Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

20 | 2019 Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia

Svati P. Shah (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4925 DOI: 10.4000/samaj.4925 ISSN: 1960-6060

Publisher Association pour la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud (ARAS)

Electronic reference Svati P. Shah (dir.), South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 20 | 2019, “Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia” [Online], Online since 02 May 2019, connection on 13 March 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4925; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.4925

This text was automatically generated on 13 March 2021.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia Svati P. Shah

Exceptional Sexuality in a Time of Terror: “Muslim” Subjects and Dissenting/Unmournable Bodies Dina M. Siddiqi

Queer intimacy during seditious times: revisiting the case of Ramchandra Siras Nishant Shahani

The Transgender Nation and its Margins: The Many Lives of the Law Sayan Bhattacharya

Dissenting Differently: Solidarities and Tensions between Student Organizing and Trans- Kothi-Hijra Activism in Eastern Aniruddha Dutta

Translucent Citizenship: Khwaja Sira Activism and Alternatives to Dissent in Faris A. Khan

Caste, Queerness, Migration and the Erotics of Activism An Interview with Filmmaker Moses Tulasi Kareem Khubchandani

State-industrial Entanglements in Women’s Reproductive Capacity and Labor in Mythri Jegathesan

Sedition, Securitization, Sexuality: A Conversation between Rohit De and Inderpal Grewal Inderpal Grewal and Rohit De

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Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia

Svati P. Shah

1 The question at stake in this collection of essays is: how might we extend critiques of nationalist projects in South Asia by accounting for nationalism and political dissent in the imbrications, conflicts, aporias, elisions, and formations of “non- normative” forms of gender and sexuality. 1 These essays engage this project by focusing on the ways in which speech is being further regulated and sequestered by the state, especially when the state is confronted by its critics on policies that are increasingly repressive. These essays also engage the ways in which the problematic of speech is imbricated with, inflected by, and constituted within social and affective categories that are produced through rubrics of gender and sexuality in South Asia. Collectively, the contributors to this issue are interested in the ways in which laws that enable the state to penalize critical speech, like India’s colonial era sedition law, have been used against citizens seeking to express their dissent to the exercise of state power, especially when that power veers toward impunity. While there are laws on the books throughout South Asia that resonate closely with the rubric of “sedition,” this collection is less concerned with looking for resolute alignment between distinct national legal codes in the region than it is with how the problematics of dissent that implicate gender and sexuality are folded within accusations of “anti- nationalism,” which specific imputations of “sedition” or “blasphemy” often sustain. To be sure, of particular interest here is how “anti-nationalism” creates a juridical foil

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to nation-loving citizens, via the “anti-national” subject. This means that we are interested in where and how policing, regulating and/or embracing “diversity” with respect to queer, trans and other identities and practices that emerge from the rubrics of gender and sexuality shore up or inhibit the rights of citizens to criticize their own . This interest emerges, in turn, from a longstanding set of inquiries within gender and sexuality studies on whether inhabiting “non-normativity” with respect to these rubrics necessarily indicates dissension with the status quo, if, indeed, it ever did (Warner 2000). These kinds of questions will gain new momentum in South Asia, now that “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal”—homosexuality, by proxy—has been decriminalized in India via the “reading down” of India’s anti-sodomy law, Section 377 (Narrain 2018), with the hope that the law might be read down or eliminated in Sri Lanka, and Pakistan as well.

