The Myths about Indian Hijra

Years ago when I was still sipping on the koolaid, I was in awe of Western feminists who periodically pointed out the plight of Indian hijras. I would appreciate their advocacy which stood tall in the face of racism and overall neglect of the “truly” marginalised. I imbibed the glowing intersectionality they espoused, and willed to carry forward their legacy. Despite being an atheist, I was fascinated by the way in which feminism borrowed from Indian mythology to make a larger point about hijras. I found plots which override the conventional masculine-feminine stereotypes as a way of looking at the situation of hijras a bit differently. When media outlets and the who’s-who of global feminism alluded to these characters too, I was convinced that one could “feel” like a woman.

Thankfully, I didn’t dwell on that cesspool of acute brain decay for very long. Ever since I was radicalised by actual feminism, I have metaphorically thrown myself into nitric acid to wash away any remnants of ‘woke’ from my system. That said, I can empathise with a lot of women who are still untouched by radical feminism and meander into the woke universe to “be kind.” I will, however, not condone the sinister agenda of gender ideology that uses groups of people to suit their whims and needs. I now fully understand that this ideology is run by rich white men whose sexual fetishes drive them to any lengths. Every person recruited to further this agenda also knows that the existence of an androgynous character in a man-made mythology does not confirm any ambiguity in biological sex. Because if that were true, we would also have to justify gravity-defying monkeys and a bridge-building squirrel, among other things.

In a twisted way, the West has glorified South-Asian eunuchs and North-American ‘Two Spirits’ to normalise administering puberty blockers to children.

Watching the Western world misuse hijras for their covert plan, the woke idiots in India, who are probably unfamiliar with it, clap along. So it is doubly damaging. While this cultural dubiety of hijras and ceaseless conflation of sex/gender have worked in their favour, TRAs are now coming after female-only spaces—a move I thought we had at least five years to fight. But these mythical characters aren’t female, nor are the modern-day trans-identifying males.

So who are these eunuchs?

Historically, eunuchs are claimed to have been part of the Chinese royal court for more than a thousand years. Also in several ancient civilisations like the Assyrian Empire, Rome, Byzantium and many countries in South Asia. Eunuchs served as palace servants. Their sexual impotence made them trustworthy guards to look after royal women. In some civilisations they used to command armies and served as spies.

During the 17th century when the Dutch East India company was set up, they noted the power the eunuchs held in Imperial households. Eunuchs (or Khwajasaras – the Persian term for men with removed or non-functional sexual organs) were both slaves and slave owners.  The monarchy encouraged the sustenance of slavery, much to the disadvantage of the eunuchs.

Their bodies with ambiguous parts were considered safe for two distinct worlds of the Mughal setup. The harem, as well as the public sphere (harem is Arabic for ‘forbidden’ – a place exclusively made for women, where men were excluded). These royal harems relied upon the eunuchs to safeguard the premises without posing a threat to the residents. These men are known to have been castrated as slaves or criminals, or mutilated in adolescence by their families in the hope of material gain from the rulers. The power and wealth of eunuchs is common knowledge among harem societies. Their ‘disability,’ ironically, gives the eunuchs certain very real advantages in the form of wealth, power and access.

British traveller Eldon Rutter noted an active participation of eunuchs in Islamic history. In his book, he wrote about the presence of eunuch guards at the tomb of the Prophet. “The reason why eunuchs are specially employed on the Mataf, and for police purposes is, that in the event of a disturbance occurring in which women are concerned, or in the event of a woman appearing on the Mataf in unseemly attire or in a state of uncleanliness, they may handle such offenders and expel them without impropriety, as they are not really men in the full sense of the word,” observed Rutter in his travelogue, ‘The holy cities of Arabia.’

 In Hindu mythology, Shiva transformed himself into a form called Ardha-narishvara (half man and half woman), a deity who is worshipped in many parts of India.  Mohini (an incarnation of a male god Vishnu) and Shiva copulate and create another god, Ayyappa. Some consider this the “birth of hijras.” Ayyappa, whose temple is situated in the state of Kerala had banned women of menstruating age from entering due to the “impurity” associated with period blood. They had to fight for their right to enter the premises.

