Inhabiting the state subjunctively: Transgender life-making alongside death and a pandemic

ABSTRACT

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 26 September 2020, stated that India had introduced legal reforms to accord rights to transgender citizens. Even though there is not much material basis to these rights, transgender communities have been protesting against the state and at times negotiating with it to get laws that are more in alignment with their rights. In the wake of serialised deaths and precarity intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, transgender communities also stage other negotiations in the everyday with activists, transnationally funded NGOs and academics researching their communities, encounters that are not as spectacular as the protests against the state, but that which ensures their daily sustenance. This paper investigates how they inhabit these systemically violent institutions. Deploying ethnographic field notes from eastern India, this paper argues that they inhabit them subjunctively, which is not about refusing engagement with what is oppressive but about the ceaseless conjuring of improvisatory and contingent gestures that are marked by hope as well as uncertainty. The simultaneity of protests, rage, hopelessness, hope, negotiations, supplications and scepticism allow them to not only endure the violence of institutions but also to rupture them and imagine them otherwise.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender communities
• Covid
• death
• nation-state
• homonationalism

Introduction

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 26 September 2020, stated that India had introduced legal reforms to accord rights to transgender citizens and signalled the Transgender Persons’ (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 as India’s stake to the global regime of human rights.¹ Sections of the transgender communities started circulating clips of the speech across community networks to demonstrate how this was the first time that an Indian Prime Minister had spoken about transgender rights on a global platform. Coupled with the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 2018 that was earlier deployed to criminalise non-peno-vaginal sex, Modi’s speech was marked as the moment of queer and transgender rights in India.²

Given that Modi’s rule has also marked the consolidation of Hindu majoritarianism in India, scholars have cautioned that the folding of queer and transgender rights within Hindu nationalism produces the Muslim as the deviant other (Sircar & Jain, 2013). Further, such an enfolding obfuscates how caste-based violence is central to Hinduism. This imbrication of queer and transgender rights with Hindu nationalism is being referred to as homohindunationalism (Upadhyay, 2020). What is ironic here is that even as the Hindu state deploys the hijra as evidence of Hindu tolerance towards gender diversity and tries to make her commensurate with a global regime of rights, it also criminalises those very practises that define hijra religiosity – namely her kinship networks and livelihood practises (Saria, 2019).³ The celebratory discourse around Section 377 totally invisibilizes the quotidian and daily ways in which state authoritarianism terrorises working-class transgender and feminine individuals under the garb of redressing the symbolic harm of law for queer individuals in general (Mandal, 2018). Elsewhere, I have documented how the multiple drafts of what is now the Transgender Persons’ Act were actually violative of transgender rights as they mandated the institution of screening committees that would certify one’s gender identity, and the drafts did not provide for any affirmative action or protection against discrimination (Bhattacharya, 2019). However, so far as homonationalism is concerned, there is no contradiction here. Jasbir Puar points out that the ‘terrain of homonationalism has always been contradictory and in-flux, and never focalising whether a nation has or does not have rights protections for LGBTQ populations’. (2017, p. 224). Instead, these rights have been used as a marker of civilizational status whereby certain populations get lauded for their tolerance of diversity while others get vilified as homophobic. In other words, homonationalism is not an identity position one can occupy. It is analytic that helps apprehend how LGBTQ rights become braided with imaginaries of a liberal nation-state founded on rendering some sections of the population as always already deviant. Additionally, Puar cautions,

… it is not another marker meant to cleave a ‘good’ (progressive/transgressive/politically Left) queer from a ‘bad’ (sold-out/conservative/politically bankrupt) queer. I feel it is especially unhelpful as an accusation, as if some of us are magically exempt from homonationalism … and others are intrinsically predisposed to it. The accusation of homonationalism works to disavow our own inevitable and complex complicities with ‘queer’ and ‘nation’. (2017, p. 230)

If there is no queer and transgender subject untainted by the regimes of rights, law and the nation-state, how do they occupy these structures? What kind of politics does such inhabitation produce? These questions become particularly salient because transgender communities have been fiercely protesting against the State and at times negotiating with it to get laws that are more in alignment with their rights. It is a result of these protests that the final version of the Transgender Persons’ Act has done away with its earlier biologically deterministic definition of the term ‘transgender’, it has done away with the screening process if one opts for a ‘transgender’ certificate and most importantly, no medical intervention will be required for such certification.⁴ While affirmative action is still not included in the law and there is not enough protection against discrimination, the resistance is ongoing in the form of petitions against the law that have been filed with the Supreme Court.

Following these ceaseless contestations with various institutions of the state, this paper will argue that if there is no outside of a majoritarian state that instrumentalizes queer rights to project itself as a liberal state, transgender communities occupy these institutions subjunctively.⁵ According to the Merriam–Webster dictionary, subjunctive relates to or constitutes ‘a verb form or set of verb forms that represent a denoted act or state not as fact but as contingent or possible or viewed emotionally (as with doubt or desire)’. In other words, subjunctive signals improvisatory, provisional, contingent modes of engaging with the world. I use it as a theoretical framework to make sense of actions and gestures that cannot refuse structural oppression but can at the same time construct and imagine worlds that disrupt these very structures and sometimes even engender an otherwise.