2 For the purpose of the discussions that the works in this issue engage, I begin this introductory essay with the observation that the critical space for thinking about national unity, belonging, and un-belonging have been historically and constitutionally generative for feminist, queer and trans* critique,2 and vice versa. One axis for feminist and queer critique of the nation has necessarily been via critical engagement with the law, and the fundamental insight that the law enables, sustains and produces national subjects in the terms of gender and sexuality in everyday life. For example, if laws like those against sedition and blasphemy evince a discursive space that enables acts of extrajudicial, nationalist impunity, then that space of public discourse is also marked through gendered and sexual comportment and power. This is why, in addition to laws such as those governing sedition, which constrain speech acts, these authors are also interested in debates on laws that regulate gender and sexuality directly. These include the regime of “personal law” (Sharafi 2015) present throughout South Asia, which governs marriage and heritability, as well as the colonial-era anti-sodomy law, which remains in effect in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The problematics of personal law are one way we might access an interest in questions of temporality, juridicism, and the telos of progress, and the ways in which these are attached, for example, to the status of cisgender women (Mukhopadhyay 2015) and queer subjects in the postcolony. Expanding critical space to think through the juridical imbrications of sedition, personal law and anti-sodomy law, for example, is particularly consequential at a time when dissent, including anti-heteronormative dissent that is critical of caste-based endogamy, is pitted against the idea of national unity, rather than its being seen as integral to the constitution of a democratic polity.

Sedition and anti-nationalism

3 This collection proceeds from these foundational insights to seek a means of interrogating the ways in which questions of sexuality and gender have been articulated in relation to governance, materialism, inequality, and dissent in South Asia. For some of the authors represented here, this means using an explicitly “intersectional” frame that maps specific relations between distinctly theorized categories of analysis. For others, this means enabling critiques of gender, sexuality, materialism, secularism, and governance, where these are not necessarily held apart as distinct or primary objects of knowledge (Wiegman 2012). All of these authors are engaged in an exercise that brings to bear questions of sexuality and gender on those of

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caste, class and governance, within the careers and contexts of various forms of nationalism in South Asia.

4 Thus, these papers mark the intersections of two contemporaneous phenomena: firstly, the ways in which the term “anti-nationalist” is being deployed as both an epithet and, at times, as grounds for arrest in South Asia, and, secondly, the ways in which the politics, legal discourses, and everyday comportment of gender and sexuality continue to change rapidly in South Asia, as they do throughout the world. Critiquing these coincident phenomena requires particular attention to the ways in which gender and sexuality are categorically, affectively, aesthetically, and juridically rendered in relation to governance in general, and in relation to the ways in which speech and dissent are under specific forms of attack across the region today, in particular. This interest in contemporary forms of sequestering or even eliminating certain speech acts does not indicate a belief that the regulation of speech is the same across South Asia (see below), nor that the kinds of official and unofficial regulation, surveillance and sequestration of speech that we are concerned with here are necessarily being understood as “new.” In other words, the concern with the contemporary here does not imply a belief that there was once a time when dissent was, in general, a mode of speech protected in law and in practice that is now being rapidly stamped out. Rather, our attention to the contemporary moment in which the rubric of “anti-nationalism” is used to regulate dissent mobilizes an interest in how these forms of regulation and control often resonate with historically robust manifestations of the state controlling criticism of its policies.

‘Gay saathiyon ko lal salaam’ (‘Red salute to gay comrades’)

5 The initial provocation for the symposium from which this volume is derived was the efflorescence of activism in response to the Indian ’s crackdown against in a number of its central universities,3 beginning in 2015. I say “initial” because a symposium dedicated to the crisis of speech in India’s most prestigious public universities would necessarily interrogate a different, though overlapping, set of issues to those discussed in this collection of essays. Rather, the symposium and, therefore, this volume, grew out of the questions that Indian student activists were asking at the time regarding the government’s use of the death penalty and its use of extrajudicial force to suppress minority franchise, and out of an engagement with the critical response to the physical and rhetorical attacks that these activists faced. At the same time, the volume has also arisen from questions that are asked by the relatively new activist coalitions and rhetoric that emerged amongst leftists and progressives seeking to fight against the government’s actions during this period. For example, shouting slogans like “gay saathiyon ko lal salaam” at campus protests indicated a new chapter for left organizing in India, to be sure, while also showing the need to theorize the relationships between queer and trans subjectivity, non-normativity, and political dissent.

