Beyond Emasculation: Being Muslim and Becoming Hijra in South Asia

Abstract

Hijra, the icon of sex/gender non-conformism in South Asia, are “male-bodied” people who identify as female and sacrifice their male genitals to a goddess in return for spiritual prowess. While hijra draw on a narrative tradition that creatively mingles Hinduism and Islam, scholars suggest that hijra exhibit a special bias towards Islam. In recent times, as in the more distant colonial past, that association has been drawn on the basis of emasculation, the putatively defining ritual of hijrahood. Drawing on ethnographic research in contemporary Bangladesh, this paper challenges the association between emasculation and hijrahood. Becoming a hijra is a complex process. Hijrahood is an identity acquired through various and repeated ritual and gender practices that are described by my interlocutors as hijragiri, “the occupations of the hijra ”. Those occupations are construed as acts of devotion to both Muslim saints and Hindu mother goddesses, an eclectic cosmological frame of reference that defines and is practically acquired in and through ritual practice. I argue that hijra transcendence of the categorical boundaries and communal politics that divide Hindu and Muslim in South Asia is best accounted for neither in terms of an abstract theological pluralism nor in terms of hijra's ascribed and chosen affiliations with other subalterns. What Reddy ( 2005) refers to as hijra “supra” religious/national subjectivities emerge out of the plurality of their daily life practices and the incessant material and symbolic comings and goings through which “hijrahood” is constructed in South Asia.

Keywords:

• Bangladesh
• hijra
• Islam
• Hinduism
• syncretism
• pluralism
• emasculation
• orientalism

Notes

The third person singular pronoun in Bengali is uninflected by gender. I use “her/is” instead of “her” to demonstrate the context-specific and fluid nature of hijra gender performativity. Although scholars have conventionally used “her” in the representation of the hijra, this convention works to reify hijra as a feminine subject position that people who fail to be either adequately masculine or normatively feminine adopt, foreclosing the possibility of reading hijra through other optics, most notably masculinity (Hossain, 2012).

Reddy (2005, pp. 59–63) describes zenana in South India as referring to a group of non-emasculated, non-sari-wearing koti (sic), also spelt kothi, who are categorically distinct from, but related to, hijra but have separate lineages and occupations. In Bangladesh, janana is used in hijra argot to refer to hijra who have, or are presumed to have, a penis. It is not a self-ascribed identity category; nor do people who are described as janana form a social group distinct from fellow hijra.

See also Murray and Roscoe (1997) for historical examples of varied practices of cross-dressing in Muslim societies.

Hegira, the journey of prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622, marks the onset of the Muslim era. This event became the starting point of the Muslim calendar during Umar Ibn Al-khattab's (634–44) caliphate. Shaban is the eighth month in this lunar calendar.

While I acknowledge the psychoanalytic connotations of “emasculation”, I do not use it to refer to the reductive theories of the oedipal complex. Rather, I deploy the word to refer to the hijra act of chibrano, a ritualised event in which the scrotum and the penis of an initiand are removed with a knife by a ritual cutter known as “katial”.

The Veda mentioned in this song is the Hindu scripture, as the hijra later confirmed and explained this “interpolation” by saying that “Allah and Hari (Hari is a local way of designating Hindu supreme beings) are the same”.

In her paper on the electoral success of hijra in India, Reddy (2003) argues that despite hijra's affinity with Islam, hijra politicians, far from identifying with Muslims and transcending the nation, were complicit with the hypermasculine project of Hindutva-inspired nation-building in India.