The subjunctive is a mood of inhabiting various institutions is not a novel theorisation. Jigna Desai and Kevin Murphy use it in the context of what it means to inhabit the American university that deploys equity and diversity as tokenistic tools of representation even as it continually defunds gender, women and sexuality studies and various critical ethnic studies programmes (2018). The American land grant university, erected on indigenous land, is imbricated in settler colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism. Programmes like gender, women and sexuality studies, ethnic studies and critical indigenous studies are tasked with the onerous responsibility of undoing these oppressive structures through experiential and decolonial epistemologies and diversity in faculty and student hires. However, institutionalisation also means that these departments constituted through decades of student-led protests, have to match up to university metrics of productivity and efficiency and thus, the spectre of defunding always haunts these units even as its faculty and student members are always hailed to bring their diverse voices as a token of difference in predominantly white spaces. Desai and Murphy offer the subjunctive as a mood to inhabit the university that involves a host of strategies – sometimes it involves displaying professional productivity as an emergency strategy to stop the collapse, sometimes it involves grinding care labour to nurture spaces of resistance that speak back to the institution, and at other times it could involve gallows humour to not take’s one’s labours seriously because the institution is still trying to sink what one is trying to keep afloat.

We also find the deployment of the subjunctive in Vaibhav Saria’s decade-long ethnography with hijras in east India. In a 2015 essay, Saria writes that as one enters a hijra household, she has to become a chela (disciple) to a guru, and the guru conducts elaborate rituals to formally induct her into the household. An important part of this ritual is the name that she accords to her chela. The chela gives up her birth name, and her new name signifies her new identity and belonging to the hijra household. However, this is by no means the only name the hijra will inhabit because she might decide to move to another hijra household for a wide range of reasons from conflicts with the guru to her failure to adhere to all the familial codes and with the new guru in the new household, she acquires a new name. Saria theorises these changing of names as ritualised games that hijras play, ritual signifying all the structures that are in place to formalise the name change, and by game, Saria suggests the register of the subjunctive. They write that the change of name ‘has an “as-if” character in that it reveals a particular modality – that of playfulness as the mode in which one engages one’s past’ (2015, p. 4). The new names construct an ‘as-if’ self that gives the impression that it can completely detach from the past self. However, this playful register of reading time often breaks against the actuality of circumstances. The previous name continues to haunt the hijra as the name is also a dense site of significations – the prestige of a particular guru and her household, the chela’s loyalty towards her and even the very authenticity of her hijra identity. So often, the hijra has to go back to the previous household, participate in another set of rituals to atone for her abandonment before she can move ahead. The new name often meets its hardest opponent in the labyrinthine state machinery of law and bureaucracy that issue identity documents to make the hijra body commensurable with its technologies of surveillance. As the birth name on the identity document does not match up to the new name and the ever-changing appearance (depending on the hijra’s sartorial preferences at a particular time, if she has undergone surgical transition or is taking hormone pills among a host of factors), the state finds ways to reinscribe its biological ideas of gender onto the hijra body, which tries to leave such assignations behind. Hence, the subjunctive register is always full of uncertainty, even as it also provides tools to imagine different futures while enduring one’s present reality.

Building on these theorizations of the subjunctive, I present ethnographic vignettes from my fieldwork with transgender individuals in West Bengal. The first section describes a funded meeting in the memory of the dead and how the template of the event is exceeded by its participants that forces one to rethink how we imagine transgender vulnerability. The second section is set in the months during the nation-wide lockdown following the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and how transgender communities wrestled with a transphobic state, righteous activists and academics to demand their rights. I conclude by stitching these two sections with a few provisional remarks on how close attention to gestures, actions and conversations offers us a lesson on how life is lived and also richly imagined in the wake of death and loss. The simultaneity of hope, hopelessness, rage, obedience, biting sarcasm and humour not only help my research interlocutors endure the quotidian nature of everyday violence but also allows them to imagine and sometimes even actualise what is conceived as impossible. I argue that their exchanges with the state, transnationally funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and even with academics such as myself are on the subjunctive register. The outcomes of these negotiations are never given in advance, but they are always brimming with the potentials of what is not possible yet.

The ethnographic scenes of this paper emerge from my PhD fieldwork with transgender and queer communities that I began in 2018 in West Bengal. The research was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), University of Minnesota (IRB ID: STUDY00003708, Submission ID for 2019–2020: CR00004526, for 2020–2021:CR00006844). I sought the verbal consent of all my interviewees for this research and used their names only when they asked me to. The ethnography of the first section was conducted in 2019, and the second section during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. I have been involved in transgender and queer activisms in Bengal since 2010. Additionally, I am often interpellated as a koti sister, daughter in the communities that I work with, which affords me relatively easier access to my research interlocutors. However, I do not claim to be an insider because as a Brahmin researcher, with the class privilege of English education, pursuing a PhD in an American university, there are huge power differentials between myself and my research interlocutors most of whom are working-class. It is this tension between my institutional privileges and the field that becomes home due to my gendered location that informs how the ethnography of this paper plays out, which will become particularly explicit in the second section of the paper.