6 Two of the most widely publicized examples of the Indian government cracking down on its critics in the university were at the University of Hyderabad, in the wake of Dalit4 graduate student Rohith Vemula’s suicide in early 2016 (Sukumar 2016), and at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in during that same year.5 The attacks against student organizing in each of these instances were initiated or intensified in

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response to on-campus student protests against the implementation of the death penalty in cases where people had been convicted of “anti-national” crimes on the basis of highly questionable evidence. At the University of Hyderabad, a combination of actors on campus, working in tandem with the federal Ministry of Human Resource Development, responded to protests led by the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA) in 2015 against the 2007 hanging of Yakub Memon for the 1993 bombings in the city of (then so-named) Bombay (Grover 2015). Rohith Vemula, a Dalit graduate student, was a member of the ASA, an organization comprised of non-upper-caste students dedicated to fighting for the rights of Dalits on campus. Vemula served as an organizer of these protests, and it is widely believed that his suicide was facilitated by the retaliation he experienced from university administrators, who cut off his student fellowship and evicted him from university housing. The retaliation that Vemula suffered caused his supporters to label his suicide an “institutional murder.” At JNU, a similar combination of state and non-state actors also responded with violence, in tandem with visible police presence on campus, when another campus protest against the use of capital punishment took place. This protest, led by a leftist student group, sought to highlight the cases of Afzal Guru, who was convicted for playing a role in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament (Zia 2018), and the much earlier case of Maqbool Bhatt, a Kashmiri separatist and co-founder of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, who was executed by the state in 1984. At this writing, the crackdown against JNU has been ongoing since February 2016, (JNUTA 2017) with several student leaders of these protests still facing formal charges of sedition (Manral 2018). To these two instances of the Indian state’s repression of speech we can add a great many others,6 including violent attacks led by the BJP’s youth wing—the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP)—against a 2015 screening of the documentary Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai in Kirori Mal College, Delhi University (Pal 2015).7 The film shows how communal “riots” in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, in 2013 were contrived by Hindu fundamentalist political parties in a bid for electoral power, a strategy that has been called “the Gujarat model.”

7 There are a number of obvious similarities amongst these examples of state-sponsored suppression of student activism in India, the main ones being that these are all instances which demonstrate the ways in which hatred against Muslim and Dalit minorities is used to consolidate Hindu nationalist electoral power, in a context where right “family” of political parties—the Sangh Parivar—seems to be focused on obtaining electoral success by legal and extra-legal means. While the reaction to these campus protests received a great deal of attention in the media (Farooq 2016), in activist reports (PUDR), and in scholarly critiques (Sukumar 2016), what has perhaps received less widespread attention is the support that these student protests received from a wide range of activist groups and “communities,” including women’s groups, and queer and transgender students, faculty, and organizations. Their support was neither unusual nor particular, but it does give us an opportunity to ask what is significant about the recognizable presence in all of these struggles of feminists and of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) activists? And what, therefore, is there to say on the relationship between feminist and queer scholarship on the links between struggles for freedom of speech and the right to protest, and the campaigns that feminists have waged on sexual harassment, bodily autonomy and integrity, consent, and sexual freedom for decades?

8 By underscoring the preceding events in relation to this volume, I do not mean to suggest that these are the only universities in South Asia where confrontations with

