The Hijra Self: The Production of Hijra Identity and National Belonging in Contemporary Novels, Films and Life Writing
Creators: Khan, Arshad Said
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2024

<p>This dissertation examines literary and filmic representations and self representations of hijras, a South Asia specific trans feminine subaltern community. Hijras have existed for millennia and they have been defined and interpellated by various dominant discourses. Ancient Hindu epics saw them as semi divine figures with the power to bless or curse, while British colonial laws criminalized their identity for sexual and gender transgressions. Against these dominant discourses, this study examines a range of contemporary literary and cultural texts, like novels, life writing, and films to demonstrate the complexity of Indian hijra identity today, which I argue needs to be understood as shaped, energized, and constrained within the specificity of India’s political context. This study is guided by the questions of what the hijra story articulates and what kinds of ideological labours it performs in making hijras culturally intelligible. In particular, this dissertation examines how hijra agency is situated within the hegemony of the Indian state and Hindutva, the current dominant ideology of Hindu nationalism. Specifically, I argue that hijra narratives not only speak back to the dominant discourses that have historically defined them, but that they also reconstruct and legitimize hijra subjectivity within circulating ideas regarding Indian national identity.<br>
The first chapter examines the role of hijra life writing in self-actualizing Indian citizenship through repeated assertions of hijras as rights bearing citizens, as well as revealing their negotiations with the Indian state’s administrative powers, which are necessary to consolidate legal recognition. In the mapping of hijra encounters with the state, I demonstrate how contingencies of caste and class determine degrees of hijra citizenship and how the hijra subject asserts agency. The next chapter analyzes acts of hijra belonging as represented in novels and life narratives that discuss creations of alternative communities, unexpected forms of solidarity with other minorities that counter Hindu nationalist erasures, and the queering of the heteronormative family structure. I reveal how the idea of hijra community far exceeds its tropic markers like the traditional hijra gharana (household). I also show how hijra marginality intersects with other forms of liminality through genocidal violence. The final chapter explores how hijra identity is being increasingly claimed by the Hindu Right. Turning to a selection of films and novels, I investigate how representations of the hijra are invested with hegemonic notions of Brahmanical maternity and the ultimate symbol of Indian nationalism, Mother India. I reveal the extent to which Hindutva ideology seeks to restrict and deradicalize hijra subjectivity, especially in her role as mothers and mother figures, yet I also illuminate how the idea of hijra motherhood continues to unsettle the Hindu nationalist project. <br>
Overall, through these chapters, I centralize hijra identity within the lager idea of the Indian state, and resignify how it is imagined through institutions and ideologically saturated symbols. I show that hijra identity is not only constructed via navigations across hegemonies, but that it disrupts and transforms their exigencies and processes. I also show that hijra resistance takes on unanticipated forms and generates unforeseen political possibilities, and that hijra acts of subversion trouble preconceived notions of what it means to be hijra in contemporary India. </p>