Alongside death

The Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) is commemorated globally on November 20 every year to remember and honour the memories of transgender individuals lost to transphobic violence. It was started by transgender activist Gwendolyn Ann Smith in 1999 in honour of Rita Hester, an African American transwoman who was murdered in 1998. TDOR is marked in several Indian cities and towns as well. This is not to argue that memorialisation of death did not happen prior to the founding of TDOR or that all memorialisation meetings happen only on November 20. A pride parade or World AIDS Day could also become sites of memory keeping. However, with the transnational traffic of images and capital, TDOR has become an important event on the annual roster of many Indian NGOs. The following paragraphs describe one such TDOR that I attended in 2019.

Raina, the founding member of Samabhabona (Equality in Thought), a Kolkata based transgender NGO, invited me to join their programme being organised in collaboration with Asroy (Shelter), a non-funded transgender collective comprised of mostly subordinate caste transpersons based in Baruipur, an hour by train from Kolkata. Asroy only exists in name, and its registration has expired. One of its founding members, Suvana, who is also one of my research interlocutors, is trying to resuscitate some life into this dying group by bringing new volunteers. Collaboration meant that Samabhabona, which is funded, financially supported Suvana to organise the event. On their part, Samabhabona could demonstrate to their donors that their work extended outside the city. The programme was ironically held at a venue called the Anima Bibaho Basor (Anima Wedding House). I was relishing the delicious irony of a property that is rented out for the celebration of marriages, the state-sanctioned signifier of reproductive futurity being utilised to commemorate death. The theme of marriage kept recurring that evening.

I entered the hall and was greeted at a registration desk where participants had to fill in their names, phone numbers and organisational affiliations. Posters decked up the hall, and the themes ranged from the threat of Hindu Fascism to a call to the larger society for more transgender inclusion. There was a banner that had images of several transwomen who had died, and the slogan ‘Trans Rights are Human Rights’ was emblazoned in English, Bengali, Hindu and Urdu across the banner. As the hall filled with people, Suvana opened the programme with some housekeeping instructions. Phones had to be on silent mode, an instruction that was flouted all through the evening. Then she urged the participants, comprised of hijras and transgender women, to sit next to someone they did not know and not to sit next to one’s friends. Throughout the event, Suvana behaved like a stern teacher asking her wards to be quiet in the classroom. The unruly hijras and transwomen were busy chatting with each other and clicking selfies with friends. Sometimes, Suvana went to the extent of asking individuals to change seats to stop them from talking. Repeatedly, the solemnity of the event was interrupted by the boisterous crowd. As I glanced around the room, I saw activists earnestly explaining the history of TDOR, projecting visuals of transgender individuals who had died in West Bengal over the years on stage while the target audience kept walking around, going to the corridor for a smoke break, coming back, sitting next to friends, exchanging pleasantries and taking photos in complete disregard for the sombre mood on stage. I would argue, however, that it would be erroneous to read this seeming lack of interest in the official programme as apathy. After all, the audience was also equally vulnerable to every violence that was being talked about on stage.

Medical negligence, the stigma of HIV, suicides, transphobia are everyday realities in transgender communities. An overflowing inventory of loss that is undesirable but still an archival plenitude. Anjali Arondekar draws on Elizabeth Povinelli to remind us that ‘ … any epistemological privileging of loss (past or present) assumes an “eventfulness” that flounders in the face of the “ordinary, chronic and cruddy” syncopations of everyday subaltern life’ (2014, p. 99). One could draw from the work of Lauren Berlant to argue that structural violence is the environment in which trans life operates, and death as an event is simply an intensification of such an environment (2007). So then, if there was nothing unexceptional or eventful about vulnerability to an untimely death, the hijras and transgender women were teaching me how life was vitalised with every joke, banter and gesture that sought out pleasure. Their presence at the TDOR was an acknowledgment of trans vulnerability, but how they inhabited that vulnerability exceeded the templates of an event memorialising the dead.

This is not to dismiss the activist labours of organising such an event or the impact such an event has on the larger community. The very fact that the entire hall was filled with hijras and transwomen speaks to both their investment in the event and also the reach that Suvana and her barely surviving collective, Asroy, continue to have. Most importantly, TDOR was an opportunity for all these individuals to gather together. This gathering enthused Suvana, and she had tears in her eyes when she asked the audience if they felt the need to revive the group. Immediately, there was loud approval in the form of claps and cheers. As soon as the speeches and presentations were over, rented disco lights were switched on, and the hall magically transformed into a dance floor. A dance troupe, comprised entirely of young transfeminine persons, started dancing to popular Bengali songs, and the audience started grooving. The final song for the day was an Indian rendition of the widely popular ‘Because I am happy’ by Pharell Williams. This particular rendition had been performed for the first time by transgender performers based in Mumbai, and the video had gotten viral when it was released in 2016.⁶ With this song, the dance troupe joined the audience, and soon all of us were dancing.