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the state have been taking place, nor to imply that these events represent the most egregious excesses of state power in the region. Most importantly, these events must be read against the long history of state suppression of critical speech deployed against impoverished, non-metropolitan, landless people all over South Asia who are racialized as “lower caste,” “tribal” and as “religious minorities.” Rather than claiming that these events are particular in some way, I discuss them here as a means of pointing to certain obvious and instructive similarities amongst these attacks against student organizing on each campus. That they all involved a self-described “nationalist” response to student protests against the use of the death penalty, and that they involved local police and proxy student organizations for the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, shows that, while all spaces of critique and dissent are vulnerable, a tandem judicial and extrajudicial attempt was being made at that time to sequester a specific area of discussion and critique from public view. This was, in other words, a real effort toward “the muting of critical discourse and public debate” (Butler 2004). In South Asia, this area of “sequestered” critique may be broadly defined as critiques that are seen to question the territorial integrity of the nation, by questioning the ways in which borders are drawn, and by questioning the various means that the state uses to maintain its territorial integrity, including its use of the death penalty. To be sure, such critiques also necessarily question what is gained from this version of national territoriality, and by whom, inasmuch as they document police and paramilitary violence against citizens exercising their right to protest.

The problematic of South Asia

9 This particular combination of papers draws on South Asia as a repository of shared history, including juridical history via the legacy of legal codes first drafted during the British Raj by imperial administrators in the late nineteenth century, without implying that there is single unifying model for problematizing nationalism and “anti- nationalism” across South Asia. Due to the publicity attached to the recent “reading down” of India’s anti-sodomy law, Section 377 (Safi 2018b), it is at present one of the more widely discussed of these anachronistic “legacy” laws shared across South Asia, although it is certainly not the only law of its kind to have remained in force for so long. While the end of the criminalization of consensual “unnatural” sex between adults is a welcome change, particularly as it was won on the heels of a 25-year-long campaign (Sahni 2018), it does raise questions about how much freedom it portends when dissent itself seems to be at stake. This collection raises these kinds of questions as it begins to address a relative lacuna in work on how these kinds of colonial-era laws may be used to problematize one another. At the same time, this collection goes beyond the law by examining extrajudicial means, including targeted killings, that states throughout South Asia use to silence their critics.

10 Several authors in this collection discuss how India and Bangladesh implement their colonial-era anti-sedition law, often as a means of proving a citizen’s affective loyalty to a conflated notion of the nation and the state. In Sri Lanka and Pakistan, we are not following “sedition” inasmuch as we are tracking the career of the Family Background Report in Sri Lanka, and the status of gender variance in relation to national belonging in Pakistan. Rather than showing that all of contemporary South Asia is comparable or in strict juridical alignment, these papers read alongside one another ask what

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meaning discourses and rubrics of , gender-queerness and queer sexuality can make for understanding the production of nationalism at a time when the foil of “anti- nationalism” is so critically present.

11 The full sweep of the Indian state’s concerns about protest and criticism shows that targeting activists as “anti-nationals” in India is taking place under the twinned signs of privatized extractive capitalism and Hindu nationalism. This is evidenced by the ways in which anyone who is not rendered as normatively Hindu, or as being noncompliant with intensified economic stratification, seems to be fair game for arrest and censure. The hand of the state is evident in the pattern of impunity that has taken shape under Hindu nationalist rule, as in the killing of three “rationalist” Indian intellectuals, in 2013, M.M. Kalburgi and Govind Pansare in 2015, followed by the 2017 murder of journalist in Bangalore. In the context of an English language academic journal, it may be helpful to note that all four of these writers had large audiences for their work in Marathi and , one ostensible reason why they were seen as a danger to the currently ascendant nationalist project in India.

