Human-nonhuman home: bioregional cosmopolitan exploration of intersex identity in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

This research explores the reconfiguration of intersex (hijra) home and identity in relation to human-nonhuman interdependence as represented in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Anjum, the intersex protagonist of the novel, receives humiliation and experiences homelessness for her biological sex ambiguity and nonconforming gender performances in a society founded upon gendered binaries. This study focuses on the complex ways in which Anjum, as a human Other, resolves her gender ambiguity by adopting a cosmopolitan pluralist awareness of self and place in the age of neoliberal development. Since dualisms, constructed along socio-cultural coordinates, such as man/woman, humans/nonhumans, human/human Others, and nature/culture, among others, are integral to the experiences of vulnerability, alienation and marginalization, the reconceptualization of home and identity as plural, accommodating social relations among different human groups and between humans and nonhumans, acts as a strategy, as the study will argue, to alleviate the sense of Otherness. Moreover, drawing on cultural geographical approach to the spatiality of home, mediated by social echelons of gender and class, and bioregional cosmopolitan epistemology of pluralist community-based identity, grounded in human–nonhuman correlations, the study will explore the way a sense of place can be created in a bioregion that ensures agentic participation of human and nonhuman groups in the neoliberal project of development, negating class, gender, as well as species dualisms.

Keywords:

• Agency
• hijra
• home
• humans/nonhumans
• identity
• sense of Otherness

Introduction

In locating identity along the axes of dualist socio-cultural paradigms of gender, race, class, sexuality, among others, spatial dynamics of place have always remained at the locus of postcolonial, feminist and cultural geographical explorations of making a sense of place out of space. Places that appear ‘neutral’ are often dichotomous, such as private/public, local/global, indoor/outdoor, and they can have idealistic connotations of ‘stability, completeness and authority’ (Laurie et al. 1997, 112). Home as a private place is perceived as associated with stability, security, and ‘feelings of belonging, desire and intimacy’, although it can also be a place for trauma, exploitation, and violence (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 2). In exploring marginalized experiences, again, it is believed that the focus on home spaces is crucial as it is in the domestic sphere of home ‘the existence of the voiceless, inarticulate and abject are often revealed’ (Buchli, Clarke, and Upton 2004, 4). For geographies of sexualities, lack of sense of place is almost intrinsic to transgender and intersex experiences (Valentine, Skelton, and Butler 2003; Gorman-Murray 2008; Cook 2014). For many transgender individuals, lack of privacy in their own homes restrains their transgender performances and identity (Bell and Valentine 1995). Home is also perceived by cultural geographers as a homophobic space where heteronormativity is encouraged and hegemonic power relations are enacted (Brown and Knopp 2003). Again, homelessness is almost always a common condition for hermaphrodites or hijras in India, who, although legally recognised as third gender, fail to gain acceptance in society and live in groups in the periphery as intersex people. Despite being perceived as individuals with supernatural powers who can ‘confer blessings of fertility on others’ (Nanda 2007, 229), hijras are often regarded as displaced, homeless and classless people, living in mysterious hijra communities where social victimization and the conundrum of intersex identity are beard upon with passivity. Arundhati Roy’s 2017 novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness revolves around the narrative of homelessness of a motley of hermaphrodites, development refugees, and lower caste individuals, who undergo the process of Othering along with nonhumans and the environment in the age of development and globalization. Against this backdrop, this study explores the reconfiguration of hermaphrodite hybrid home in a neo-liberal globalised space, where Anjum, the hijra protagonist of the narrative, finds agentic identity and plural sense of belonging in connection with both human and nonhuman Others.

In addition to the socio-cultural categories of differentiations, such as gender and class, which contribute to the experience of homelessness, in the age of neo-liberalisation, the spatiality of a place is underscored by economic, political and environmental impacts of development. The process of development, on the one hand, connects local, national, and transnational spaces and offers economic opportunities by creating several ‘networks’ (Bebbington and Batterbury 2001, 375). In developing nations, on the other, it causes spatial segregation between high and low-status groups since the process is mediated by internal socio-cultural hierarchies along the lines of class, gender and, in Indian context, caste politics, among others. Moreover, such networks of development across local and global spaces pose environmental threats, and establish hegemonic relations between the West and the East, in which the latter is used as a waste disposal ground for the industrialized West for its cheaper disposal costs (Shiva 1999). Furthermore, cultural geographers and environmentalists claim that in a capitalist economy the agency of the individuals living on the social periphery is disregarded as they always remain outside the decision-making process on how their resources, such as lands, are used (Plumwood 2002; Bebbington 2000). Therefore, neoliberal development in developing economies becomes a byword for migration, displacement, and loss of sense of place.