The song ended, and Suvana took the microphone and thanked the band and announced the name of the volunteer who was waiting with our food packets. Once we had eaten a delicious meal of stuffed paratha, fish chop and a sweet, we were asked to take all the posters for a rally to a playground next to where Asroy’s office used to be. All of us were also given candles. The procession started. At the start of the rally, some of the participants held the banner with images of the dead. A music box was being carried in an auto that blared songs of revolution, including ‘We shall overcome’. However, at the back of the rally, some of the participants started ululating, as if a wedding was about to take place. After all, we had just stepped out of the wedding hall. Just as in the hall, joy, humour and activist earnestness jostled with each other on the streets as well.

We reached the playground and everyone assembled in a rough circle. The candles were also placed on the ground in a circle. Samabhabona’s employees started taking photos for documentation; transwomen started taking selfies with each other with the warm light of candles glowing on their faces. Someone laughed, saying that yellow light brings out the best photos. Raina thanked everyone for coming and said that only collectivisation could defeat fascist forces. Suvana reminded everyone about reviving Asroy. She ended her words with, ‘See you next year!’ Listening to her, some of the transwomen started shouting, ‘Asche bochor abar habe! (We shall meet again next year)’. These words are always uttered in the context of Hindu festivals where devotees chant that the festivities will happen again next year while immersing the goddess, marking an end but only temporarily.

In an essay entitled, ‘Trans Necropolitics’, C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn warn us that trans deaths ‘act as a resource for the development and dissemination of many different agendas’ (2013, p. 66). These agendas could range from sensationalist media coverage that grabs eyeballs to trans-NGOs instrumentalizing death to claim rights and recognition. Indeed, the Baruipur TDOR would be an important event on Samabhabona’s roster of advocacy initiatives that extended beyond the confines of a metropolitan city and would allow it to advocate for continued funding from donor bodies. However, its collaboration with a non-funded collective, Asroy, also meant that a trans collective that was dying might just get a new lease of life. Moreover, the activists of both collectives had a keen sense of what the community would most appreciate. From organising a delicious meal to hiring disco lights for a dance party, they ensured that the TDOR not only mourned death but also nourished life with food, merriment and the promise of collectivisation.

Queer theorist Sarah Lamble points out that events like TDOR overdetermine transgender lives with the finality of death. Individual deaths are stripped of context and history and what emerges through such remembrance events is the universalised body of a dead transgender subject, such that each death can be interchanged with the other (2008). The hijra and transgender participants that day did not refuse such significations. They attended the event, marched the streets, held the banner with the faces of the dead, and lit the candles. If the central conceit of a TDOR is to keep the memory of the dead alive, poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich pithily asks if death itself is unjust or all that preceded it. He writes, ‘What is unjust is the terms of living. There is something deeply unsettling, that is, to the insistence that someone ought to be alive in a world that did little to support that life’ (2019). His critique of TDOR is reflected in the disregard that the hijras and transgender folks displayed for instructions and protocols of a TDOR, their inattention towards the display of dead figures from the past on stage. Even as they succinctly acknowledged the serialisation of trans deaths and the environment of structural oppression through chants of ‘Asche Bochor Abaar Habe’, they also shone in the glow of the candlelight and danced and ululated their way through streets camping up the most common signification of futurity that is marriage. They sought joy in each other’s company. There was no wishing away loss, but such loss could not occlude the visions of renewal. What was joy one moment could be drowned by the tragedy swirling forth underneath it, but there was always the possibility that the joy would transform what tragedy could look and feel like. Even the actuality of loss and utter seriousness with which it is remembered could be borne with a sense of irony and disdain. Hence, the subjunctive.

Covid and the transgender nation

In the context of how neoliberalism transformed the political economy of India, Aradhana Sharma writes,

… transnational neoliberal ideologies of development articulate and jostle with histories of state and subject formation and of popular movements in India, producing a spatially uneven and ambiguous terrain of changes not easily captured by the rubric of dewelfarized states, depoliticized existence, and disciplined, consuming, individuated civic actors. (2008, pp. xvii–xviii)

Even as the Indian state withdraws itself from its welfare responsibilities, working-class people have also fiercely contested this neoliberal orthodoxy through consistent grassroots-led movements and have forced the state to commit back to some of its welfare roles. In his ethnography with Manavi Hakk Abhiyan, an NGO that works on a host of issues from violence against Dalits to their land rights in the Marathwada region of Maharastra, Suryakant Waghmore notes that the common perception that neoliberal governmentality in the form of NGOs depoliticises structural issues that impact the public does not hold in the case of Dalit movements because Dalit politics continues to be autonomous (2012). Funded work through NGOs often leads to unpredictable consequences in the form of collective and aggressive mobilizations against structural oppression. We also encountered such unexpected dynamics in the previous section where Samabhabona was exceeding the templates of a funded meeting by exhorting trans communities to collectivise in the face of fascism and was facilitating the revival of dying collectives. Thus, the trajectory of neoliberalism in India, as in many parts of the global south, has been a contentious one. India’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is an ideal example of the contested terrains of neoliberalism and its impact on the transgender communities.

