Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India, 2021
Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans
populations, have been an enduring presence in
the... more Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche. Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance or irresponsibility but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning distinct from the secularized accounts within the horizon of public health programs and queer theory. Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday—laughter, flirting, teasing—to impossible longings, kinship networks, and economies of property and of substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.
Private primary care providers are usually the first site where afflictions come under institutio... more Private primary care providers are usually the first site where afflictions come under institutional view. In the context of poverty, the relationship between illness and care is more complex than a simple division of responsibilities between various actors—with care given by kin, and diagnosis and treatment being the purview of providers. Since patients would often visit the provider with family members, providers are attuned to the patients’ web of kinship. Providers would take patients’ kinship arrangements into account when prescribing diagnostic tests and treatments. This paper terms this aspect of the clinical encounter as ‘kin testing’ to refer to situations/clinical encounters when providers take into consideration that care provided by kin was conditional. ‘Kin testing’ allowed providers to manage the episode of illness that had brought the patient to the clinic by relying on clinical judgment rather than confirmed laboratory tests. Furthermore, since complaints of poor health also were an idiom to communicate kin neglect, providers had to also discern how to negotiate diagnoses and treatments. Kinship determined whether the afflicted bodies brought to the clinics were diagnosed, whether medicines reached the body, and adherence maintained. The providers’ actions make visible the difference that kinship made in how health is imagined in the clinic and in standardized protocols. Focusing on primary care clinics in Patna, India, we contribute to research that shows that kinship determines care and management of illnesses at home by showing that relatedness of patients gets folded in the clinic by providers as well.
The vocabulary of and tasks associated with COVID-19—social isolation, lockdown, quarantine, hand... more The vocabulary of and tasks associated with COVID-19—social isolation, lockdown, quarantine, hand washing and sanitizing, using face masks and shields—are all too familiar for us now. These are, at once, individuated and collective efforts to contain the spread of the virus. The collective as being spatially collected, or crowds, however, are an anathema for now. Amid varying stages of lockdowns and their unlocking, states across the world desire resumption of economic activities, but in a way that would allow for a control on the movement of people, lest there be crowding. The crowd and to crowd have taken on signification in the current moment, tied as they are to the uncertainty generated by the virus and, also, through the measures taken to stop its spread.
Any anxiety about whether the world will see crowds with all their radical and equalizing potential (Canetti 1961) now stands at rest. The fear of contagion has not stopped the convening and reconvening of political crowds, as may be seen in the anti-racism protests following George Floyd’s death and from the protesting migrant population in India, who suddenly found themselves without work, food, shelter and means to get back home in the lockdown period. The possibility of contagion is but one risk that political minorities face in a pandemic; racism and dispossession are continuing public health emergencies as we already know from the disproportionate number of infections among the African-American population in New York.
In his work on crowds, Canetti was emphatic that no institutions could decidedly be relied on to repress the growth of crowds once and for all. This contention has an increased valence during the pandemic because even when backed with extraordinary and emergency powers, states have not been able to stop the protesting crowd/s. The inability of states to control and limit crowds sits in some contrast to the wider field of surveillance laid out in the pandemic where technological innovations are supposed to improve response time and optimize deployment of personnel. This would remain true for spaces that are policed—airports, street patrolling, railways stations, bus terminals, metros—and those that a managed by software solutions like galleries, theme parks, malls, theatres, to name a few. After all, crowds do need to be managed tied as they are to generation of profits and revenue.
With this background in mind, this Special Section on Crowds intends to make a timely intervention in thinking through Canetti’s contention that crowds allow for collective joy to be experienced as transcendental and being part of one submerges our individual failings. The anti-racism protests, at the time of coronavirus, remind us of the collective potential of a crowd, but with more and more investment in individual identification, we ask, what might be the future of crowds and the anonymity they afford? On an adjacent register, all crowds are not motivated by political intent and the context of a pandemic has meant that crowding can be a result of state policies. The set of essays gathered in this section span in their focus, different regions, disciplines, and periods of time, together offer thought provoking arguments on what crowds as an analytic concept reveals and predicts about our lives during Covid-19.
Simulated standardized patients (SSP) have emerged as close to a ‘gold standard’ for measuring th... more Simulated standardized patients (SSP) have emerged as close to a ‘gold standard’ for measuring the quality of clinical care. This method resolves problems of patient mix across healthcare providers and allows care to be benchmarked against preexisting standards. Nevertheless, SSPs are not real patients. How, then, should data from SSPs be considered relative to clinical observations with ‘real’ patients in a given health system? Here, we reject the proposition that SSPs are direct substitutes for real patients and that the validity of SSP studies therefore relies on their ability to imitate real patients. Instead, we argue that the success of the SSP methodology lies in its counterfactual manipulations of the possibilities available to real careseekers – especially those paths not taken up by them – through which real responses can be elicited from real providers. Using results from a unique pilot study where SSPs returned to providers for follow-ups when asked, we demonstrate that the SSP method works well to elicit responses from the provider through conditional manipulations of SSP behavior. At the same time, observational methods are better suited to understand what choices real people make, and how these can affect the direction of diagnosis and treatment. A combination of SSP and observational methods can thus help parse out how quality of care emerges for the “patient” as a shared history between care-seeking individuals and care providers.
