Trans Reading in South Asia: Taxonomies of Loyalty in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Ānandamaṭh

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s (1838-1894) famous Hindu Nationalist Bengali novel, Ānandamaṭh, or The Sacred Brotherhood (1882/1906) presents readers with an unlikely and unexpected hero of an all-male anti-Muslim revolutionary action. Assigned-female-at-birth (AFAB), the Brahminic Shanti comes to perform her caste masculinity as the ascetic male revolutionary warrior Nabin through a practice that the narrator describes as parroting. Shanti’s transness—movement across gendered socio-cultural roles and identity categories—portrays an acceptable and exceptional temporary ethnonationalist political strategy. Once Hindu nationalist goals of an ethnically cleansed India are met, such fungible gender existence is no longer needed or conceivable. A Hindu-based anti-Muslim framework of distinct binary gender comes to align with British colonial Enlightenment taxonomies of speciation and naturalised difference. Chatterjee constructs Nabin’s passing as a sannyāsī through a framework of loyalty where his trans male gender performance simultaneously serves the forthcoming Hindu nation and does not nullify or negate the British empire’s Indian Penal Code (1860) that polices and criminalises behaviours “against the order of nature”: non-binary gender embodiments, customs, and identities as well as non-copulative intra-/cross-species sex acts. The chapter argues that an overriding allegiance to the concept of loyalty reveals a nation’s conservatism may in fact require ethnoreligious gender strategies that it is also simultaneously hellbent on extermination.