Arjuna, a character in Mahabharat receives a curse from Urvashi, a woman; damning him to a year in exile as the eunuch Brihannala, a dance tutor.  During this time he had access to the private chambers of women. Some curse that!

In Mahabharata, Aravan (in Tamil: the son of a snake), was offered as a sacrifice to ensure the victory of Pandavas in the war. While he agreed, he wanted to live the life of a married man for a day. Since no woman was volunteering knowing his fate, Krishna, a male god, took the form of Mohini and married him. It is believed that this is why the hijras of Tamil Nadu call themselves Aravanis. In Koovagam, a town in Tamil Nadu, there is an 18-day festival every year, where the village eunuchs dress up as his wives and then mourn for their “husband’s” death.

“Eunuchs possess divine power”

There is a strong belief among the community, largely thanks to all these historic references, that these castrated men possess divine powers, one bestowed upon them by god – a reward for daring to become hijra. This is often cited to claim saintly status in society. Since these men are often invited at weddings and other rituals, they are viewed as channels of the divine power of the mother goddess;  which transforms their own impotence into the power of life.

In her book “Neither Man or Woman”, Serena Nanda writes: “Several occult Hindu ritual practices involve male transvestism as a form of devotion. The male devotees in some sects imitate feminine behaviour, including simulated menstruation; they also may engage in sexual acts with men as acts of devotion, and some devotees even castrate themselves in order to more nearly approximate a female identification with say, Radha so as to become lord Krishna’s beloved.”

Everyday reality

But ritual dancing and divine powers aside, the livelihood of most modern-day hijras – while not largely talked about – is prostitution. Almost all eunuchs, owing to poverty, illiteracy and depravity resort to prostituting themselves to men.

Dr. Renate Syed, a German Indologist and Sanskritist, wrote a book on the life of the ‘third gender’ in India and Pakistan in 2015. “The two countries follow the same tradition,” she said. The hijras in Pakistan are Muslims, of course, and as long as they respect Sunnite Islam, they are accepted. They share the culture of hijras in India: leaving their native families at a young age, living together in houses with extended families with a guru, who rules over the chelas [pupils]. “Hijra is a term in the languages of North India and has no equivalent in any other language as there is no translation at hand. Hijra is an antonym or endonym, while Western terms describing Hijras are a xenonym or exonyms that do not hit the target and miss the point. The false equivalent of ‘transgender’ cannot describe the Hijra which is thereby lost in translation,” she wrote in her book titled ‘Gender and Violence in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives’.

Other than hijras (a mostly North Indian word), there are also men who only exhibit femininity on occasions who are often considered hijra. However, they are often on tenterhooks with the hijra community and get accused of being fake hijra. These men, collectively referred to as Kothis, may even marry women and have children. There are also young boys known as Jogtas – who may or may not be castrated, and are given away to perform temple duties.

In South India, where hijras do not have the cultural role that they do in the North (singing and dancing at weddings etc.), the terms used for effeminate men, such as kojja in Telugu or pottai in Tamil, are epithets that connote a derogatory meaning of a cowardly or feminine male.

“We are all men, born as men, but when we look at women, we don’t have any desire for them. When we see men, we like them, we feel shy, we feel some excitement. We want to live and die as women. Just as you women fall in love and are ready to sacrifice your life for a man, so we are also like that. Just like you, whenever a man touches us, we get an excitement out of it,” said one of the interviewees of Serena Nanda for her book.

Within the group, there is an ongoing debate about whether hijras, aravanis, kinnars and khwaja siras want to be considered as “women,” and the current trans rights activism leaves no scope for their voices to be heard in the matter.

Whose crimes are these anyway?