This article juxtaposes various sets of narrative accounts to explain the theological underpinnin... more This article juxtaposes various sets of narrative accounts to explain the theological underpinnings of liberal explanations for accommodating queer sexuality in India. First, the article looks at contemporary Bollywood films in which hijras are often inserted into the plot to bring the villains to justice, sometimes by castrating them. This seeming contradiction, in which queer personhood is made life-affirming, reveals the complex ways in which hijras have been redefined as legitimizing forms of historical queerness in South Asia. Their role, it is argued, is better understood not through an ontological notion of generosity but through the particular dramaturgical position of the sutradhar that the Hindu-Muslim theology of South Asia makes available. The sutradhar is the one who holds (dhar) the strings (sutra) of the dramatic plot. The voicing and enacting of the moral position with which queer ethics have been associated, both in film and in life, are drawn from this character. Given that the long documented history of hijras has made them quite intelligible to South Asian people without the need for translation, this article argues that debates of queer sexuality must go beyond the civilizational terms of “West and the rest” and explore the theological material available for the crafting of queer personhood and ethics.
In 2013, a new technology, GeneXpert, was introduced in India, which, in addition to testing for ... more In 2013, a new technology, GeneXpert, was introduced in India, which, in addition to testing for TB, could also diagnose whether the detected strain was drug resistant. By detecting the bacterium more effectively than other available tests and simultaneously testing for resistance, GeneXpert promised to reduce the delay in diagnosis and hence ineffective treatments. The new test was introduced to multiple cities via a coalition that included global health funding bodies, the government of India, the World Health Organization, and non-governmental organizations. Despite the concerted effort of the coalition, among formal providers (those trained in biomedicine) in the private sector, the new technology was not adopted as quickly as had been hoped. Examining formal providers' initial responses to the technology's introduction in the city of Patna reveals how the adoption of new technology can be influenced by the particularities of the local medical market such as the availability of diagnostic tests, presence of informal providers, and reputation of formal providers. While protocols and operations might seem standardized across implementation plans, the work that is required to ensure success must take into account the particular role that the market plays from site to site.
This article begins by examining multiple drafts of a parliamentary legislation that aims to
prov... more This article begins by examining multiple drafts of a parliamentary legislation that aims to provide rights and reservations to transgender persons in India, so as to trace the ways in which hijras have been absorbed into the discourse of nationalism. The most current draft of this bill, ‘The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016’ shows that despite claims to protect transgender citizens, the state uses the discourse of nationalism to justify the increased governmentalisation of hijra bodies and lives. I bring attention to the state’s insistence on the distance between homosexuals and hijras and the active endorsement of Sexual Reassignment Surgery to argue that the legislations are consolidating heterosexuality rather than making space for queer citizens. The project of heterosexualisation marks the disjuncture between colonial and contemporary ambitions of policing hijras, which have remained remarkably consistent and centred around their economic activity of begging. Based on ethnographic research conducted in rural Odisha, I question the glossing of hijras’ practice of seeking alms or challa as begging, to show how limits of nationalism are drawn and render hijra forms of being as incommensurable with the state.
Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has the potential to reduce HIV acquisition among adolescent... more Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has the potential to reduce HIV acquisition among adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in sub-Saharan Africa. However, health care providers’ (HCPs) perspectives and interactions with potential clients can substantially influence effective provision of quality health services. We examine if HCPs’ knowledge, attitude, and skills, as well as their perceptions of facility readiness to provide PrEP are associated with their willingness to provide PrEP to AGYW at high risk of HIV in Tanzania.
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2015
CONTENTS
* Veena Das and Jacob Copeman - Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)pro... more CONTENTS * Veena Das and Jacob Copeman - Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation * Jonah Steinberg - Remaining Nameless: Names, Hiding, and Dislocation Among Delhi’s Runaways * Vaibhav Saria - To Be Some Other Name: The Naming Games that Hijras Play * Deepak Mehta - Naming the Deity, Naming the City: Rama and Ayodhya * Jacob Copeman - Secularism’s Names: Commitment to Confusion and the Pedagogy of the Name * Alexander Henn - Kristapurāṇa: Translating the Name of God in Early Modern Goa * William Mazzarella - On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names * Luke Alexander Heslop - Signboards and the Naming of Small Businesses: Personhood and Dissimulation in a Sri Lankan Market Town * Aditya Bharadwaj - Badnam Science? The Spectre of the ‘Bad’ Name and the Politics of Stem Cell Science in India * Gregory Maxwell Bruce - Names and the Critique of History in Urdu Literature: From Manto’s ‘Yazid’ to Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’ * Veena Das - Naming Beyond Pointing: Singularity, Relatedness and the Foreshadowing of Death * Sean Dowdy - Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam)
This chapter responds to Lawrence Cohen's provocation to study the intersection of sexuality and... more This chapter responds to Lawrence Cohen's provocation to study the intersection of sexuality and poverty and the ways in which each comes to invoke the carnality of hijra bodies. More specifically, it tracks hijra aspirations toward reproduction, the future it promises even when granted mythically, and the narratives of constant failure that accompany that aspiration. I end by discussing the resolutions that are negotiated, which can be seen as an allegory for what is survivable. The ethnography that follows studies the forms of relating between hijras and their lovers in rural Orissa and offers some thoughts on the position of the hijra in a world that is seen to offer little by way of care or sustenance. It describes scenes from the everyday with the purpose of tracing the figure of the pregnant hijra and her baby to show how it is invoked by the hijras either to provoke laughter in the audience that inevitably gathers around them, or to flirt with and seduce men. The baby is also mentioned in myths and in the narratives that hijras weave about themselves. I claim that hijras can be understood as standing in a metonymic relationship between their local moral world, with its imagination of a future, and their desire for sex with men. By studying the different ways in which the baby figures in a variety of conversations, I hope to show how the baby signals anxieties found in the reproductive futurity that progeny offers, which hijras see as denied to them.
