State, citizenship and gender-variant communities in India

ABSTRACT

Though persons belonging to gender-variant communities (GVCs) were a part of the Indian culture for thousands of years, new modalities were introduced to outlaw them under colonial rule. Post-independence, GVCs were subjected to progressive laws in theory; yet the colonial legal framework was largely retained in practice. Despite their significant presence in the public sphere, GVCs struggled for decades to acquire cognitive visibility and citizenship rights. Even the civil society in India at large overlooked their entitlement to sexual identity until the late 1990s. This paper, based on field and documentary data, uncovers the struggles of GVCs to claim citizenship rights in India. Beginning with the tradition of ‘cultural family’ under Gharana, the trajectory relegated them first to ‘illegal’ citizens under colonial rule and subsequently to ‘captive’ citizens in post-Independent India. Their positioning as ‘stranded’ citizens even after passing the new law in 2019 also challenges their potential as ‘monitorial citizens’.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender-variant communities
• citizen
• rights
• law
• state
• civil society
• NGOs

Note on the contributor

Banhishikha Ghosh is a Swiss Government Excellence PhD Scholar (ESKAS) under the chair of Prof. Dr Johannes Quack at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. She completed her Masters and M. Phil degrees from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research focuses on themes of gender, sexuality, intimacy, identity, and citizenship in India. Some of her recent work has appeared in Contemporary South Asia, Anthropology in Action, and Indian Journal of Gender Studies, amongst others.

Acknowledgments

I sincerely acknowledge the contributions of the anonymous referees and the editorial team of Citizenship Studies in revising, editing and formatting the paper. I am indebted to Prof. Maitrayee Chaudhuri who immensely assisted me to articulate many of the ideas discussed in this paper. This paper was presented at the Development Days 2020 Conference organized by Finnish Society for Development Research at Helsinki, and I thank the experts of my panel, Dr. Tiina Kontinen, Dr. Eija Ranta, and Dr. Henri Onodera for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank my PhD supervisor Prof. Johannes Quack and my MPhil Supervisor Prof. Vivek Kumar for their unwavering support and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Let me introduce these identities in brief:

a) The term hijra refers to a popular gender-variant community in South Asia. Scholars (Cohen 1995; Reddy 2005;; Hall 2005; Kalra 2011) have argued that these marginalised GVCs, who are assigned male status at birth, maintain complex identity blending kinship-based social organisation with Islamic and Hindu religious practices.

b) Zenanas refer to cross-dressers, individuals, who might or might not be castrated or impotent, but sustain their lives by ceremonial begging.

c) Aravani, a Tamil word, refers to a man who changes sex by castration.

d) Koti (or Kothi) refers to an effeminate man or ‘prospective hijra’ (Sinha 1967). However, it is difficult to generalise them (Hall 2005).

e) The Tamil word Thirunangai means a respectful (‘thiru’) lady (‘nangai’). It was introduced as a replacement of the derogatory term ‘aravani’ in 2006 by the DMK leader Karunanidhi to address the community (Ramakrishnan 2019).

2. My primary purpose is not to discuss lesbians, gays and other queer identities.

3. Akharas are designated groups and houses where GVCs live and practice vocations like ritual begging.

4. Being a group leader, the guru serves as the spiritual head and initiates chelas into the institutionalised system of gender variance, providing them with food and shelter.

5. It is believed that if a hijra curses someone, it would materialise in reality and may ruin the whole family. Concurrently, if she blesses, it is believed to be positive.

6. Banerji (2019) notes how most firms maintain a wide gender gap and do not diversify. Moreover, because many trans community members either remain illiterate or leave school early, they cannot look for career prospects in the corporate sector. Badgett (2014) also comprehensively analyses the economic cost of stigma, exclusions and inherent discrimination that GVCs face within the Indian state and market.

Additional information

Funding

This work is not supported by any funding