12 To be sure, there are similar examples of activists being threatened with arrest, violence, and murder in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. We may recall, for example, the 2015 murder of activist Sabeen Mahmud, gunned down in her car while driving home from a talk she had organized at her cafe in Karachi on the nationalist movement in Balochistan. Regarding responsibility for the attack, “police officers responding to the scene described it as a “‘targeted’ or ‘seemingly targeted’ killing” (Parshley 2015). In Bangladesh, extrajudicial detention of activists, journalists and intellectuals included photojournalist Shahidul Alam, who was held for 107 days before finally being released on bail in November 2018 (Daily Star 2018). Alam was arrested after giving a statement to the press supporting student protests for road safety in Dhaka, in the wake of a hit and run accident that left two students dead (Tipu, Rabbi, and Chaity 2017). Where the government is not directly involved in ordering or abetting arrests and detention, there seems to be synergy, at least, with other actors who may act with impunity, as evidenced in the spate of machete attacks on bloggers, religious minorities and activists in Bangladesh in 2016 (Khan and Bengali 2016). Dina Siddiqi’s article in this volume discusses the murder, during this time, of Xulhaz Mannan, a Dhaka-based activist and blogger who wrote on LGBTQ rights. Sri Lanka’s government also struggles to sustain spaces for dissent in the aftermath of its more than 30-year long civil war, which officially ended in 2009, with thousands of Tamils who surrendered to government forces in the last months of the war still missing, and information about them “unavailable.” Amnesty International has now formally asked the Sri Lankan government to provide information on the missing and disappeared to their families (Daily Mirror 2018). This request is contextualized by Sri Lanka’s post- war “national reconciliation” policy, and the infrastructure granted to this policy by the Office of National Unity and Reconciliation, both of which are intended to create space for religious, linguistic and ethnic minorities in the country. To be sure, these efforts have been fraught (Thiranagama 2013; Vanhullebusch, and Pushparajah 2016).

13 In light of the array of events I have mentioned here, it would be fair to ask what relation are these papers proposing, in order to link these examples of state impunity, amongst these four different national contexts? While a comparative frame is certainly warranted with respect to the countries that comprise South Asia, the Cold War legacy

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of this mode of regionalization notwithstanding, this collection seeks to highlight struggles over the place of dissent and minority rights in each national political milieu. As such, this collection does not seek to argue for “South Asia” as the only or best comparative frame for all of these national contexts. Rather, these works collectively emphasize a basic insight of feminist historiography, that contemporary struggles over “nationalism” are also necessarily waged along the axes of gender, sexuality, and gender identity. We are substantively interested in “South Asia” because of the shared legal histories amongst its component national contexts, via the shared legacy of British colonialism, and because, to greater and lesser degrees since independence, feminist and queer movements have crossed borders and vast distances for periods of time, and can therefore be said to have had, at certain moments, a shared regional legacy as well.

Sedition and “anti-nationalism” in colonial India

14 The previous section’s examples provide evidence of a period of heightened foreclosure of critical speech in South Asia. It would be wrong, of course, to presume that this historical period is exceptional in this regard. To clarify this, we must also clarify that “sedition” is akin to, but not the same thing as, “treason.” Whereas treason is defined as an “act” or a set of “acts” committed against one’s own nation, sedition is a crime of speech that “excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the State” (Narrain 2011:37). In the Indian Penal Code’s ([1860] 2011) iteration of the law against sedition, Section 124A, “disaffection” is referenced in the following textual injunction: Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law [in India], shall be punished with [imprisonment for life], to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to three years, to which fine may be added, or with fine. Explanation 1—The expression “disaffection” includes disloyalty and all feelings of enmity. (Narrain 2011:37; emphasis added) When the law against sedition is referenced as a “colonial era” law, this sometimes implies that it has remained unchanged since the Indian Penal Code was drafted in 1860. In this sense, critiques of India’s anti-sedition law are resonant with critiques of Section 377 (Gupta 2008; EPW Engage 2018). While the language of Section 377 had been in force in a fairly unaltered form since the 1860 draft of the IPC, Section 124A has been in effect since 1870, apparently due to an error that omitted it from the original IPC draft of 1860 (Donogh 1911; Singh 2018:137; Narrain 2011:33). Rajeev Dhavan’s (1987) alternate theory of its initial omission from the IPC, that “the British government wanted to adopt more wide-ranging strategies against the press including initiating systems of registration…” (Narrain 2011:33) is consistent with how both 377 and 124A have been deployed. While Dhavan’s (1987) argument references the 10-year gap between the drafting of the IPC in 1860, and the inclusion of 124A in the IPC in 1870, and while the deployment of the law has hardly been consistent since that time, it is clear that both 377 and 124A fall within a range of laws and extrajudicial “policies” that have been used intermittently, unevenly and sometimes collectively, over time, to maintain a certain normative order. Section 377, for example, functioned in tandem with anti-vagrancy laws, laws against sex work, and laws against kidnapping in order to prohibit “gay sex” in public spaces. Collectively, these laws enabled the harassment and