On 24 March 2020, Prime Minister Modi announced a three-week nation-wide lockdown to purportedly arrest the spread of the virus. However, the lockdown kept getting extended. As the state manifested itself through ruthless policing of public spaces in the name of care towards its citizens, migrant workers, mostly from the subordinate castes, who lived on daily wages, were stranded in the cities without jobs and no money to pay for food and rent. Working-class transgender people and hijras who mostly work as sex workers, beg at traffic signals and trains (challa) and bless newborns and the newly married (badhai) were suddenly without work, now that public transport was totally shut down and no public gatherings were being allowed.⁷ Soon NGOs started diverting their regular budgets towards providing emergency rations to transgender communities, and various students groups and non-funded collectives started organising fundraisers to procure rations to distribute among these communities. This did not mean that the transgender movements were getting depoliticised because these same groups were also fiercely negotiating with the state so that it did not cede its welfare responsibilities.

As a result of these negotiations, the National Institute of Social Defence (NISD), an autonomous body that works under the aegis of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, announced monetary assistance for transgender people. The monetary assistance, however, was a meagre one-time 1500 rupees and the process of receiving the money was cumbersome. A google form had to be filled either in English or Hindi with copies of the Aadhaar card and bank details.⁸ Activists and NGO workers had to put in the unpaid labour of helping transgender individuals fill in these forms as most individuals in India do not use English and Hindi as their language of communication. Many community persons pointed out that most working-class transgender persons neither have bank accounts nor the Aadhaar card. Additionally, a lot of transgender activists expressed alarm that they were being asked to submit photo identity cards to receive cash assistance. In personal communication with several activists, they expressed that they would not submit any identity documents to the state. This was in light of the massive protests across the country against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019 and early 2020.⁹ Two thousand transgender individuals were excluded from the NRC when it was announced in the state of Assam, creating outrage across the country, and so there was a lot of justifiable distrust against the government’s welfare initiative being tied to Aadhaar and bank details.¹⁰ Finally, the NISD issued two separate forms – one for those with bank accounts where the money would be directly transferred and one for those without bank accounts and identity documents which would receive the amount through the district collector’s office. Thus, the activists and NGOs were not only performing individualised labours of bringing emergency sustenance to transgender communities, but they were also exerting pressure on a neoliberal, right-wing state to offer cash assistance to transgender individuals without documents. This also meant, however, that those transgender individuals not within the circuits of NGOs did not know about these various measures of relief and were left high and dry, exemplified by the fact that in the final count, only seven thousand transgender individuals availed the one-time assistance of the state.¹¹

In the previous paragraphs, I have briefly mapped transgender activist negotiations with a state that is both neoliberal and welfarist, but there were other daily contestations not so easily discernible. Here is one such account. Chhanda Dey refers to herself as a dhurani, a term widely used in parts of eastern India to refer to feminine individuals whose identifications could be transwomen, gender non-conforming, feminine persons who desire men, or sometimes a mix of all these identities. Chhanda is now in her early 60s. After suffering a massive stroke a few years back, she has partially lost mobility on the left side of her body. She lives in a tiny room that used to be a workshop for making signboards owned by her former lover. This room is located in a century-old ramshackle building where families, offices, pharmacies and doctors’ chambers jostle for space in central Kolkata. Chhanda belongs to the bene caste, traditionally one of the wealthiest business classes of Bengal, who mostly trade in gold and silver ornaments. Chhanda had inherited family property but used to spend most of her income on organising community gatherings, weddings between her dhurani friends and their lovers and also splurged on many a lover herself. Her generational wealth and how she spent it in the community has now reached a mythic realm. I have spent many an evening listening to these stories from her and many of her friends and with each rendition, the grandeur of the parties and the various gatherings increases. However, the culmination is always the same – that Chhanda has ended up destitute with no savings, totally dependent on the mercy of others and most importantly, an insistence that the community owes her for all that she has done for it. The community is a wide network of transgender activists, a couple of transgender NGOs and some queer and transgender academics, including myself. I have known Chhanda for years but started regularly meeting her only in March 2020 when the lockdown was announced. She was quick to adopt me as her koti daughter and started giving me life lessons on how to deal with heartbreaks and finance. I was completely taken over by her charms.