Review Essay:
1) Hinchy, Jessica, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, C... more Review Essay: 1) Hinchy, Jessica, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, C.1850–1900 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) 2) Kozma, Liat, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East ( Ithaca: State University of New York Press, 2017) 3) Mitra, Durba, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020) 4) Pande, Ishita, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) 5) Surkis, Judith, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)
Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India, 2021
Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans
populations, have been an enduring presence in
the... more Hijras, one of India’s third gendered or trans populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population caught within the AIDS epidemic. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche. Against easy framings of hijras that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance or irresponsibility but rather a specific idiom of erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics, economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of self-fashioning distinct from the secularized accounts within the horizon of public health programs and queer theory. Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday—laughter, flirting, teasing—to impossible longings, kinship networks, and economies of property and of substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.
Private primary care providers are usually the first site where afflictions come under institutio... more Private primary care providers are usually the first site where afflictions come under institutional view. In the context of poverty, the relationship between illness and care is more complex than a simple division of responsibilities between various actors—with care given by kin, and diagnosis and treatment being the purview of providers. Since patients would often visit the provider with family members, providers are attuned to the patients’ web of kinship. Providers would take patients’ kinship arrangements into account when prescribing diagnostic tests and treatments. This paper terms this aspect of the clinical encounter as ‘kin testing’ to refer to situations/clinical encounters when providers take into consideration that care provided by kin was conditional. ‘Kin testing’ allowed providers to manage the episode of illness that had brought the patient to the clinic by relying on clinical judgment rather than confirmed laboratory tests. Furthermore, since complaints of poor health also were an idiom to communicate kin neglect, providers had to also discern how to negotiate diagnoses and treatments. Kinship determined whether the afflicted bodies brought to the clinics were diagnosed, whether medicines reached the body, and adherence maintained. The providers’ actions make visible the difference that kinship made in how health is imagined in the clinic and in standardized protocols. Focusing on primary care clinics in Patna, India, we contribute to research that shows that kinship determines care and management of illnesses at home by showing that relatedness of patients gets folded in the clinic by providers as well.
The vocabulary of and tasks associated with COVID-19—social isolation, lockdown, quarantine, hand... more The vocabulary of and tasks associated with COVID-19—social isolation, lockdown, quarantine, hand washing and sanitizing, using face masks and shields—are all too familiar for us now. These are, at once, individuated and collective efforts to contain the spread of the virus. The collective as being spatially collected, or crowds, however, are an anathema for now. Amid varying stages of lockdowns and their unlocking, states across the world desire resumption of economic activities, but in a way that would allow for a control on the movement of people, lest there be crowding. The crowd and to crowd have taken on signification in the current moment, tied as they are to the uncertainty generated by the virus and, also, through the measures taken to stop its spread.
Any anxiety about whether the world will see crowds with all their radical and equalizing potential (Canetti 1961) now stands at rest. The fear of contagion has not stopped the convening and reconvening of political crowds, as may be seen in the anti-racism protests following George Floyd’s death and from the protesting migrant population in India, who suddenly found themselves without work, food, shelter and means to get back home in the lockdown period. The possibility of contagion is but one risk that political minorities face in a pandemic; racism and dispossession are continuing public health emergencies as we already know from the disproportionate number of infections among the African-American population in New York.
In his work on crowds, Canetti was emphatic that no institutions could decidedly be relied on to repress the growth of crowds once and for all. This contention has an increased valence during the pandemic because even when backed with extraordinary and emergency powers, states have not been able to stop the protesting crowd/s. The inability of states to control and limit crowds sits in some contrast to the wider field of surveillance laid out in the pandemic where technological innovations are supposed to improve response time and optimize deployment of personnel. This would remain true for spaces that are policed—airports, street patrolling, railways stations, bus terminals, metros—and those that a managed by software solutions like galleries, theme parks, malls, theatres, to name a few. After all, crowds do need to be managed tied as they are to generation of profits and revenue.
With this background in mind, this Special Section on Crowds intends to make a timely intervention in thinking through Canetti’s contention that crowds allow for collective joy to be experienced as transcendental and being part of one submerges our individual failings. The anti-racism protests, at the time of coronavirus, remind us of the collective potential of a crowd, but with more and more investment in individual identification, we ask, what might be the future of crowds and the anonymity they afford? On an adjacent register, all crowds are not motivated by political intent and the context of a pandemic has meant that crowding can be a result of state policies. The set of essays gathered in this section span in their focus, different regions, disciplines, and periods of time, together offer thought provoking arguments on what crowds as an analytic concept reveals and predicts about our lives during Covid-19.
