THE PERFUMED SEMEN: the LABOUR of LOVING in RURAL ORISSA, INDIA by Vaibhav Saria a Dissertation Submitted to Johns Hopkins Unive
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THE PERFUMED SEMEN: THE LABOUR OF LOVING IN RURAL ORISSA, INDIA by Vaibhav Saria A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October, 2014 © 2014 Vaibhav Saria All Rights Reserved Dissertation Abstract This dissertation concerns itself with the everyday lives and love affairs of hijras of two districts, Bhadrak and Kalahandi, in the eastern state of Orissa, India. Hijras are now an easily recognizable figure of what is referenced as the ‘Third Gender’. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the various claims made by the social on the hijra body. I begin my study by looking at the forms of flirting that take place in the town markets between the hijras and the men of the village to critique easy readings of marginalization, exclusion, and stigmatization. I argue that the hijra, far from being at the outskirts of the social, actually reveals to us, through her offerings of sexual pedagogy, the erotic dynamics between the householder and the ascetic; the household and the world outside; or what I articulate as the texture and the dynamics of the social. I then proceed to locate the hijra within her family and map out her movement in the web of kinship. I do so in order to show that though the hijra stands apart from the rights and responsibilities of reproductive heteronormativity, her participation in various transactions of care render the domestic space salubrious and prevents disputes within kinship from becoming lethal. My research proceeds to offer evidence that complicates ideas about begging and the economic transactions hijras undertake on trains. I contrast the money hijras earn and collect with notions of daan, dakshina, dalaali, bhiksha and haq to offer a more complicated reading of the hijra as a citizen of the state waiting for its rights and dues. ii As a study of love affairs between hijras and their men, the dissertation offers an ethnographic elaboration that challenges the recent provocations of queer theory that focus on temporality and notions of futurity. I study love affairs not only as an instantiation of queer desire but also as an experience of time that undoes any easy association between sex and the future. I conclude by offering some thoughts of what implications my research might have on our understandings of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Dissertation Advisors: Prof. Veena Das (Chair, Dissertation Committee), Prof. Aaron Goodfellow, Prof. Jane Guyer, Prof. Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Prof. Leonardo Lisi iii With immeasurable admiration and gratitude to Aaron Goodfellow, whose generosity will make him wonder why this is dedicated to him. iv Acknowledgements The fieldwork for this dissertation was funded by a grant awarded by the Wenner- Gren Foundation. I would like to thank my teachers, Roger Bowen, Veena Das, Aaron Goodfellow, Jane Guyer, Naveeda Khan, Harry Marks, Deborah Poole, Pamela Reynolds, Charles Sherry, Ashley Tellis and Susan White. I would also like to acknowledge the help and support that was offered to me by all the members of the SAATHII (Solidarity and Action Against the HIV Infection in India) offices in Calcutta and Bhubaneshwar. Apart from their help, I would like to thank Pawan Dhall and Amrita (Amitava Sarkar) for the warmth of their decade long friendship. I would like to express my gratitude to the Babli Moitra-Kanti Saraf, the Usha Ramanathan-S.Muralidhar, and the Sudha-Sheshadri Ratnam households for their hospitality. I want to acknowledge my friends and colleagues who read multiple drafts of my chapters and provided invaluable and incisive comments. Khushboo Agarwal, Mariam Banahi, Sruti Chaganti, Serra Hakyemez, Ross Parsons, Maya Ratnam, Sailen Routray, Aditi Saraf, Bishan Samaddar, Pooja Satyogi and William Stafford. I would also like to thank several friends who have made my life bearable with their banter, parties, care and kindness. Ghazal Asif, Swayam Bagaria, Roger Begrich, Hester Betlem, Caroline Block, Anila Daulatzai, Richard Helman, Amrita Ibrahim, Ankit Kejriwal, Patricia Madariaga-Villegas, Bican Polat, Ishani Saraf, Megha Sehdev and Anaid Citlali Reyes-Kipp. I would like to take this opportunity to finally thank my father who is taller than the sky and my mother who is stronger than earth for their unwavering support. Prateek and Sweta Saria have stood by me steadfastly and for that they have my undying v gratitude. My grandmother, Sita Saraf died during my fieldwork and the memory of her love stands for the perplexity that is kinship. The unexpected love and untimely death of Kamlesh Desai can find their trace in my words. Finally, I would like to thank Gregory Sesek for making apparent to me that the design of my life is still unfolding. vi Table of Contents Chapters Introduction: Part 1 – That Limpid Liquid Within Young Men 1 1. A Prodigious Birth of Love 21 2. In False Brothers, Evil Awakens 68 Introduction: Part 2 –Standing at a Slight Angle to