Hijras, Lovers, Brothers

This book seeks to describe the fullness of lives. As one of India’s third gendered populations, hijras are too often and easily relegated to positions of marginality as if their lives can be fully contained within the imperatives of survival. By offering a way of thinking about sexuality in Indian kinship in relation to the queer figure, and by restating an argument for psychoanalytic thinking of the Indian family, the hijra is invited to step out from the long reaching shadows of global discourses of HIV prevention and human rights. Hijras are situated within the moral and ethical dramas that define their everyday lives such as discharging the duties of kinship, achieving financial solvency, choreographing love affairs, and participating in the sociality of the local world. By studying scenes in the marketplace where the flirting between the hijra and the men of the village take place, easy readings of marginality and the outsider status ascribed to the hijra are disputed. The focus is shifted from the queer son and the patriarchal father to the hijra sibling and her brother, to offer a new way of thinking about the Oedipal drama in South Asia. Dwelling with the hijras for a period of two years, begging on the trains with them and co-inhabiting various other sites offers a provocation to think about hijras as embedded in fields of power and circles of sociality that do not reduce their lives to suffocating oppression but render them in terms of aspirations for ethical accounting.