A Prodigious Birth of Love

This chapter begins by studying the flirting that takes place between hijras and the men of the village to critique the all too easy reading of hijra sociality as an expression of marginalization, exclusion, and stigmatization. Hijras, far from being on the outskirts of society, through her offerings of sexual pedagogy actually reveal to us the dynamics of entering and belonging in the social world—or, in other words, the erotic dynamics between the householder and the ascetic that maps onto the links between the domestic realm and the world outside. The forms of life that hijras inhabit, I argue, in various ways lie both within the larger Hindu and Muslim universe of sociality and outside it—a posture I describe as being diagonal to that world. I then extend the conceptual apparatus of the diagonal in the later chapters in the book. This chapter illuminates the diagonal stance and traces it under a larger ethical rubric of endurance or preservation in several ways.