Review Essay: Criminality, Sexuality and Gender in British India Special Focus: Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Ronald Inden, Imagining India (London: Hurst, 2000).

2. See Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020); Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003); Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Wiedenfield & Nicolson, 1980); Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

3. See Radhika Singha, ‘Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India’, in Studies in History, Vol. 16, no. 2 (2000), pp. 151–98; David Arnold, ‘Crime and Crime Control in Madras, 1858–1947’, in Anand A. Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985); Sandria Freitag, ‘Collective Crime and Authority in North India’, in Anand A. Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985); Meena Radhakrishna, Dishonoured by History: Criminal Tribes and British Colonial Policy (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001); Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and Policing the “Criminals by Birth”, Part 1: The Making of a Colonial Stereotype—The Criminal Tribes and Castes of North India’, in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 27, no. 2 (1990), pp. 131–64; and Sanjay Nigam, ‘Disciplining and Policing the “Criminals by Birth”, Part 2: The Development of a Disciplinary System, 1871–1900’, in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 27, no. 3 (1990), pp. 257–87.

4. See Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South Asia (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005); Gayatri Reddy, ‘“Men” Who Would Be Kings: Celibacy, Emasculation, and the Re-Production of Hijras in Contemporary Indian Politics’, in Social Research, Vol. 70, no. 1 (2003), pp. 163–200; Lawrence Cohen, ‘The Pleasures of Castration: The Postoperative Status of Hijras, Jankhas, and Academics’, in Paul R. Abramson (ed.), Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 276–305; Serena Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1989); Adnan Hossain, ‘Beyond Emasculation: Being Muslim and Becoming Hijra in South Asia’, in Asian Studies Review, Vol. 36, no. 4 (2012), pp. 495–513; Claire Pamment, ‘Hijraism: Jostling for a Third Space in Pakistani Politics’, in The Drama Review, Vol. 54, no. 2 (2010), pp. 29–50; Shahnaz Khan, ‘What Is in a Name? Khwaja Sara, Hijra and Eunuchs in Pakistan’, in Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 23, no. 2 (2016), pp. 218–42; and Aniruddha Dutta, ‘An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India’, in Gender & History, Vol. 24, no. 3 (2012), pp. 825–49. For the existing historical literature on hijras, see Laurence Preston, ‘A Right to Exist: Eunuchs and the State in Nineteenth-Century India’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 21, no. 2 (1987), pp. 371–87; and Anjali Arondekar, ‘Subject to Sodomy: The Case of Colonial India’, in For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 67–96.

5. Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 10.

6. Ibid., p. 28. See also Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kim A. Wagner, ‘“Treading upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, in Past and Present, Vol. 218, no. 1 (2013), pp. 159–97; Harald Fischer-Tiné, Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Robert Peckham (ed.), Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015).

7. Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India, p. 78.

8. Ibid., p. 95. See Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, in Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8, no. 4 (2006), pp. 387–409; and Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999).

9. Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India, pp. 109, 110. See also Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Wang, ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’, in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2012), pp. 1–40; and Mahmoud Mamdani, ‘Settler Colonialism: Then and Now’, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 41, no. 3 (2015), pp. 596–614.

10. Hinchy’s account contributes to the revisionist historical literature on colonial governmentality as a distinctive political rationality. See also Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

11. Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India, p. 113.

12. Ibid., p. 224.

13. Ibid., pp. 258–60.

14. See Nanda, Neither Man Nor Woman; Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas and Sabine Lang (eds), Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Sabine Lang, Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991); Walter L. Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986); and Unni Wilkan, ‘The Xanith: A Third Gender Role?’, in Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

15. Writing on the ‘third term’ of ‘aporia’, Rosalind Morris reflects that ‘the limits of our genders are simply the limits of our language’. Rosalind Morris, ‘Three Sexes and Four Sexualities: Redressing the Discourses on Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Thailand’, in positions, Vol. 2, no. 1 (1994), pp. 15–43 (39). See also Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan, ‘Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the “Third Gender” Concept’, in GLQ, Vol. 8, no. 4 (2002), pp. 469–97; and David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For Judith Butler’s inaugural critique, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

16. See Lydia H. Liu (ed.), Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 179–200; and Judith Butler, ‘Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism’, in Philosophia, Vol. 9, no. 1 (2019), pp. 1–25.

17. See Elizabeth A. Povinelli and George Chauncey, ‘Thinking Sexuality Transnationally’, in GLQ, Vol. 5, no. 4 (1999), pp. 439–49; Jessica Berman, ‘Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?’, in Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 24, no. 2 (2017), pp. 217–44; and Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah and Lisa Jean Moore, ‘Introduction: Trans-, Trans, or Transgender?’, in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 36, nos. 3/4 (2008), pp. 11–22.

18. Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India. On Hinchy’s uses of ‘gender identity’, see pp. 1, 17, 18, 219; on ‘gender expression’, see pp. 3, 16, 30, 43, 44, 54–61, 78, 105; and on ‘non-binary’, see pp. 16, 30, 56–7, 111, 123, 143, 167. On recent works in sexual science and translation that stage sexual knowledge as perpetually in translation, see Mitra, Indian Sex Life; and Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015).

19. See Noga Efrati, ‘Colonial Gender Discourse in Iraq: Constructing Non-Citizens’, in Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan (eds), The Routledge History Handbook of the Middle Eastern Mandates (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 157–69; John M. Willis, Unmaking North and South: Cartographies of the Yemeni Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Robert Fletcher, British Imperialism and ‘the Tribal Question’: Desert Administration and Nomadic Societies in the Middle East, 1919–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).