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extortion of gender non-conforming and transgender people who were trying to access public space. Ganachari describes how Section 124A has historically functioned in a way that resonates with the history of Section 377. Unable to stem the surging tide of Indian nationalism at the turn of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century, the British Indian Government sought to contain “sedition,” on the one hand, by a wholesale prosecution of newspapers … by ever-widening the legal scope of the term “sedition” and also by inventing legal traditions by amending the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Criminal Procedure Code (Cr. PC); applying different existing laws and enacting new cognate laws such as the Sea Customs Act (1878) the Seditious Meetings Act (1908), and the Indian Press Act (1910) to name a few; to bring those newspapers’ editors and printers under the official net. (Ganachari 2009:95) Tilak and Gandhi, both defendants in two of the most famous sedition trials of the pre- independence era, understood that this law was part of a broader legal arsenal used for controlling speech in the press and in the public sphere. This kind of control over forms of speech as part of a discourse that pitted “nationalists” against “anti- nationalists” was an aspect of the law against sedition that early Indian “nationalists” also understood only too well. Of sedition charge, Gandhi famously wrote: I consider it a privilege, therefore, to be charged under that section. I have endeavoured to give in their briefest outline the reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal ill-will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King’s person. But I hold it a virtue to be disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to have affection for the system. And it has been a precious privilege for me to be able to write what I have in the various articles tendered in evidence against me. (Gandhi 1922:168) Here, Gandhi makes a distinction between being against the government—called rajdroha in —and being against, or critical of, the people of the country— deshdroha—where, to be sure, the people are the desh (nation), not the government. This question comes up repeatedly in pre-independence sedition charges and trials, including those of Lokmanya B. G. Tilak, who, like Gandhi, argued that he was against colonial rule as vested in the government—that he was, if anything, rajdroha—but that he was emphatically not deshdroha (Ganachari 2009:95).

15 Understanding the systematic and dangerous conflation of rajdroha and deshdroha is key to understanding both the history of the discourse of “sedition” in South Asia and how it manifests in contemporary politics. This conflation was apparent during the Emergency in India, from 1975–77, when, following on a disputed national election, Indira Gandhi declared martial law, imprisoned and threatened opposition leaders and those critical of her government, and enforced compulsory sterilization among those segments of the national population that had little or no power to resist (Tarlo 2003; Bhushan 2018). The conflation of being rajdroha and deshdroha has also been apparent in more recent memory, as in the contemporary examples mentioned above, when “sedition” and sedition-like charges have been used to silence dissent and criticism. One of the better known of these instances in the recent past occurred in 2010, when Binayak Sen, a physician working in the state of Chhattisgarh, was actually charged, tried and sentenced to prison for sedition (Vaid 2011), and when, in a separate incident that year, Arundhati Roy was formally accused of sedition, although she was never arrested or formally charged. At that time, a police First Information Report (FIR) was lodged against Roy and Kashmiri separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, for a speech

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they gave in New Delhi (PTI 2010). The speech was impugned as “seditious” because Roy claimed that Kashmir, a disputed state bifurcated by a “Line of Control” which marks Indian and Pakistani authority, is not an “integral” part of India, a statement that was taken to mean Roy was publically endorsing the secessionist movement in Kashmir. Roy, for her part, characterized her comments thusly: I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state. (Chamberlain 2010) There are further resonances between Roy’s experience and that of JNU Professor Nivedita Menon, who, in early 2016, was also charged via a formal police complaint over a misrepresentation of her remarks during a speech she had made after the crackdown against speech at JNU had begun. Defending the students’ right to raise the issue of Kashmir in their protest, her remarks, delivered in Hindi and recorded on video, were distorted via selective editing and misreporting in order to impute similar designs to those that had been used to target Roy.