Since the livelihood of these men largely depend on performing at  weddings/child births, they resort to extreme measures when the family is unable to pay the sum they demand. Just last year, cases in two different cities were recorded for abduction and murder of infants. In a West Bengal city, a child less than a month old, passed away on the lap of the accused. He refused to give the child back to the parents because they were unable to pay him for his “blessings.” In another event, a man was arrested for kidnapping and burying alive a three-month-old girl for the same reason. The accused, the police said, had kidnapped and killed her to “teach them a lesson.”

India is also plagued by fetishistic men who would exploit the vulnerability of children for sexual motives. Last year, a 13-year-old boy in Delhi was forced to undergo sex change surgery and raped multiple times. The accused repeatedly abused the boy and “forced him to beg at traffic signals as a transgender,” according to the Delhi Commission for Women. Arun Kumar from Sahara Group, an NGO that works with eunuchs, says what the statistics don’t reveal is how kids and youths are kidnapped for prostitution. He said “Eunuch gurus and their paid agents get these kidnapped youngsters addicted to opium and then initiate them into homosexuality. Eventually, they are castrated in a gory and risky operation – a process they call Nirvan.”

“The hijra emasculation operation is conducted by another hijra called dai ma (a midwife) as it signifies a “rebirth.”

Khairati Lai Bhola of All India Hijra Kalyan Sabha (AIHKS), formed in 1984 to protect the rights of the community, said, “Young and addicted boys are abducted and then introduced to homosexuality by the agents of eunuch’s gurus. Castrations are clandestinely forced on them and ironically, very few people gather the courage to retaliate.” In an extremely hierarchical model, Bhola says the hijra mafia that controls the castrations operates secretly throughout the country. “They have a network of hijra mandis where a newly castrated eunuch is auctioned to the highest bidder. The auction is conducted with claps – a single clap means Rs 1,000. Fair, clean-limbed boys who can earn more, attract the highest bids. Victims are threatened with death if they break silence,” reveals Bhola.

“The hijra emasculation operation is conducted by another hijra called dai ma (a midwife) as it signifies a “rebirth.” This dai ma makes two quick opposite diagonal cuts by calling the goddess’s name. The organs—both penis and testicles—are completely separated from the body. A small stick is put into the urethra to keep it open. When the cut is made, the blood gushes out, and nothing is done to stem the flow,” Serena Nanda in her book.

The man is left to bleed without any medical intervention because it is believed that the blood is the “male part” and should be drained off. To ensure no stitches are administered to stop the flow, they only have another hijra do the operation. If others do it, for example, the “sex change” doctors who are available in hospitals, they try to stop the flow of blood, and this is considered less effective ritually.

It was later revealed through an investigation that a victim of forced castration was abducted, made an addict of brown sugar and hashish, and then pushed into homosexuality. The guru chela system ensures that the men have to prostitute themselves and offer a sum to the guru, who they sometimes call ‘mother’. This is how they live out the rest of their lives sometimes.

Existence of hijras used to normalise puberty blockers for children?

In a twisted way, among other things, the West has glorified South-Asian eunuchs and North-American ‘Two Spirits’ to normalise administering puberty blockers to children. The existence of these mythical creatures symbolises nothing more than the robust imagination of a (probably fetishisistic) man. Using these examples to have a ‘gotcha’ sounds more absurd than the likes of scientologists and conspiracy theorists.

The TRAs have done a good job in picking at the wound of historic mass guilt at the way we treated homosexuals and members from the marginalised caste in the past.

This post barely scratches the surface of the pitiful situation of hijras in India and the problems associated with using them to serve the “trans” movement. The TRAs have done a good job in picking at the wound of historic mass guilt at the way we treated homosexuals and members from the marginalised caste in the past. But a man’s feelings don’t make him a woman. This is an affront to the existence of every female human in this country. Gender ideology is a system which embodies a philosophy that is antithetical to every menial stride we have made in the past, a system that disadvantages  women, even within structures designed for women.  The apathy gender ideology shows towards women- their boundaries, their needs, their lived reality- should shock the world. Yet, provisions are being made, as I write this, for male access to female toilets and other safe spaces for women.

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