Ecocriticism, or ‘[e]nvironmentally oriented literary and cultural studies’ (Heise 2008a, 381–382), has offered a solution to such conundrum of development, as both posing risks and creating economic opportunities, by accentuating the need of formulating a ‘global community’, where an interrelation between individual/local and wider community/global will be established and humans–nonhumans/nature relationships will be reappraised (Roos and Hunt 2010, 2–3). In such community, values of ‘pluralism’ and ‘solidarity’ with both nature and culture will be championed and environmental ‘security’ by sustainably using the limited environmental resources will be ensured (Shiva 2005; Heise 2008b). Cosmopolitan bioregionalism, as a form of environmentalism, adopts such a model of sustainable use of local resources for development and a ‘plural’ understanding of human culture and nonhuman nature (Thomashow 1999, 121). In other words, by adopting a pluralist perception of place as inclusive of both local and global spaces and of human culture as a conglomerate of humans, animals, the environment and several organisms, the socio-cultural boundaries of differences can be traversed. Besides, in such environmentally sustainable economy, the individuals affected by development can participate in the process of decision-making as actors, control the ways resources are used, and valorize traditional environmental knowledges and practices.

In this context, the article will explore the way the intersex protagonist of Roy’s novel reconfigures home as a place that offers an agentic sense of belonging, traversing boundaries of gender and class in local and national spaces. Significantly, scholarly literature on hijra experience and identity, especially in the Indian subcontinent, chiefly focuses on their queer sexuality, non-heteronormative gender performances and anthropological details of hijra subjectivity (Loh 2014; Patel 1997; Nanda 2007). Studies on ritualistic and spiritual practices of hijras in India (Nanda 1990), sociological aspects responsible for their social exclusion in Pakistan (Ahmed, Yasin, and Umair 2014), and their struggle for legal recognition and basic human rights in Bangladesh (Sifat and Shafi 2021) have provided detailed insight into the lived experience of hijras who frequently remain at the centre of public curiosity, yet fail to receive social acceptance. The role of globalization, neoliberal development projects, and consequent environmental devastation in reshaping spatial boundary for hijras as the marginalised Others, however, have remained unexplored. This research addresses this gap by locating hijra identity at the intersection of the spatiality of home, mediated by gender and class binaries, and human–nature interactions, affected by neoliberal development projects. Incidentally, in India, hijras almost always live in communities, founded upon guru–chela hierarchical relationships (Hossain 2018), and, thereby, only have community-based hijra identity. Cosmopolitan bioregional pluralist perception is significant in exploring intersex identity politics since it not only destabilises hierarchical relationships and dualist paradigms constructed along the axes of race, gender, class, sexuality and caste, but also creates an identity across socio-cultural and species boundaries. The research will emphasise the way Anjum connects with individuals from different religious, class, gender, and sexual backgrounds as well as with nonhumans in her new home and creates a cosmopolitan community across local and national spaces.

Again, bioregional cosmopolitanism normalizes the intermediate embodiment of hermaphrodite corporeality, which intersex individuals often fail to accept and strive instead to fit themselves into binary gender stereotypes. Such an understanding, as this study will show, enables Anjum to embrace her hijra corporeality as normal in her new home, resolving her conundrum to adopt either stereotypical male or female behavioral patterns. Moreover, as bioregional cosmopolitanism thrives on alternative development model that allows individuals to participate in the project of development as actors, Anjum, who, as a mysterious social outcast, always remains outside the decision-making process on how spaces are used, can now participate, as the study will show, in the reconceptualization of spaces. Such reconfiguration of spaces, such as turning a graveyard into a home, as accommodating the new subjective (agentic) self, acts as a strategy, as it will be expounded, to alleviate her sense of Otherness. The way spaces can be restructured by human and nonhuman actors regarded as Others will be elucidated in the following section on bioregional cosmopolitan directives and alternative development paradigm in developing economies.

Bioregional cosmopolitanism, intersex identity, and homelessness

Bioregionalism as a form of environmental practice explores the way ‘social behavior’ of humans as well as the interactions between humans and nonhumans foreground characteristics of places and formulate human identity (Berg and Dasmann 2003). Making a sense of place out of space in the age of neoliberal development, one of the most celebrated concepts in cultural geography, is understood through the axis of local and global interrelations in bioregional studies, as bioregionalist Thomashow notes: ‘Global economy requires that bioregionalists explore both the immediate landscape (place) and those larger systems that exist beyond the horizon (space). The local landscape can no longer be understood without reference to the larger patterns of ecosystems, economies and bureaucracies’ (1999, 126). The emphasis on spaces both immediate and beyond one’s own locality is built upon ‘multicultural and multispecies tolerance’ – an understanding termed as cosmopolitanism that allows ‘different people to understand all the different places that may be considered home’ (Thomashow 1999, 121–122). Moreover, cosmopolitanism offers pluralistic identities by allowing assimilation of cultural values, traditions, environmental knowledges and practices of both local and global spaces. Such pluralistic identities with cosmopolitan awareness of connection between places and their human and nonhuman actors turn spaces into bioregions (Sarkar 2017).