16 It is significant that the state’s hackles against “anti-nationals” are raised around particular sets of issues, not the least of which is the constitution of the nation’s territoriality. Certain questions—of, for example, Kashmiri and Balochi nationalism, of the displacement of entire villages in Chhattisgarh in the face of multinational mining projects (WSS 2017), of the consolidation of Dalit and tribal franchise in (Parmar 2018), of environmental degradation and destruction in the wake of copper production in Tamil Nadu (Scroll Staff 2018b), protests against road safety (and bad governance by proxy) in Dhaka (Safi 2018a)—have drawn the full force of state repression in India Pakistan and Bangladesh, including not only the use of the law against sedition, but also the array of anti-terrorism and public nuisance laws. We may derive at least two insights from this very truncated representation of sedition and “anti-nationalism” discourses in South Asia. First, that sedition is embedded within a wider discourse on the constitution of the nation, where stateist anxieties regarding certain forms of speech evince the fragility of the idea of “national unity,” especially when the state responds to certain speech acts with organized violence. Second, given that “anti-nationalism” embodies such a far-reaching discursive rubric, understanding how and where it functions demands an equally expansive analytic rubric; this volume suggests that this rubric must include questions of gender, sexuality and gender identity as well.

‘Queer and trans* feminism’ in South Asia

17 The persistence and uses of the law against sedition throughout South Asia are as much an instigation for this volume as are the wider discursive slippages between “rajdroha” and “deshdroha.” Of equal importance is the long tradition of South Asian feminist critiques of nationalism, and the significant shifts in how sexuality and gender identity have been differently legible at different points in time, with respect to the rhetoric of nationalism in South Asia. In referencing feminist critiques of nationalism, many of the authors here reference postcolonial feminist critiques of gender in relation to the

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formation of South Asian nation states during the era of anti-colonial struggle (Jayawardena [1986] 2016; Sinha 1995; Chatterjee 1990), the longstanding insight that there are no seamless or a priori connections between nation, religion, territory, and the state in South Asia (Jalal 2000), and the continued importance of women’s movements throughout South Asia in constantly interrogating citizenship and state power (Basu 2016; Roy 2013; Loomba and Lukose 2012).

18 Historically, these kinds of critiques focused on asking what the category of “women” meant to anti-colonial struggles and in the aftermath of independence (Menon and Bhasin 1998; Jayawardena [1986] 2016). In this way, postcolonial feminist scholarship in South Asia has long facilitated asking how gender and sexuality become the bases for national/ethnic/cultural belonging and un-belonging, and whether individual cisgender “women” are even legible as subjects in their own right (Sunder Rajan 1993). In India, this question is necessarily mobilized in its contemporary context in relation to critiques of Hindu nationalist ideology and the ways in which normative tropes of masculinity (Sinha 1995; Shah 2002; Banerjee 2005), for example, have been integral to its formation. A few key nodes of scholarship in this vein clarify certain attachments between questions of gender, sexuality and national belonging. These include earlier debates on “age of consent” legislation (Sinha 1995; Sarkar 2000), interrogating the notion of the private sphere and private space (Grewal 1996:25), more recent debates in India on how to challenge the terms of “personal law” from a feminist perspective (Menon 1998; Naqvi 2017), and on the ways in which caste has long framed the terms of national belonging, writ large (Rege 2000; Chakravarti 2000; Paik 2014).8