One evening I found Chhanda in a sour mood. Earlier that day, I had seen her photo on social media on a transgender activist’s page, who is also a founding member of one of Bengal’s many transgender-led NGOs. Chhanda’s image was part of a gallery comprised of many similar images of transgender persons receiving rations from the activist and her colleagues. Most NGOs and student-led groups that distributed rations posted images and videos of individuals receiving rations. The videos follow the same template where the recipient is seen thanking the NGO and individual activists for supplying rations. These images and videos served several purposes. It was evidence for the donors that their funds were being utilised for the purposes for which they were given but most importantly, it was also a further call to action so that potential donors would release funds immediately as needs always surpass supply. These images and videos also helped NGOs consolidate their position within communities to prove that they were active even during a pandemic.

I asked Chhanda why she looked disgruntled. Her eyes glared, and she told me that she was taking her afternoon nap and the activist rudely woke her up by knocking hard on her door. Overcoming my initial surprise that what bothered her was not consent violation but the interruption of sleep, I tried to interject, saying at least she had gotten her rations delivered. This time Chhanda shouted at me, saying, ‘Do you even know what kind of rice she has given me? Mota chaaler bhaat! Amar gas sesh hoye jabe! (The rice is so coarse that my gas will end just trying to cook it!)’. Chhanda told me that she would give away the rice to anyone who needed it but would not use it herself. After probing a bit, I found out that another rival NGO, which was also distributing rations, had brought her rice a few days back and that rice was a finer grain. Additionally, through networks of dhurani friendships, Chhanda had ensured that the information that the activist was distributing coarse grains would travel far and wide. A few days later, the activist made another trip to Chhanda, this time with some monetary support. The gossip networks had threatened to tarnish the NGO’s reputation, and so the damage had to be undone. Chhanda’s anger immediately disappeared, and the thoughtless activist morphed into her large-hearted younger sister, who made the community proud.

Three weeks had passed since this interaction, and I could not visit Chhanda due to a health emergency. I had even ended up missing her call and could not call back. Finally, when I went to meet her, I was accosted by her neighbour, who warned me that Chhanda was extremely angry with me and had called me a thief. I had taken her photo and splashed it everywhere and raised money for her daily maintenance but had not bothered to share those funds with her. The neighbour’s animated voice and gesticulations in conveying Chhanda’s allegations were so dramatic that I could not stop laughing. She got annoyed with me and asked me to verify with Chhanda herself. I assured her that I believed her, and then she asked me how much money I had actually raised. I had to explain to her that I am not part of any NGO and that I work as an academic, and whatever support I give to Chhanda comes from my stipend. She did not seem convinced, and it was my turn to be annoyed.

I went to Chhanda’s room. The moment she saw me, her face lit up with a smile. I explained to her why I could not visit her the past few weeks. She listened to me and then broke into tears about how lonely she feels and that she cherishes my company but also reminded me that she had no money left and so she had called me. After a while, I asked her about her allegations. She just smiled and said, ‘Dhurani ektu bila debe na? (Shouldn’t the dhurani create some drama?) You were not coming, so I was angry’.¹² In the next few days, I heard from a few other koti friends as well that Chhanda had called them and complained about me. My relationship with Chhanda has deepened with the passage of time and through many more interactions full of bila. However, I have kept revisiting her allegations, and it took me a while to learn the lesson that Chhanda had taught me.

Chhanda had not differentiated between the transnationally funded NGO that distributed rations and used an elderly dhurani’s photograph as evidence of their outreach and a koti Brahmin PhD student at a US university whose research is located in the same communities. Chhanda taught me that there was no pious distance I could claim from my complicity in the queer-neoliberal nexus, as Puar also points out. It is this complicity that demands a reorientation of how I read Chhanda’s negotiation with activists, NGOs and academics, a shifting of gaze that neither fetishises agency nor offers a grim ethnography of precarity. The fact that Chhanda, like many other transpersons, is listed as a recipient of medicines and essential supplies with two NGOs and that she also receives assistance from various government institutions implicates her in the wider networks of transgender rights, transnational funding and the imaginaries of a liberal nation-state. However, through her everyday bila, Chhanda creates a different modality of engaging institutions which can sometimes have unexpected consequences. Activists can be hauled up for providing coarse grains and forced to offer compensation and academics can be reminded about their parasitic relationship with communities.