However, in a capitalist economy through the connection between spaces, local humans and nonhumans/nature are exploited in the name of progress that contributes to the prosperity in global/urban regions. While acknowledging the necessity of connecting spaces for economic progress, bioregionalist Evanoff notes that development also exploits labour that further widens the chasm between the East and the West (2011, 146–147). By elaborating Wolfgang Sachs’s concept of ‘delinking’ local resources from global exploitation, Evanoff frames an ‘alternative bioregional model’ that encompasses ‘self-sufficiency within the ecological limits of local geographical regions’ (2011, 148). This ‘alternative bioregional paradigm’, as part of cosmopolitan understanding of culture, can destabilize the politics of hegemony working along the lines of socio-cultural determinants between spaces. Additionally, it focuses on the local with an emphasis on the agency and decision-making rights of the community:

[A] bioregional global ethic would respect a high level of cultural and ecological diversity but simultaneously seek to obtain sufficient levels of cross-cultural agreement to allow those various forms of social and ecological domination which are made possible by our present highly interrelated global society to be overcome. […] [S]uch a global ethic can only be realized, somewhat paradoxically, through a process of deglobalization […], in which production and consumption are organized on a local, bioregional scale (without necessarily excluding all forms of trade), and ultimate economic and political decision-making power is located not in the hands of a global managerial elite but in local communities. (Evanoff 2011, 194)

This alternative model can disrupt the chain of exploitation and inequities by transferring decision-making power to the hands of the local community and thus safeguards their rights. However, the focus on local community, involving humans, nonhumans, and the environment, allows a pluralistic identity across spaces, which are connected, on the one hand, to assist in the local regional development and detached, on the other, to allow local self-sufficiency and sustainable use of local resources. Such pluralistic identity is important for contesting the process of Othering and challenging dualist paradigms. The normative binaries of man/woman, homo/heterosexuality, self/other as well as the performativities and practices that formulate such dualisms should be questioned, as geographies of sexualities and queer space theory also perceive, to understand how identities are materialized in spaces built upon such normative dualist models (Browne 2006). Thus, the reconceptualization of spaces and geographies is central to understanding intersex identity that aims to transgress the boundaries of normativity.

The dualisms constructed upon socio-cultural coordinates also affect spatiality, as various scholarships, such as feminism has shown how spaces are bifurcated along the line of gender as private and public. While private spaces are perceived to be spaces of women and children and associated with body, emotion, irrationality, and ignorance, public spaces are dominated by men and their mind, reason, rationality and knowledge, which have justified men’s authority and domination as ‘significant political agents’ in public spheres (Alcoff 1996). Such division of spaces is considered a ‘tyranny’ which occurs when people defy the hegemonic ideals that decide on gender-specific behaviour (Doan 2010, 635). For intersex individuals, however, such tyrannous spatial bifurcation turns into spatial segregation as their indefinite genitalia and ambiguous gender performances shock the cultural perception of society (Delimata 2014), and thus intersex individuals are grouped as the genderless Others who are expected to live outside both public (men) and private (women) spaces in a society. Again, dichotomous categorization of spaces, such as rural and urban, has also been associated with transgender identity. Whereas urbanization, which has been linked to modernization, allows homosexuality and non-conforming gender performances (Rubin 1993; Weston 1995), rural spaces, ‘where sexual difference is policed, silenced and invisible’ (Gorman-Murray, Waitt, and Gibson 2012, 71), appear as spaces devoid of lesbian and gay presence. Moreover, sexual identity has long been a determinant of social status, and, therefore, the ambiguous sexual identity of intersex individuals contributes to their lower social status as Alice Dreger sums up: ‘The hermaphrodite was and continues to be a person whose body gets caught up in cultural “border wars”—wars over the borders separating males and females, men and women, boys and girls, borders separating the acceptable heterosexual and the disfavored homosexual, borders separating those with authority from those without’ (qtd. in Holmes 2008, 113). In addition to the ambiguous genital appearance, the cultural perception of an intersex individual as the passive Other without agency contributes to their loss of sense of place.

Since the appearance of genitalia is associated with gender identity, with the development of science and medicine, medical intervention is deemed essential to ‘cure’ the ambiguous genitalia in order to fit the intersexual body into the ‘natural’ dualistic gender model (Reis 2005; Delimata 2014). Gender critic Fausto-Sterling (2000) has pointed out several assumptions responsible for medically correcting an intersex body, notably: there are only two sexes, all humans are heterosexuals, and it is the gender performance that creates gender identity for both men and women. However, the medical procedure of sex assignment to ‘normalise’ the ‘nonconforming body’ through surgery often fails to offer the desired gender identity (Reis 2005, 414). Instead, intersex individuals can ‘recast their identities further by engaging in intersex support and activism. By doing so, they realize […] the coming-out process: developing pride in their marginality and integrating their marginal identity within a larger socio-cultural context’ (Preves 2003, 126). Significantly, it is this acceptance of the bodily ambiguity that can affirm a ‘normalcy’ of intersex gender identity (Amato 2016, 151). In other words, developing a community, modelled upon problems of mutual concern, aids in accepting ambiguous genitalia and gender performances as one’s own self and offers an opportunity to create home in a space that is otherwise unwelcome to hermaphrodite/intersex/transgender individuals. Therefore, identifying with individuals termed as Others, as it is contended, is an important step in developing a pluralist space called home.