Simulated standardized patients (SSP) have emerged as close to a ‘gold standard’ for measuring th... more Simulated standardized patients (SSP) have emerged as close to a ‘gold standard’ for measuring the quality of clinical care. This method resolves problems of patient mix across healthcare providers and allows care to be benchmarked against preexisting standards. Nevertheless, SSPs are not real patients. How, then, should data from SSPs be considered relative to clinical observations with ‘real’ patients in a given health system? Here, we reject the proposition that SSPs are direct substitutes for real patients and that the validity of SSP studies therefore relies on their ability to imitate real patients. Instead, we argue that the success of the SSP methodology lies in its counterfactual manipulations of the possibilities available to real careseekers – especially those paths not taken up by them – through which real responses can be elicited from real providers. Using results from a unique pilot study where SSPs returned to providers for follow-ups when asked, we demonstrate that the SSP method works well to elicit responses from the provider through conditional manipulations of SSP behavior. At the same time, observational methods are better suited to understand what choices real people make, and how these can affect the direction of diagnosis and treatment. A combination of SSP and observational methods can thus help parse out how quality of care emerges for the “patient” as a shared history between care-seeking individuals and care providers.
This article juxtaposes various sets of narrative accounts to explain the theological underpinnin... more This article juxtaposes various sets of narrative accounts to explain the theological underpinnings of liberal explanations for accommodating queer sexuality in India. First, the article looks at contemporary Bollywood films in which hijras are often inserted into the plot to bring the villains to justice, sometimes by castrating them. This seeming contradiction, in which queer personhood is made life-affirming, reveals the complex ways in which hijras have been redefined as legitimizing forms of historical queerness in South Asia. Their role, it is argued, is better understood not through an ontological notion of generosity but through the particular dramaturgical position of the sutradhar that the Hindu-Muslim theology of South Asia makes available. The sutradhar is the one who holds (dhar) the strings (sutra) of the dramatic plot. The voicing and enacting of the moral position with which queer ethics have been associated, both in film and in life, are drawn from this character. Given that the long documented history of hijras has made them quite intelligible to South Asian people without the need for translation, this article argues that debates of queer sexuality must go beyond the civilizational terms of “West and the rest” and explore the theological material available for the crafting of queer personhood and ethics.
In 2013, a new technology, GeneXpert, was introduced in India, which, in addition to testing for ... more In 2013, a new technology, GeneXpert, was introduced in India, which, in addition to testing for TB, could also diagnose whether the detected strain was drug resistant. By detecting the bacterium more effectively than other available tests and simultaneously testing for resistance, GeneXpert promised to reduce the delay in diagnosis and hence ineffective treatments. The new test was introduced to multiple cities via a coalition that included global health funding bodies, the government of India, the World Health Organization, and non-governmental organizations. Despite the concerted effort of the coalition, among formal providers (those trained in biomedicine) in the private sector, the new technology was not adopted as quickly as had been hoped. Examining formal providers' initial responses to the technology's introduction in the city of Patna reveals how the adoption of new technology can be influenced by the particularities of the local medical market such as the availability of diagnostic tests, presence of informal providers, and reputation of formal providers. While protocols and operations might seem standardized across implementation plans, the work that is required to ensure success must take into account the particular role that the market plays from site to site.
This article begins by examining multiple drafts of a parliamentary legislation that aims to
prov... more This article begins by examining multiple drafts of a parliamentary legislation that aims to provide rights and reservations to transgender persons in India, so as to trace the ways in which hijras have been absorbed into the discourse of nationalism. The most current draft of this bill, ‘The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016’ shows that despite claims to protect transgender citizens, the state uses the discourse of nationalism to justify the increased governmentalisation of hijra bodies and lives. I bring attention to the state’s insistence on the distance between homosexuals and hijras and the active endorsement of Sexual Reassignment Surgery to argue that the legislations are consolidating heterosexuality rather than making space for queer citizens. The project of heterosexualisation marks the disjuncture between colonial and contemporary ambitions of policing hijras, which have remained remarkably consistent and centred around their economic activity of begging. Based on ethnographic research conducted in rural Odisha, I question the glossing of hijras’ practice of seeking alms or challa as begging, to show how limits of nationalism are drawn and render hijra forms of being as incommensurable with the state.
Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has the potential to reduce HIV acquisition among adolescent... more Oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has the potential to reduce HIV acquisition among adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in sub-Saharan Africa. However, health care providers’ (HCPs) perspectives and interactions with potential clients can substantially influence effective provision of quality health services. We examine if HCPs’ knowledge, attitude, and skills, as well as their perceptions of facility readiness to provide PrEP are associated with their willingness to provide PrEP to AGYW at high risk of HIV in Tanzania.
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2015
CONTENTS
* Veena Das and Jacob Copeman - Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)pro... more CONTENTS * Veena Das and Jacob Copeman - Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation * Jonah Steinberg - Remaining Nameless: Names, Hiding, and Dislocation Among Delhi’s Runaways * Vaibhav Saria - To Be Some Other Name: The Naming Games that Hijras Play * Deepak Mehta - Naming the Deity, Naming the City: Rama and Ayodhya * Jacob Copeman - Secularism’s Names: Commitment to Confusion and the Pedagogy of the Name * Alexander Henn - Kristapurāṇa: Translating the Name of God in Early Modern Goa * William Mazzarella - On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names * Luke Alexander Heslop - Signboards and the Naming of Small Businesses: Personhood and Dissimulation in a Sri Lankan Market Town * Aditya Bharadwaj - Badnam Science? The Spectre of the ‘Bad’ Name and the Politics of Stem Cell Science in India * Gregory Maxwell Bruce - Names and the Critique of History in Urdu Literature: From Manto’s ‘Yazid’ to Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’ * Veena Das - Naming Beyond Pointing: Singularity, Relatedness and the Foreshadowing of Death * Sean Dowdy - Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam)
This chapter responds to Lawrence Cohen's provocation to study the intersection of sexuality and... more This chapter responds to Lawrence Cohen's provocation to study the intersection of sexuality and poverty and the ways in which each comes to invoke the carnality of hijra bodies. More specifically, it tracks hijra aspirations toward reproduction, the future it promises even when granted mythically, and the narratives of constant failure that accompany that aspiration. I end by discussing the resolutions that are negotiated, which can be seen as an allegory for what is survivable. The ethnography that follows studies the forms of relating between hijras and their lovers in rural Orissa and offers some thoughts on the position of the hijra in a world that is seen to offer little by way of care or sustenance. It describes scenes from the everyday with the purpose of tracing the figure of the pregnant hijra and her baby to show how it is invoked by the hijras either to provoke laughter in the audience that inevitably gathers around them, or to flirt with and seduce men. The baby is also mentioned in myths and in the narratives that hijras weave about themselves. I claim that hijras can be understood as standing in a metonymic relationship between their local moral world, with its imagination of a future, and their desire for sex with men. By studying the different ways in which the baby figures in a variety of conversations, I hope to show how the baby signals anxieties found in the reproductive futurity that progeny offers, which hijras see as denied to them.