Chhanda’s bila was an incisive critique of the power differentials between herself and the academic/NGO. However, this critique does not lead to the shutting of doors to the institutions that extract value from her. Chhanda cannot refuse NGOs from taking her photos, exposing her dependence on the latter. However, she can try to hold onto her sense of self-respect by expressing anger at her sleep being interrupted. Chhanda does not refuse to be written about by researchers like me because of the economy of exchange we are implicated in, but she can also rudely remind us of how she is of value to us. Thus, Chhanda’s bila is one amongst a host of strategic moves that strives to ensure her daily sustenance with her sense of dignity intact. These gestures are somewhat akin to Saria’s eloquent theorisation of haq in the context of challa that hijras ask for on trains (Saria, 2019). A secular translation of challa would be begging, but as Saria demonstrates, challa is imbued with a lot of affective and emotional labour and has religious connotations that the word begging cannot encompass. Gurus teach chelas to ask for challa for which the chela is bound in gratitude to the guru. The hijra is read as an ascetic figure who has transcended the worldliness of the householder and hence can demand their right, that is, their haq from passengers on the train. While the complex religiosity of such practises is beyond the scope of this paper, what is important in this regard is how hijras talk about their helplessness, lament about their fate, fully cognisant of all the ridicule and gybes that are hurled at them. Yet, they cannot think of giving up challa because it is their right and, obversely, the responsibility of the larger society to pay them. To give up on their haq is to give up on their very being. Similarly, it is Chhanda’s haq that she receives her daily sustenance. Hence one affect that she cannot embody is gratitude. It is her right that the academic and the activist support and care for her because in her youth, she had redistributed all her generational wealth among her community. The community should now payback. If they do not, she will remind them of the instrumental relationship that all the players are involved in. These blunt reminders are also supplemented by her lamentations of loneliness, helplessness and the performance of koti kinship attachments whereby sisters and daughters become thieves and then again loving sisters and daughters seamlessly. These gestures are tinged by a sense of scepticism because all of us have learned that both accusations of neglect and profuse affections at receiving one’s allowance need to be accepted with a pinch of salt because none of these emotions are constant and each mode of affective labour is meant to keep each player on one’s toes. Yet, these shifting affective modes of engagement are also tinged by an ‘as-if’ because these improvisatory gestures often shatter against the actuality of power differences. The activist can decide to undermine gossip and not provide compensation for the quality of grains, and the state might find ways to tighten surveillance and the academic can move to another field for new data.

The rub here is that such outcomes are not surprising, and hence they keep engendering further improvisations to negotiate and endure structural oppression.

Conclusion

In the context of his ethnography in post-apartheid South Africa, where the ongoing impact of racial segregation aggravated the devastating impact of HIV on poor Black communities, Didier Fassin provides a sophisticated analysis of how strategies, discourses, technologies and tactics of the Foucauldian management of population also have very concrete consequences for everyday realities of Black life in South Africa (2009). To make life implies that explicit and implicit choices are made about what sort of lives should thrive and for how long. Disparities in longevity, mortality rates, nutritional status, quality of housing and so on cannot be read in abstraction on the level of statistics because they also affect individual lives. Normalisation of the population is also about differentiation on the level of life. However, an account of biopower on the level of life is perhaps inadequate if it fails to account for the perspectives of individuals, their daily negotiations, the creativity with which they manoeuvre their way through the bureaucracy, state institutions and oppressive regimes. This is not to fetishise resilience or resistance because the bodily vulnerability of some does not even register as vulnerability with the state. The short notice with which the Indian nation-state was shut down is evidence of the fact that the precarity of migrant workers did not register with the policymakers even as the middle and upper classes could claim vulnerability and hence guard against the virus by not stepping out of the home. However, life is not reducible to only what the state mandates. Fassin states,

 … life is not only a question of politics seen from the outside, through the lenses of the state, of institutions, of immigration policies, of statistics on mortality, but should also be seized from inside, in the flesh of the everyday experience of social agents … . (2009, p. 57)

These everyday experiences demand close attention because that is where the imaginaries of an otherwise thrive. Hence, in this essay, I have attempted to offer layered descriptions of negotiations, encounters and conversations that disrupt the singularity of a particular scene.

My ethnographic vignettes demonstrate how actions, gestures and conversations keep troubling any fixed templates of vulnerability, marginality and oppression. Raina documents the TDOR event through registration sheets, and photographs and transgender activists keep audio-visual evidence of how many members of the community have benefitted from their ration distribution, fulfilling their roles as professional NGO workers who instrumentalize trans vulnerability to gain visibility and continued funding. Yet, these very same workers also plot ways to facilitate the formation of new collectives, put in their care to ensure that their communities can also seek pleasure amidst death and mourning. They remind a neoliberal state of its welfare responsibilities even as they exhort their communities to protest against fascism. Hijras and transpersons do not fail to attend TDOR meetings but do not get overawed by the template of grief. They dance and ululate their way through public spaces in boisterous celebration but also imitate an immersion ceremony to signal how death and life, subjection and defiance do not exhaust each other. An elderly dhurani’s canny and strategic calculations with NGOs and academics to ensure a dignified survival involves excoriating critique, affection, gossip and helpless supplication. I argue for the subjunctive as a register to apprehend these various modes of negotiating with institutions because the outcomes of these negotiations are forever mired in uncertainty, and pre-given categories are forever troubled.