Home is also a space, nonetheless, that is bound up with different rules and regulations, and, thus, to be at home means to be able to feel those protocols as part of one’s identity. Similarly, an ‘imagined neighbourhood’, bolstered by shared experiences of marginalization, ‘embodied emotions’, and ambiguous gendered identity, offers power and sense of belonging as a community and, thereby, can be termed home that is ‘multi-scalar and porous’ (Johnston 2018, 57). Therefore, home can also be a communal place that allows gender transgressions, repudiating gender conforming attitudes. This research in focusing on the reconceptualization of a gender variant space, accommodating a plural sense of belonging, will employ cultural geographical approach to the spatiality of home, mediated by gender and class identity in the age of development, to unfold the nexus between spatial politics and intersex identity. Moreover, drawing on bioregional cosmopolitan analysis of pluralist communal identity, constructed upon human–nonhuman interdependence, the study will illustrate how spaces can be turned into pluralist homes, negating class, gender as well as species dualisms. Thus, by amalgamating cultural geographical analysis of making a sense of place in spaces with bioregional cosmopolitan understanding of pluralist community-based subjectivity, this research will argue, as the following section will show, the way Anjum, the intersex protagonist of the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, makes a pluralist multispecies home, which enables her to overcome her sense of Otherness and reservations over her ambiguous gender identity.

The dream of ideal home, hijra community and the loss of identity

The narrative’s opening with the description of a desolate graveyard, its dead birds, and the comparison of a desiccated tree with the protagonist Anjum, who lives in the graveyard as a social outcast, sets the scene for human–nonhuman encounters as contributing to spatiality of places demarcated for Others. It is in the very beginning, the narrative expatiates on how the society outside the graveyard is founded upon binary gender model and individuals like Anjum, who are born as hermaphrodites, also called hijras in India, cause humility and embarrassment for their family members (Roy 2017, 8). Since fixed ‘gender roles’ delineate social hierarchy as well as spatial divisions such as masculine (public) and feminine (private) spaces (Blunt and Rose 1994), Anjum, who although raised as a boy (Aftab) and was trained from childhood as a finest singer, finds her space restricted as her ambiguous gender identity draws mockery and derision in public places. As humiliation and social exclusion mark the basic tenets of hijra experience (Sifat and Shafi 2021), Anjum’s expulsion from public spaces underscores the lived realities of her hijra subjectivity in a patriarchal society: ‘He could sing Chaiti and Thumri with the accomplishment and poise of Lucknow courtesan. At first people were amused and encouraging, but soon the snickering and teasing from other children began: He’s a She. He’s not a He or a She. He’s a He and a She. She-He, He-She Hee! Hee!’ (Roy 2017, 12; emphases original). Therefore, public places like schools and music classes for Anjum gradually become spaces for trauma, evoking self-hatred and shame for her ambiguous genitalia. Similarly, her home, far from offering a sense of belonging, intends to control her non-conforming gender performances through medical interventions and forces her to follow gender norms and practices. Since our gendered perception of self can have an impact on the formation of sense of being in a place (Laws 1997, 49), Anjum’s sense of her intersex body, forced to dress as a male and to follow medical procedures to become a man, confines her sense of being in a space where she can never have any distinct individual (both male and female) subjectivity. Therefore, her intersex subjectivity becomes incomprehensible, according to gender critic Amato, as Anjum is not allowed ‘to keep/have [her] intersex corporeality and at the same time to identify as the gender that [she feels she is] […] (male, female, both, neither, genderqueer, intersex, etc.)’ (2016, 296). Therefore, Anjum’s leaving the space of her home can be viewed as an act of resistance to gender stereotypes and normative gender assignments.