Review Essay:
1) Hinchy, Jessica, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, C... more Review Essay: 1) Hinchy, Jessica, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, C.1850–1900 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) 2) Kozma, Liat, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East ( Ithaca: State University of New York Press, 2017) 3) Mitra, Durba, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020) 4) Pande, Ishita, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) 5) Surkis, Judith, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)
Tamil athlete Santhi Soundararajan attempted suicide in September 2007 in Pudukottai by consuming... more Tamil athlete Santhi Soundararajan attempted suicide in September 2007 in Pudukottai by consuming dangerous amounts of a veterinary drug. She was driven to take her own life because, in 2006, after winning the silver in the women's 800m race at the Asian Games, she was stripped of her medal, her accolades, and her job (she had earlier that year won the gold in the 1,500m and the silver in the 800m at the South Asian Games in Colombo) and subjected to humiliation and governmental indifference. This is because a test ostensibly revealed that she was biologically intersexed. (which means that while the male has XY chromosomes and the female has XX chromosomes, there are instances when a person might have an XXY chromosome as well, hence, intersex, somewhere between the two sexes). Furthermore, I should just mention at the outset, that having this extra chromosome doesn't necessary mean that you have external physical manifestations of both the sexes. Hence, let us straightaway clear Santhi of any intentional deception. The way media represented the case didn't help either; calling it " the sad story of " or " the mysterious case " or " the strange case of " Santhi Soundararajan instead of looking at what assumptions of gender and sex were problematically being made by the federation. Instead of raising a ruckus — the reports were relishing the sensation of the 'freak' and had hideous and offensive headlines like 'Santhi runs like a man, but cries like a woman.' The Olympic Council of Asia assumes that there are two genders and two sexes (the International Olympic Committee does not do gender tests), but also that these genders and these sexes have something universally definitive about them. There is a plethora of genders out there — male, female, intersex, hijra, transsexual, transgender, male-to-female transsexuals (MTF), female-to-male transsexuals (FTM): should they not be given the chance to become sportspeople? There are a lot of sexes as well: the male sex (XY chromosomes), the female sex (XX chromosomes), the Turner Syndrome (XO chromosomes), the Triple xxx Syndrome (XXX chromosomes), the Klinefelter syndrome (XXY), XYY syndrome, XX male syndrome, Swyer syndrome (XY female). And I have just hit the three chromosomes list — the list is longer if you look at anomalies with four chromosomes. And none of these " deviations " necessarily imply any physical manifestations, deformities or incapacities. The point is that there are not just two sexes. The intersexed condition, with which Santhi was ostensibly diagnosed, itself has five variations. People are born with both or neither of the male and female gonads. Further, the stage of development of either results in more combinations, which ultimately makes it impossible to determine clearly whether you fall into the male or the female category. The ambiguity in the reports about Santhi in the Indian media shows this ignorance. References to her ambiguous sex organs, to her anatomy not matching her chromosomes, to her characteristics of a woman and the internal sex organs of a man. If this is Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS), she is not a man because her body does not respond to testosterone she is producing, but there is no space, at the end of the day, for an XY female athlete. Now, take the plurality of genders (which by no means is an exhaustive list) and take the numbers of choromosomal patterns (which again is not an exhaustive list) and create all sorts of permutations and combinations and see the number you come up with. How can then you clearly say this is a man and this a woman? Should people with all of these " syndromes " not be allowed to play? Should they not be allowed to live? The violence of such archaic notions of sex, uninformed by science, and unethical in practice are clear. Santhi tried to kill herself because she was an athlete, a brilliant athlete, who had won for her country one of the few medals that it manages to win every four years, who had been shamed and stripped of her hard-earned and well-deserved medal because of some outdated and unscientific beliefs about sex and gender. Very few among us can claim to know that feeling that an athlete, especially a lower caste athlete from a small town (Kathakurichi) gets, when, after years of toil and discipline, she holds the fruits of her work in her hands and makes her village and family proud. The shame and the violence of having all of that negated because of unsubstantiated and unjustified reasons backed by some old boys' uninterrogated crap about sex and gender must be bafflingly painful to her. Nobody contested not only the administering of this test (the team comprising a gynaecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist and genetic expert — god save us from these!) but also what it assumed. I find such assumptions rich coming especially from the field of sports which has a long history of encouraging the consumption of performance-inducing drugs that play havoc with one's hormonal system, starting from cocaine and opium in the 17th century. What kind of " natural " performance and " natural " athletes are the sports federations around the world looking for when they pump their athletes with all kinds of unnatural substances that they first allow and then ban? Give me the kabbadi tournaments in Punjab, the football clubs of Calcutta, and mohalla cricket over the cruel, discriminating arena of international sports. They apparently are not concerned with whether you're a good athlete, but whether you have the right chromosomes. The only relief for Santhi and for us is that the Tamil Nadu government recognised her as a female athlete and awarded and feted her. More recently, reports have stated that with the support of the TN government, she has started coaching youngsters in athletics. Along with the aravani voter rights issue, the Tamil Nadu government is proving to be arguably the most progressive government in the country. —Vaibhav Saria is doctoral student in