the Universe 120 3. Something Rotten in the State 128 4. Courses of True Love 178 Introduction: Part 3 – I have Immortal Longings in Me 233 References 239 Curriculum Vitae 252 vii Illustrations Figures 1. The Full Symmetry 2. Manjhan’s Cosmology viii Introduction: Part 1- That Limpid Liquid Within Young Men This dissertation is based on the research I conducted on the lives of hijras in rural Orissa, a state in eastern India. Hijras were translated as eunuchs in much of colonial discourse and in the English language dailies till quite recently. The efforts of activists and scholars on the heels of the urgency of the HIV epidemic have resulted in hijras becoming a recognizable term and figure. Hijras are now indexed as South Asia’s ‘Third Gender,’ following the imperative to globalize categories and desires of the LGBT movement in the 1990s.1 An earlier re-iteration of the trope of universal sexual deviancy, albeit with different moral charges, was seen in the hypothesis of the Sotadic Zone. This hypothesis, put forward by Richard Burton, during the mid-nineteenth century was built on thinking about sexuality geographically; in climactic and constitutional terms and was drawing from and contributing to the orientalist imagination. 2 Against this background, the hijras were included by the British Raj in the Indian Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. This was at the insistence of a Law member of the drafting committee who believed that they were managers of “an organized system of sodomitical prostitution” and particularly unwilling to “adopt ‘honest pursuits’.” Though the act prohibited the hijra from appearing in public wearing female clothing, the fact that hijras were also performers, actors, and theatre artists made it particularly difficult for the colonial police force to effectively enact this criminalization.3 Furthermore, with the 1 For an encyclopaedic cross-cultural study of the concept of third gender, please see Herdt, Gilbert H., Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism In Culture and History. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 2 Bleys, Rudi. The geography of perversion: Male-to-male sexual behaviour outside the West and the ethnographic imagination, 1750-1918. New York: New York University Press, 1995. 3 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125. Furthermore, the propinquity of the hijra to various traditons of performance can be seen not only in their participation in continuing events of festivals and rural theatre but also in the terms that are still used to describe the plurality within the hijra population- such as jankhas, bhand, zenanas etc. 1 annexation of various princely states at the end of the 19th century, in the courts of which Hijras hitherto had fairly respectable positions, the claims that hijras held to land and property (gifted by the royal family), along with the right to collect money from the exchequers of these principalities, were also dissolved, resulting in an impoverished community by the time of independence.4 Hijra re-emerged in prominence in the mid to late 1990s which saw LGBT movement of India appropriating the hijras and reframing them as legitimizing historical figures of queerness. The HIV epidemic has reframed hijras not as signifiers of oriental excess but of a sexual excess of the more secular kind. The urgency of the epidemic resulted in hijras being recruited as local experts who are trained to practice and disseminate safer sex advice, given that they are associated with selling anal sex. My dissertation is based on fieldwork I conducted among the hijras of rural Orissa, one of the poorest states of India, in the district headquarters of Bhadrak and Bhawanipatna. The hijras in the first field site of Bhadrak mostly earned their money through selling wares near a shrine of a Muslim saint (mazar), by begging on the trains, collecting money on ritual occasions of childbirths and weddings, dancing at religious festivals, and sex work. Out of all the districts in Orissa, Bhadrak has the highest percentage of Muslims, and the several mazhars that dot its countryside are of particular importance to the lives of hijras.5 This detail introduces the particular way in which the hijra inhabited the Hindu- Muslim universe. Hijras historically have not been easily relegated either through self- 4 Preston, Laurence W. "A right to exist: eunuchs and the state in nineteenth-century India." Modern Asian Studies 21, no. 02 (1987): 371-387. 5 I collect this information from the 2001 census of India. The information regarding concentration of populations based on religion is not available from the 2011 national census. Please see “Table C -1 Population by Religious Community Table For Orissa.” Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, accessed September 5, 2014. http://www.censusindia.gov.in/DigitalLibrary/MFTableSeries.aspx 2 identification or through religious practice to either Islam or Hinduism.6 And while I had both Hindu and Muslim informants, their beliefs and practices would often adhere to one while being claimed as characteristic of the other.