However, while Anjum leaves such restricted space and enters Khwabgah (meaning dreamland in Hindi), the local hermaphrodite community-based household, the ‘ordinary, broken-down home’ appears to her a real ‘paradise’, where cross-dressing is encouraged and bodily differences are celebrated: ‘[I]t was where special people, blessed people, came with their dreams that could not be realized in the Duniya [the world]. In the Khwabgah, Holy Souls trapped in the wrong bodies were liberated’ (Roy 2017, 53). Incidentally, cross-dressing can be perceived, as Hines contends, ‘as a form of gender resistance’ through which socio-cultural attitudes towards sex stereotypes and traditional gender roles are questioned (2007, 52). Thus, Khwabgah enables Anjum to challenge gender stereotypes that fail to incorporate gender ambiguity. However, although Khwabgah presents itself as a dreamland to the hijra community in the city, it has its own norms, such as following ‘extremely painful’ procedure of castration, that makes ‘Khwabgah […] just as complicated, if not more so, than the Duniya’ (Roy 2017, 27). Again, such procedures involving medical interventions, which all intersex residents of the household are needed to undergo, could hardly materialise their dream of having their desired body, and hence they live in the Khwabgah with their ‘patched-together body’ and ‘partially realized dreams’ (Roy 2017, 29). For hijras castration is a procedure that offers higher social status and economic opportunities within hijra community (Nanda 1990), although it has little value in the mainstream society (Khan et al. 2009). Therefore, while Khwabgah, a space detached from the gender normative society, can offer a sense of belonging to the hijras of the city, it fails to accept hijra corporeality as normal and intends to medically alter intersex bodily differences to fit it exclusively into the hermaphrodite category. In this context, Anjum’s ‘ambitions’ to transgress the boundary of the separate dreamland for hijras and to live ‘like an ordinary person’ in society can be termed as an act of affirming the normalcy of ambiguous genitalia as well as an act of resistance to gender-normative spatial segregation. The burning of her possessions, such as her ‘photo features in foreign magazines’, documentary films about her, and interviews in international newspapers (Roy 2017, 57), which often romanticise her gender ambiguity and represent it as essentialist – a common tendency in Western narratives on hijra identity (Cohen 1995; Reddy 2005), signifies her rejection of the essentialist and exoticising perception of hijra identity. Besides, it marks her aspiration to experience the ‘real’ world (Duniya) outside Khwabgah, a community built exclusively for hijras. Moreover, the destruction of material possessions can be regarded as part of her strategy of ‘unmaking home’, which, as Baxter and Brickell view, is ‘a generative process’ of remaking home in a different space (2014, 135–136). Thus, Anjum’s leaving or ‘unmaking home’ in Khwabgah and remaking home outside the community is co-constitutive of, as will be shown in the following section, her desire for a stable livelihood, financial success, and an interconnected web of social relationships that cuts across gender, class, caste as well as species boundaries.

Hybrid home of Others: pluralist space for humans, nonhumans and the environment

Since places are constructed by our ‘socio-spatial relations’ (McDowell 1999, 4), Anjum’s settlement, like a ‘ravaged, feral spectre’, in a desolate graveyard, transforms her from an object of derision and mockery to a subjective being, who actively participates in reconceptualising home by formulating socio-spatial relations with those termed as Others (Roy 2017, 63). It is in her shack in the graveyard where Anjum establishes an interconnection with people from the world outside the graveyard and gradually recovers from the trauma that she experienced during a communal riot, as the following shows:

It took years for the tide of grief and fear to subside. Imam Ziauddin’s daily visits, their petty […] quarrels, and his request that Anjum read the papers to him every morning, helped draw her back into the Duniya. Gradually the Fort of Desolation scaled down into a dwelling of manageable proportions. It became home; a place of predictable, reassuring sorrow – awful but reliable. […] Anjum began to groom herself again […]. As the Fort of Desolation scaled down, Anjum’s tin shack scaled up. It grew first into a hut that could accommodate a bed, and then into a small house with a little kitchen. (Roy 2017, 66–67)

Although Anjum’s making a home in the city graveyard marks a watershed in the hijra communities’ struggle for a permanent foothold in society, the home also becomes a part of spatial belonging for development refugees (Roy 2017, 96). The refugees are often displaced both from their rural spaces and from the imagination of the administration in the city as expendable resources for progress and urban development (Nixon 2011, 150–51). Incidentally, whereas urban development, on the one hand, offers city migrants opportunities of ‘making a living’, it calls into question, on the other, their rights to conserve native places, agricultural lands, culture and the environment (Bebbington 2000, 498; Evanoff 2011, 131). Therefore, the development refugees resort to ‘resistance’ to gain control as ‘actors’ over the decision-making process on how their lands are used (Bebbington 2003, 302), as Roy depicts: ‘In slums and squatter settlements […] people fought back. […] “Where shall we go?” the surplus people asked. […] their lifetime’s work […] were flattened by yellow bulldozers imported from Australia […]. Experts aired their expert opinions for a fee: Somebody has to pay the price for Progress, they said expertly’ (2017, 98–99; emphasis original). Therefore, the lands of the poor are appropriated in the name of progress and economic expansion, which connect the spaces in the metropolis with those in the rural villages through a network of exploitation.

Such neoliberal development project, akin to European paradigm of Enlightenment and progress, views the spaces of the poor as wild territories, which should be organized and reshaped (Cowen and Shenton 2005, 27–30; Power 2003, 131). Consequently, the homeless poor are relocated in spaces that remain outside the boundary of the megalopolis, and, accordingly, are deemed as non-existent. These spaces resemble neither their rural home, which is lost in the process of development, nor their urban settlements in construction sites, where they can never find any sense of self as displaced Others (Sarkar 2017, 120). In such urban settlements, they are clustered together in spaces used for depositing industrial waste material and, thus, are principal recipients of environmental pollution: ‘On the city’s industrial outskirts, in the miles of bright swamp tightly compacted with refuse and colourful plastic bags, where the evicted had been “re-settled”, the air was chemical and the water poisonous. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from thick green ponds’ (Roy 2017, 100). Incidentally, it is often the spaces of the economically and politically Othered that are used as waste disposal grounds (Forsyth 2002, 295), and, consequently, the outskirts of Delhi have been turned into spaces where environmental degradation causes ‘slow violence […] that occurs gradually and out of sight […], an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon 2011, 2). Additionally, the creation of such spaces with toxic environment in the outskirts of the metropolis is part of the project of materialising ‘uneven geographies that characterised older, colonial relationships between North and South’ (Power 2003, 151). Therefore, the contentious nature of development maintains a power hegemony in the city that has contributed to the formation of spatial boundary and ‘uneven geographies’ at the expense of migrant health and livelihood.