Bobby Darling par.cipated in the reality television show Sach ka Saamna in August and besides ent... more Bobby Darling par.cipated in the reality television show Sach ka Saamna in August and besides entertaining audiences by facing the truth; she was also made to cry for them. The show, whose logic is so brilliant that even I can only admire it (piCng people's hypocrisy against their greed), is certainly no place to pose hard ques.ons on gender and sexuality. I started wincing right at beginning when the host, Rajeev Khandelwal, asked Bobby to resolve a dilemma for him — Should he address Bobby as Kaisi hai or Kaisa hai? Now, correct me if I am wrong, but aren't the producers supposed to do a bit of research on their guests before having them over? Their ques.ons indicate that they do, so why would you invite a pre‐op transsexual woman and ask her an insul.ng ques.on like that? Even if your knowledge is limited on the terminology, one would expect that since you know Bobby dresses like a woman, wants to undergo sexual reassignment surgeries, then you would also know that you're supposed to address her as 'her'. Bobby, to her credit, smiled and resolved this dilemma for Rajeev by chirpily answering, " I'm a girl. " I wish that was the end of it — but the en.re face‐off with truth was lined with ques.ons that just made me gasp at the stupidity. It was so obvious that Bobby was asked to par.cipate so that she could be humiliated for the ..lla.on of the middle class audience. Ques.ons like, " Do you think men are beUer than women? " would never have been posed to other par.cipants because its inanity is so glaring — to which men are they referring to? Which women? BeUer at what? Are men beUer at giving birth to children? But the ques.on was posed to Bobby because she is biologically male and aUracted to men. Poor Bobby was forced to answer this ques.on with a yes or a no. She answers yes, and is forced to psychoanalyze herself then and there about complicated no.ons like sexuality and desire, to defend herself saying, " Men must be superior because I desire them so much that I am ready to undergo painful surgeries to be with them. " This was the highlight, I think, when misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia all aligned themselves to placate the uncomfortable heterosexual viewer. Thus, transsexuals are tolerated because they worship men. These are the same men that abused Bobby Darling. I infer this from the last ques.on on the show, " Have you ever been physically abused by any of your boyfriends? " Bobby replies, " No " but the show 'beeps' her a liar and implies boyfriends have indeed beaten up this transsexual. I wonder why this ques.on is not asked of women who appear on the show with their husbands in tow — isn't there a possibility that they are suffering from domes.c violence in their homes, from the very husbands and mother‐in‐laws who are seated there on that couch? Thus, the show once again assumes and projects a happy family next to the physically abused transsexual. The slew of offensive statements barely disguised as ques.ons never stopped. They included, " Do you believe that most of the men you meet want to sleep with you? " So, on one hand Bobby is supposed to desire men (who are beUer than women) to such an extent that she is willing to undergo painful surgeries and on the other hand men are also supposed to be throwing themselves at Bobby? I wished Bobby had turned the ques.on back on to Rajeev — he's a man, presumably he has met Bobby before — why don't we ask him whether he wants to sleep with Bobby? Instead we ask the woman who has suffered the violence of struggling in Bollywood, who has never been given credit for what she has achieved (her ac.ng in Navarasa), her bravery is only superficially acknowledged in the spirit of this moment of liberalism. We must be wary before we celebrate such visibility — they come at a very high price. We are cut up, dolled up and made to not only entertain television‐viewing, dinner‐chomping families, but also to placate their most homophobic tendencies. Bobby was forced to answer all sorts of contradictory ques.ons that would force her to conform to a no.on of a socially marginalised sexual person that would be palatable to the audience. She was made to cry, to evoke sympathy, her family was dragged in to prove what? That these perverts have families too, so let's be kind to them? She was made to confess that her running away from home killed her mother — so, let's be kind to them but let's also remember that they are a source of pain for families and mothers? And to top it all, the suffering of somebody who is so open about her transgressions, her isola.on and aliena.on is summed up with the ques.on — " Do you think you are going to die a lonely death? " Well, if these are the forms of the new visibility of Gay India, that instead of being sympathe.c to a member of a sexual minority is displaying her as a moment of sensa.onalist commodity, meant to be consumed and .Uered away at, then I am sure we're all going to die lonely deaths. — vaibhavsaria@jhu.edu
Uploads
Videos by Vaibhav Saria
Books by Vaibhav Saria
populations, have been an enduring presence in
the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual,
and in everyday life, often associated in
stigmatized forms with begging and sex work.
In more recent years hijras have seen a degree
of political emergence as a moral presence in
Indian electoral politics, and with heightened
vulnerability within global health terms as a
high-risk population caught within the AIDS
epidemic.
Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts two years living
with a group of hijras in rural India. In this
riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not
just a group of stigmatized or marginalized
others but a way of life composed of laughter,
struggles, and desires that trouble how we read
queerness, kinship, and the psyche.
Against easy framings of hijras that render them
marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the
normative Indian family possible. The book also
shows that particular practices of hijras, such as
refusing to use condoms or comply with
retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance or
irresponsibility but rather a specific idiom of
erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and
Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the
densely intertwined registers of erotics,
economics, and kinship that inform the
everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of
self-fashioning distinct from the secularized
accounts within the horizon of public health
programs and queer theory.
Engrossingly written and full of keen insights,
the book moves from the small pleasures of the
everyday—laughter, flirting, teasing—to
impossible longings, kinship networks, and
economies of property and of substance in
order to give a fuller account of trans lives and
of Indian society today.
Papers by Vaibhav Saria
Any anxiety about whether the world will see crowds with all their radical and equalizing potential (Canetti 1961) now stands at rest. The fear of contagion has not stopped the convening and reconvening of political crowds, as may be seen in the anti-racism protests following George Floyd’s death and from the protesting migrant population in India, who suddenly found themselves without work, food, shelter and means to get back home in the lockdown period. The possibility of contagion is but one risk that political minorities face in a pandemic; racism and dispossession are continuing public health emergencies as we already know from the disproportionate number of infections among the African-American population in New York.
In his work on crowds, Canetti was emphatic that no institutions could decidedly be relied on to repress the growth of crowds once and for all. This contention has an increased valence during the pandemic because even when backed with extraordinary and emergency powers, states have not been able to stop the protesting crowd/s. The inability of states to control and limit crowds sits in some contrast to the wider field of surveillance laid out in the pandemic where technological innovations are supposed to improve response time and optimize deployment of personnel. This would remain true for spaces that are policed—airports, street patrolling, railways stations, bus terminals, metros—and those that a managed by software solutions like galleries, theme parks, malls, theatres, to name a few. After all, crowds do need to be managed tied as they are to generation of profits and revenue.
With this background in mind, this Special Section on Crowds intends to make a timely intervention in thinking through Canetti’s contention that crowds allow for collective joy to be experienced as transcendental and being part of one submerges our individual failings. The anti-racism protests, at the time of coronavirus, remind us of the collective potential of a crowd, but with more and more investment in individual identification, we ask, what might be the future of crowds and the anonymity they afford? On an adjacent register, all crowds are not motivated by political intent and the context of a pandemic has meant that crowding can be a result of state policies. The set of essays gathered in this section span in their focus, different regions, disciplines, and periods of time, together offer thought provoking arguments on what crowds as an analytic concept reveals and predicts about our lives during Covid-19.
provide rights and reservations to transgender persons in India, so as to trace the ways in
which hijras have been absorbed into the discourse of nationalism. The most current draft
of this bill, ‘The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016’ shows that despite
claims to protect transgender citizens, the state uses the discourse of nationalism to justify
the increased governmentalisation of hijra bodies and lives. I bring attention to the state’s
insistence on the distance between homosexuals and hijras and the active endorsement of
Sexual Reassignment Surgery to argue that the legislations are consolidating heterosexuality
rather than making space for queer citizens. The project of heterosexualisation marks the
disjuncture between colonial and contemporary ambitions of policing hijras, which have
remained remarkably consistent and centred around their economic activity of begging.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in rural Odisha, I question the glossing of hijras’
practice of seeking alms or challa as begging, to show how limits of nationalism are drawn
and render hijra forms of being as incommensurable with the state.
effective provision of quality health services. We examine if HCPs’ knowledge, attitude, and skills, as well as their perceptions of facility readiness to provide PrEP are associated with their willingness to provide PrEP to AGYW at high risk of HIV in Tanzania.
* Veena Das and Jacob Copeman - Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation
* Jonah Steinberg - Remaining Nameless: Names, Hiding, and Dislocation Among Delhi’s Runaways
* Vaibhav Saria - To Be Some Other Name: The Naming Games that Hijras Play
* Deepak Mehta - Naming the Deity, Naming the City: Rama and Ayodhya
* Jacob Copeman - Secularism’s Names: Commitment to Confusion and the Pedagogy of the Name
* Alexander Henn - Kristapurāṇa: Translating the Name of God in Early Modern Goa
* William Mazzarella - On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names
* Luke Alexander Heslop - Signboards and the Naming of Small Businesses: Personhood and Dissimulation in a Sri Lankan Market Town
* Aditya Bharadwaj - Badnam Science? The Spectre of the ‘Bad’ Name and the Politics of Stem Cell Science in India
* Gregory Maxwell Bruce - Names and the Critique of History in Urdu Literature:
From Manto’s ‘Yazid’ to Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’
* Veena Das - Naming Beyond Pointing: Singularity, Relatedness and the Foreshadowing of Death
* Sean Dowdy - Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam)
Book Reviews by Vaibhav Saria
1) Hinchy, Jessica, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, C.1850–1900 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
2) Kozma, Liat, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East ( Ithaca: State University of New York Press, 2017)
3) Mitra, Durba, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)
4) Pande, Ishita, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
5) Surkis, Judith, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)
populations, have been an enduring presence in
the South Asian imagination—in myth, in ritual,
and in everyday life, often associated in
stigmatized forms with begging and sex work.
In more recent years hijras have seen a degree
of political emergence as a moral presence in
Indian electoral politics, and with heightened
vulnerability within global health terms as a
high-risk population caught within the AIDS
epidemic.
Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts two years living
with a group of hijras in rural India. In this
riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not
just a group of stigmatized or marginalized
others but a way of life composed of laughter,
struggles, and desires that trouble how we read
queerness, kinship, and the psyche.
Against easy framings of hijras that render them
marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the
normative Indian family possible. The book also
shows that particular practices of hijras, such as
refusing to use condoms or comply with
retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance or
irresponsibility but rather a specific idiom of
erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and
Islamic traditions. This idiom suffuses the
densely intertwined registers of erotics,
economics, and kinship that inform the
everyday lives of hijras and offer a repertoire of
self-fashioning distinct from the secularized
accounts within the horizon of public health
programs and queer theory.
Engrossingly written and full of keen insights,
the book moves from the small pleasures of the
everyday—laughter, flirting, teasing—to
impossible longings, kinship networks, and
economies of property and of substance in
order to give a fuller account of trans lives and
of Indian society today.
Any anxiety about whether the world will see crowds with all their radical and equalizing potential (Canetti 1961) now stands at rest. The fear of contagion has not stopped the convening and reconvening of political crowds, as may be seen in the anti-racism protests following George Floyd’s death and from the protesting migrant population in India, who suddenly found themselves without work, food, shelter and means to get back home in the lockdown period. The possibility of contagion is but one risk that political minorities face in a pandemic; racism and dispossession are continuing public health emergencies as we already know from the disproportionate number of infections among the African-American population in New York.
In his work on crowds, Canetti was emphatic that no institutions could decidedly be relied on to repress the growth of crowds once and for all. This contention has an increased valence during the pandemic because even when backed with extraordinary and emergency powers, states have not been able to stop the protesting crowd/s. The inability of states to control and limit crowds sits in some contrast to the wider field of surveillance laid out in the pandemic where technological innovations are supposed to improve response time and optimize deployment of personnel. This would remain true for spaces that are policed—airports, street patrolling, railways stations, bus terminals, metros—and those that a managed by software solutions like galleries, theme parks, malls, theatres, to name a few. After all, crowds do need to be managed tied as they are to generation of profits and revenue.
With this background in mind, this Special Section on Crowds intends to make a timely intervention in thinking through Canetti’s contention that crowds allow for collective joy to be experienced as transcendental and being part of one submerges our individual failings. The anti-racism protests, at the time of coronavirus, remind us of the collective potential of a crowd, but with more and more investment in individual identification, we ask, what might be the future of crowds and the anonymity they afford? On an adjacent register, all crowds are not motivated by political intent and the context of a pandemic has meant that crowding can be a result of state policies. The set of essays gathered in this section span in their focus, different regions, disciplines, and periods of time, together offer thought provoking arguments on what crowds as an analytic concept reveals and predicts about our lives during Covid-19.
provide rights and reservations to transgender persons in India, so as to trace the ways in
which hijras have been absorbed into the discourse of nationalism. The most current draft
of this bill, ‘The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016’ shows that despite
claims to protect transgender citizens, the state uses the discourse of nationalism to justify
the increased governmentalisation of hijra bodies and lives. I bring attention to the state’s
insistence on the distance between homosexuals and hijras and the active endorsement of
Sexual Reassignment Surgery to argue that the legislations are consolidating heterosexuality
rather than making space for queer citizens. The project of heterosexualisation marks the
disjuncture between colonial and contemporary ambitions of policing hijras, which have
remained remarkably consistent and centred around their economic activity of begging.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in rural Odisha, I question the glossing of hijras’
practice of seeking alms or challa as begging, to show how limits of nationalism are drawn
and render hijra forms of being as incommensurable with the state.
effective provision of quality health services. We examine if HCPs’ knowledge, attitude, and skills, as well as their perceptions of facility readiness to provide PrEP are associated with their willingness to provide PrEP to AGYW at high risk of HIV in Tanzania.
* Veena Das and Jacob Copeman - Introduction. On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation
* Jonah Steinberg - Remaining Nameless: Names, Hiding, and Dislocation Among Delhi’s Runaways
* Vaibhav Saria - To Be Some Other Name: The Naming Games that Hijras Play
* Deepak Mehta - Naming the Deity, Naming the City: Rama and Ayodhya
* Jacob Copeman - Secularism’s Names: Commitment to Confusion and the Pedagogy of the Name
* Alexander Henn - Kristapurāṇa: Translating the Name of God in Early Modern Goa
* William Mazzarella - On the Im/Propriety of Brand Names
* Luke Alexander Heslop - Signboards and the Naming of Small Businesses: Personhood and Dissimulation in a Sri Lankan Market Town
* Aditya Bharadwaj - Badnam Science? The Spectre of the ‘Bad’ Name and the Politics of Stem Cell Science in India
* Gregory Maxwell Bruce - Names and the Critique of History in Urdu Literature:
From Manto’s ‘Yazid’ to Zaigham’s ‘Shakuntala’
* Veena Das - Naming Beyond Pointing: Singularity, Relatedness and the Foreshadowing of Death
* Sean Dowdy - Reflections on a Shared Name: Taboo and Destiny in Mayong (Assam)
1) Hinchy, Jessica, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, C.1850–1900 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
2) Kozma, Liat, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East ( Ithaca: State University of New York Press, 2017)
3) Mitra, Durba, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)
4) Pande, Ishita, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
5) Surkis, Judith, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)