinced early on in life that Krishna was her spouse. Nonetheless, she was married off at the age of 18 to Bhoj Raj, the heir apparent to the throne of Mewar. According to legend, Mirabai never consummated her marriage and, increasingly in the throes of passion for Krishna, would wander the streets in an ecstasy of song and dance. Such behaviour was not only lineally irresponsible since it did not produce a son and heir, but it was also scandalous since Rajput women did not go out openly and behave in such a brazen manner. Rumour has it that Mira simply merged with her lover—disappeared into Krishna’s statue—when she was being forced to return home to Mewar. In the meantime, she had become a significant Bhakti poet and saint, with apparently hundreds of poems to her credit. These poems are love poems to her lord, but speak also of her right to live as she pleases, and defends all those who are oppressed by the shackles of caste and gender. Mirabai is an early example of a woman who uses celibacy to redirect her energies into socially non-sanctioned worship rather than marriage. She stands out because such a move goes directly against a Rajput culture that frowns upon women in the public sphere, and requires them to be sexually subservient to the institutions of marriage and reproduction.

  Indeed, religiously ecstatic celibacy is one of the few routes available to women who want to opt out of getting married. Consider in this regard the Basran sect of female Sufi mystics who lived in Syria around the 9th century CE, and whose practices are supposed to
have influenced later women Sufis from India to China. The most famous among them is Rabi’a bint Isma’il, who, like her fellow mystics, used celibacy as a way of escaping the circumscribed female roles of wife and mother and domestic labourer. In a tradition harking back to the Christian mystics, and forward to Mahatma Gandhi, Rabia organized a ‘spiritual marriage’ for herself with the Sufi Ahmad ibn al-Hawari after making it clear to him that she was drawn only to the Sufi way of life and had no interest whatsoever in a sexual relationship with him (or anyone else). She rebuffed all his amorous advances, and with her considerable financial wealth, even arranged for dowries to be paid for Ahmad to marry other women and satisfy his sexual cravings. Rabia’s intense desire was to fast during the day and devote herself to worshipping god at night; nothing else mattered, and sex played no role in her desires.

  Celibacy allows entry into a different kind of community that is not based on the imperatives of heterosexual marriage. This is the kind of renunciate celibate community that gathers each year before the pilgrimage to Ayyappan’s shrine, for instance. Historically, in India, women have used celibacy as a means of moving away from a community that tells them to conform to the lusts of men.

  Two of India’s most famous women saint-poets predate Mirabai in exemplifying this tendency. Mahadeviyakka, a saint from 12th-century Karnataka, betrothed herself to Shiva at an early age. Nonetheless, like Mira, she was forced into an earthly marriage with the local chieftain, Kausika, whose paeans of love impressed Mahadevi’s parents, if not her. Even though the marriage seems to have taken place, it is clear that it was never consummated. At one point, it seems that Kausika tries to force Mahadevi into having sex with him. This is the cue for her to leave him altogether. Mahadevi renounces not just husband, home, parents and village, but she also gradually sheds her clothes, and wanders about covered only by her long hair. Reminiscent of other Shaivite yogis, as well as of a later Sufi poet, Said Sarmad, who too shed his clothes in the ecstatic service of god and in rejection of heterosexuality, Mahadevi embraced celibacy as the path to freedom from a patriarchal world that serves only to harness her desires for reproductive purposes. Mahadevi is clearly in love, but her desire does not tend towards having sex with men. Or women. She wants to be one with Shiva, and celibacy is the only route by which she can achieve her ardent desire.