Moreover, it is this awareness of the impact of toxic environment on all humans, especially the poor, and their vulnerability that offers Anjum an understanding of the neoliberal development politics which affect humans and nonhumans. In other words, if Anjum’s perception of self was previously conceptualised mainly on the basis of her ambiguous gender identity as a hijra, usually perceived as ‘foul-smelling, dirty, violent and shameless people’ or ‘abjected others’ in society (Hossain 2017, 1422), she can now redefine her sense of self as part of the group of ‘falling people’, inclusive of humans and nonhumans, as the following clarifies: ‘“Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, including our Biroo [the abandoned dog used in lab experiments] […] you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people […]. The place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people.”’ (Roy 2017, 84). Thus, it can be contended that Anjum’s home, which gradually turns into a guest house, offers an opportunity not only to escape the toxic environment that has a grave impact on livelihood, but also to establish an interconnection among the migrants, the owner, and other residents which can intervene and resist the homogenising tendency of globalization.

Furthermore, as livelihood also incorporates, according to Bebbington, ‘social’ and ‘institutional’ interactions among people where ‘ideas, resources and activities’ are exchanged (2003, 300), such interactions can offer a pluralist sense of place that can be both individual and collective (Thomashow 1999, 121). Thus, Anjum’s perception of self as incorporating multiple identities, whether transgender or ungendered, homosexual or heterosexual, as expressed in the very beginning of the narrative, creates a collective identity: ‘I’m all of them, I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu. And Mujna, why not? Who says my name is Anjum? I’m not Anjum, I’m Anjuman. I’m a mehfil, I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing. Is there anyone else you would like to invite? Everyone’s invited’ (Roy 2017, 4; emphases original). It is important to note that when in Khwabgah, the hijra community house, Anjum always imagined herself as a female trapped in an intersex body, in the new space of her home, her desire to identify herself only as a woman is replaced by her penchant for identifying with different social groups that are generated by ‘economic globalization, and ecological and cultural diasporas’ (Thomashow 1999, 125–129) and connected by a sense of Otherness. These relations between different human groups are developed with shared experiences and sharply differ from the hierarchical order of guru-chela relationships, as common in hijra community-based households (Hossain 2018, 324). Thus, when in Khwabgah the hierarchical relationships among hijras constricted their sense of belonging, the cosmopolitan space in the graveyard extricates them from the system of hierarchy of gender, class and caste and, as a result, redefines their position as independent selves. Therefore, it can be argued that Anjum’s yearning for pluralist embodiment, incorporating different social identities, turns the guest house into a pluralist space where socio-cultural dualist paradigms, such as rich/poor, men/women, homosexual/heterosexual, upper/lower caste, among others, are subverted.

As a pluralist space is inclusive of various groups regarded as the Others, the necessity to include nature as part of human community has assumed a new urgency ever since the neo-colonial tendency of globalization has encouraged a separation between humans and nonhumans/nature. Moreover, human dualist perceptions have resulted not only in the ‘dehumanization of certain human groups’ as Others (Sarkar 2017, 16), but also in the destruction of ecological system and its exploitation. Again, the overproduction and overconsumption of inessential consumer goods by a wealthy minority have principally led to the loss of biodiversity, although the basic requirements for the majority have been ignored (Evanoff 2011). Therefore, it is argued that a transition in the current policies, attitudes, and environmental practices is required to maintain ecological and species balance (Thayer 2003). Thus, Anjum’s effort to make such transition in her space, unlike the metropolis, and to participate in the regenerative process to create an inclusive space for both humans and nonhumans is encouraged by other human members of the community:

Between Zainab and Saddam [the other residents of the guest house], they had turned the graveyard into a zoo – a Noah’s Ark of injured animals. There was a young peacock who could not fly, and a peahen […]. There were three old cows that slept all day. Zainab arrived one day in an autorickshaw with several cages stuffed with three dozen budgerigars that had been absurdly coloured in luminous dyes. […] Coloured like that, they couldn’t be set free, Saddam said, because they would attract predators in seconds. So he built them a high, airy cage that spanned the breadth of two graves. The budgerigars flitted about in it, glowing at night like fat fireflies. A small tortoise – an abandoned pet – that Saddam had found in a park, […] now wallowed on the terrace in a mud-pit of his own. Payal-the-mare had a lame donkey for a companion […]. Several cats came and went. As did the human guests in Jannat Guest House. (Roy 2017, 399)