The state might temporarily cede its demands of surveillance but could enhance those very regimes by other means, as the Transgender Persons’ Act exemplifies. More transgender deaths engender more memorial meetings that shore up trans vulnerability, but granular attention to these meetings might also open up innovative modalities of making life in the wake of death. An NGO might refuse accountability by not improving the quality of rations; the activist’s professional role as an NGO representative might surpass her sisterly affiliations but might not. The academic could simply move to another site of research but also keep returning to the field where her gender finds a home or new academics could take her spot in the economy of exchange. The eloquent twist in all of this back and forth is that failures are expected. They do not come as a surprise. They only necessitate further improvisations and innovations every day that help endure and even disrupt the institutions within which we are implicated.

Ethics review

Following IRB protocols, I sought verbal consent of all the individuals mentioned in the essay (IRB ID: STUDY00003708, Submission ID for 2019–2020: CR00004526, for 2020–2021:CR00006844). Real names have been used in the second section with the consent of the protagonists. Chhanda’s real name has been withheld to protect her privacy.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the peer reviewers, the special issue editors and Saptarshi Mandal for their generative feedback. The author would also like to thank the College of Liberal Arts and Culture Corps, the University of Minnesota that awarded them fellowships and supported their fieldwork in India as a doctoral candidate from the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota.

Notes

1 The full speech of Prime Minister Modi can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeWrl6uSfnI

2 The words ‘queer’ and ‘transgender’ are regularly used as umbrella categories for those with non-normative sexualities and gender identities respectively in Indian law, academia and activisms as elsewhere in the world. However, I have used other terms like ‘koti’ and ‘dhurani’ in certain sections of the paper to not only mark how individuals identify themselves but also to signal how these terms continue to widely circulate in communities. Both koti and dhurani refer to feminine individuals who could identify as transgender, gender non-conforming or simply those who desire men.

3 Hijras could be transfeminine individuals, gender non-conforming folks assigned male at birth or even women who live together in closely knit structures of kinship. Hijras dance at weddings, bless newborns, beg at traffic signals and trains and sometimes perform sex work. Hijras are widely believed to have sacred powers because they have transcended worldly attachments of the family through castration. Hijras use these belief systems to make a living. However, these beliefs do not translate into tangible social capital as hijras are also one of the most marginalized and discriminated communities in South Asia.

4 If one identifies in the gender binary, then a proof of some medical intervention will still be necessary. Even here, the scope of medical intervention has been kept wide enough so that anything from hormones to surgical procedures could come within its ambit.

5 Many scholars, including Khanna (2016), Dutta (2020) and Kang and Sahai (2020) have pointed out that though legal petitions for the decriminalization of Section 377 have instrumentalized violence against transpersons, some of those violences are not even connected to the law. However, increased mainstream visibilization of these legal activisms have rendered these communities more vulnerable to violence. For example, right after the decriminalization of Section 377, there were a spate of attacks on transgender people in public spaces. Read this report for more details: https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/7/15000/Past-Ten-Days-Have-Been-Hell-Transgender-Community-Face-Increasing-Violence-Post-Sec377-Ruling- This paper is an attempt to ethnographically explore how trans individuals navigate these heightened vulnerabilities even as elite queer individuals, mostly from the dominant castes seem to think of queer rights in a linear and hopeful sense where if decriminalization is a start, the next frontier to conquer is marriage and property rights. See https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/petition-seeks-legal-recognition-of-same-sex-marriage-delhi-hc-issues-notice-to-centre-7391874/ and https://www.news18.com/news/buzz/marriage-project-lawyer-couple-who-fought-against-section-377-now-want-to-legalise-gay-weddings-2688305.html

6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blvOBnSRfVc

7 For more on how the Covid shutdown impacted the livelihoods of transgender people, see https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/life-style/how-the-pandemic-has-exacerbated-troubles-for-the-trans-community-6548957/

8 A 12-digit unique identification number based on biometric and demographic date accorded to Indian citizens, non-resident Indian passport holders and resident foreign national who have spent more than 182 days in the year preceding the application for Aadhar. This number is now being made mandatory to receive various welfare benefits.

9 The CAA is a faith-based law that is supposed to give Indian citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan, namely, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. The Islamophobia of this law has to be read in conjunction with the NRC that will require Indians to show legacy documents to prove their citizenship.

10 For more on how the NRC impacts transgender individuals, see https://thewire.in/rights/nrc-exclusions-assam-transgender

11 For details on how many transgender individuals were able to access the paltry assistance from NIFD see https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/transgenders-from-tamil-nadu-wb-sought-most-aid-during-lockdown/articleshow/80611704.cms and for a state wise breakdown of the population of transgender individuals as per the last census conducted in 2011, see https://www.census2011.co.in/transgender.php. The NISD assistance was given during the second wave of the pandemic in 2021 as well.

12 Ulti is a code language that hijra and koti communities use. Historically, this language has been used to guard their privacy. Bila is an ulti word signifying the creation of a dramatic, troublesome situation. Chhanda had interpellated me as her koti daughter and given my own identification with the koti, gender non-conforming communities in West Bengal, our conversations are interspersed with words in ulti.