Therefore, the graveyard becomes a non-anthropocentric bioregion where nonhumans are not polarised as human’s Others, one of the basic tenets of globalization and development. This bioregional community has recreated a ‘natural’ place than a ‘national’ territory, where humans, instead of ‘defining themselves in opposition to them [nonhumans]’ perceive nonhumans as their ‘neighbours’ and not expendable resources (Crist 2020, 24). Such spaces can be termed as bioregions since the people of the community, focused on the local production, are enabled ‘to live regionally and yet learn from and contribute to planetary society’ (Snyder 1995, 247). Moreover, it is claimed that as part of the project of preserving ecological sustainability, a transactional relationship between culture and nature can be established, where local environment can be used to meet basic requirements and to preserve the ecological balance of the region (Evanoff 2011, 167). Thus, while in the world outside the guest house the biodiversity is disrupted and the ecological imbalances have toxic impact on the poor, the inhabitants of the graveyard aim for ecological sustainability by restoring the natural system of the space, as the following demonstrates:

The vegetable garden behind the guest house was doing well too, the soil of the graveyard being as it was a compost pit of ancient provenance. […] [T]hey grew brinjals, beans, chillies, tomatoes and several kinds of gourds, all of which, despite the smoke and fumes from the heavy traffic on the roads that abutted the graveyard, attracted several varieties of butterflies. Some of the more able-bodied addicts were recruited to help with the garden and the animals. It seemed to bring them some temporary solace. […] So all in all […] things were going well in the old graveyard. The same, however, could not be said of the Duniya. (Roy 2017, 399–400)

It can be claimed, therefore, that the residents of the guest house develop a transactional interactive relationship, as Evanoff suggests, with the local environment – where they show concern for the restoration of the ecological balance – and the environment, in return, offers a sense of belonging to the place founded upon nature–culture correlations (2011, 154). This can also be considered as the politics of survival for the Others which intends, in Berg’s view, to ‘restore natural systems, satisfy basic human needs, and develop support for individuals.’ (2009, 162). In this approach, both humans can modify nature within local ecological limits and can also be modified by it in achieving ‘richer possibilities of human experience’ (Evanoff 2011, 162–171). It is this richer experience of being part of the larger community, inclusive of humans, nonhumans and the environment that empowers Anjum to look beyond the dualist gender model and to consider several spaces as her home. The plural ethos of the bioregion that she has created as home for herself and Others enables her to accept her bodily differences as normal and to connect with a larger community, irrespective of gender, class, religion, or species distinctions. As ‘expand[ing] the notion of community’ by ‘honouring the diversity of species’ is crucial in creating a cosmopolitan bioregional identity (Thomashow 1999, 120), Anjum’s inclusion of diverse human and nonhuman groups as members of the guest house allows her to formulate a cosmopolitan identity. Consequently, her ambiguity over identity and lack of sense of place appear to be resolved when her fragmented selves, as lower class, intersex individual, converge in the cosmopolitan space of the graveyard.

Additionally, a cosmopolitan space encourages an alternative development paradigm that rejects global domination and exploitation in the name of assistance. Also, it emphasises the importance of local ‘self-sufficiency’ of a region, which will allow economic freedom, cultural development and social progress in assigning decision-making power in the hands of the local community (Evanoff 2011, 148). Anjum’s aim to participate in the project of development, therefore, as a small-scale entrepreneur by renting out spaces of the guest house to the local public can be viewed as a self-sustaining practice for autonomy:

Over time Anjum began to enclose the graves of her relatives and build rooms around them. Each room had a grave (or two) and a bed. Or two […].

Anjum began to rent a couple of rooms to down-and-out travellers […].

Anjum called her guest house Jannat. Paradise […].

Gradually Jannat Guest House became a hub for Hijras who, for one reason or another, had fallen out of, or been expelled from, the tightly administered grid of Hijra Gharanas […].

Gradually Jannat Guest House and Funeral Services became so much a part of the landscape that nobody questioned its provenance or its rights to exist. It existed. And that was that. (Roy 2017, 67–80)

Therefore, the utilization of an abandoned space to generate income appears as a form of alternative development that ensures active participation of all in the project of development, self-sustainability and economic freedom. Significantly, ritualised dancing at births and weddings, sex work and begging are usually the norms for the hijra community in India on which their livelihood depends (Nanda 1990; Reddy 2005). The Jannat guest house, on the contrary, provides Anjum an alternative to curve out a position as an entrepreneur for herself. After years of suffering social humiliation and exclusion as the Other, the alternative economic opportunity allows Anjum to come out of the prejudices and stigma associated with hijra practices and to traverse the boundaries demarcated by her genderless and classless status. As the owner of the housing and funeral service business and, therefore, an active participant in the local project of economic self-sufficiency, she can now engage in the neoliberal development that marks the milieu of the metropolis in the twenty-first century India.

Moreover, while the classless poor as Others remain excluded from the process of development, the alternative bioregional model enables them to attain basic amenities such as free education, the lack of which affects their livelihoods by trapping them in the snare of poverty. As the absence of education intensifies poverty, apart from the dearth of ‘material consumption’, ‘environmental quality’ and ‘political freedom’ (Evanoff 2011), the decision to offer free education to poor children in the guest house can be viewed as part of the development strategy in alleviating the sense of Otherness:

Word spread quickly in the poorer quarters that a cleaver woman [Tilo, another resident of the guest House] had moved into the graveyard. Parents in the neighbourhood flocked to enrol their children in the classes Tilo held at Jannat Guest House. […] [S]he taught them arithmetic, drawing, computer graphics […], a bit of basic science, English and eccentricity. From them she learned Urdu and something of the art of happiness. She worked a long day and, for the first time in her life, slept a full night. (Roy 2017, 397)

Unlike traditional educational system that prepares humans for export driven economies, such education system aims to highlight local self-sustainability with ecological knowledge and higher quality of life, offering liberty ‘from the treadmill of production and consumption’ (Evanoff 2011, 162). Besides, education as a survival strategy assists human Others in becoming ‘actors’, who can decide on the nature of development in cosmopolitan spaces, and in choosing ethical environmental practices over unsustainable ones (Bebbington 2003, 302). In other words, the agentic participation of all groups in the creation of an alternative economy will solidify the sense of community-based identity and, thus, the sense of Otherness can be alleviated by deconstructing socio-cultural dualist categories. Therefore, the guest house’s offering basic education to the poor can be regarded as an act of participation in the project of development. Similarly, it serves as an important mode of connecting with and expanding the network of pluralist community with the aim to alleviate the sense of Otherness.

Consequently, the hybrid space of the guest house, modelled upon alternative developmental paradigm, offers employment and local self-sufficiency to groups of human Others. In the process, it becomes a bioregion, which both considers the plurality of society, culture, and human practices and adopts a local ‘place-based orientation’ in creating ‘home’ places (Thomashow 2002, 5). Thus, the guest house appears as a home of Others interconnected to both local spaces and spaces beyond in constituting a community, which is inclusive of global culture, economy as well as an understanding of the agency of nonhumans and nature.

Conclusion

This study has explored politics of intersex (hijra) identity at the intersection of spatiality of places, mediated by socio-cultural coordinates of gender and class, and the plurality of human culture, comprising human-nonhuman interdependence. By amalgamating cultural geographical perception of sense of place and home with bioregional cosmopolitan understanding of pluralist community of humans and nonhumans, the study has shown how Anjum, the intersex protagonist of the novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, develops a cosmopolitan identity, irrespective of gender, class, caste and species distinctions. Furthermore, the study has investigated the way the pluralist space of Anjum’s home, founded upon an alternative self-sustainable bioregional model, is both connected to and separated from spaces across India in maintaining local bioregional economic self-sufficiency, cultural development, and ethical environmental practices. Again, such alternative self-sustainable bioregional model has been found to be crucial for social inclusion of those living on the periphery, as it allows agentic participation of all human groups in the project of development.

The study has, therefore, expatiated on the concept of home as a conglomerate of humans, human Others, nonhumans, and the environment in both local and faraway places. By focusing on pluralist and agentic sense of belonging as marking the spatiality of home, the study has foregrounded the way dualist paradigms, responsible for the process of Othering, constrictive social practices, and spatial segregation of hijras, can be challenged and negotiated in the neoliberal age of development. Moreover, by highlighting the interconnections between gender performances, such as masculine(culture)/feminine (nature), reason/emotion, and spatial distinctions, for instance work/home, public/private, global/local, among others, the study has contributed to feminist geographical analysis of gendered space and has explored the possibility of challenging restrictive gender practices affecting sense of place in a space. Instead of representing hermaphrodites as mere passive recipients of social humiliation and exclusion, the study has underscored the way Roy has depicted her intersex protagonist as active participant in the project of development. Despite being perceived as individuals with ambiguous gender status, hijras can resolve their ambiguity over identity, as the study has emphasised with reference to Roy’s narrative, by accepting their bodily differences as normal in a pluralist cosmopolitan community. Consequently, it is through this pluralist perception of self, especially as a contributor to the local economic development project, prejudices and discrimination against hijras can be alleviated, establishing a connection between local community and the wider society.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to my colleagues at the School of Humanities, University of Eastern Finland for their critical inputs on the article. I would like to extend my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal for their comments and suggestions on the earlier version of the manuscript. I am indebted to the Kone Foundation for the funding that has made this research possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kone Foundation under Grant number 201805088.

Notes on contributors

Barnali Sarkar

Dr Barnali Sarkar is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of English Language and Culture at the University of Eastern Finland. She completed her doctoral degree in 2017 and her doctoral dissertation explored human–nonhuman/animal interactions in postcolonial spaces in relation to contemporary Anglophone Indian novel. Her research interests include interdisciplinary sub-disciplines of environmental humanities such as ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and bioregionalism as well as postcolonialism, race-class/caste interrelations, transnational migration and cosmopolitanism. She is currently working on her postdoctoral project that explicates various dimensions of human–nonhuman encounters, such as between human and animal, human and living organism, human and nature, and human and machine in contemporary environmentally oriented and award-winning novels from India, Finland, and the United States.