19 In queer and trans studies in the Western academy, there is an emerging re- articulation of interest in questions of nationalism, thanks to the rise of troubling and not necessarily predictable alignments between sexuality, gender identity and the nation state. “Pinkwashing” is one of the more circulated examples of how queerness and right-wing nationalism, for example, are aligned (Puar 2017). Some of this interest is manifest in critiques of sexuality politics that are part of the “decolonial” turn in queer studies (Bakshi, Suhraiya, and Posocco 2016; Darwich and Maikey 2014) and in trans studies (Aizura et. al. 2014). In South Asian Studies, critiques of the relationships between sedition, anti/nationalism, gender identity and sexuality have similarly been manifest as an exercise in which “suppression” is productive of much more than simple erasure. In this regard, Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella write, “Why and when did specific markers of excess such as ‘obscenity,’ ‘sedition,’ and ‘blasphemy’ come into play in projects of cultural regulation, and what can we learn from their shifting interrelationships?” (Kaur and Mazzarella 2009:13). Identifying their project as “comparative” across South Asia, Mazzarella and Kaur’s volume discusses a number of instances wherein questions of sexuality are tied to “cultural regulation” and maintaining social order. These include accusations of blasphemy in Pakistan (Ahmed 2009), and the ways in which “Bangladesh emerged onto the international map of when Taslima Nasreen’s novel Lajja was banned in 1993” (Kaur and Mazzarella 2009:2).

20 Speaking in a similar mode of the suppression of “Dalit sexualities” in late nineteenth- century colonial India, Charu Gupta writes, “Disciplinary power was not necessarily suppressive but was also productive of new expressions of sexuality” (Gupta 2011:16). In linking the implicit and explicit Brahminism of the “Indian” state in the decades immediately following the 1857 uprising with nationalist anxieties in representing the

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Indian polity as sufficiently modern and “qualified” for self-rule, Gupta explains how suppressing marginalized sexualities was productive of an emergent nationalist attachment to normative heterosexuality: While the British criminalized same-sex love by the 1861 law, Indian reformers— both revivalists and nationalists—were attempting to regulate homosex by insisting that it was alien to Indian culture. In addition, they were trying to render conjugality the space of both procreation and pleasure. Monogamous, heterosexual, and companionable marriage was envisaged as imperative for a modern, civilized, Hindu nation. Female reproduction was linked to its utility to the nation, as it was seen as leading to the enhancement of a healthy, male progeny. In such a scenario, perceived Dalit sexualities too were constructed as deviant, and a threat to “civilized” norms of sexual behavior. (Gupta 2011:14)

21 This body of work has evinced a generalized critique that discourses of gender and sexuality in South Asia must also be understood in relation to the formation of ideals of national progress. This critique is present in Lata Mani’s foundational work, for example, on the “invented tradition” of sati and its official banning in 1829 through a combination of efforts by Hindu reformists like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and British administrators (Mani 1990). It is also present in Nivedita Menon’s introduction to her edited anthology Sexualities, where she writes, Technologies of surveillance and laws of prohibition are indeed central to understanding sexuality, and determine what will be termed as sexuality at all. But it is also imperative to note that such forms of control and hygiene, including the “cleaning up” of uncontrollable forms of sexuality, come with modernity and the values that accompany it—progress, the inevitability of historical forms, the language of rights. (Menon 2007a:xv) Feminist scholarship is rife with these themes on sexuality in India by the late 1990s, when anthologies like A Question of Silence (Nair and John 1998) were being read alongside published reports on queer and trans existence, including Humjinsi: A Resource Book on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Rights in India (Fernandez 2002) and work on the Hindu right’s organized backlash against the lesbian-themed film Fire in 1996 (John and Niranjana 2000). They are also widespread in the trove of critical work inspired and authored by autonomous feminism and lesbian/bisexual/trans organizing (Shah et. al. 2015), and the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in India (Narrain and Bhan 2005; Bhattacharyya and Bose 2007), which took shape around juridical questions, to be sure, while asking what legal recognition and its lack mean for a group of people who are seen to be demanding categorical minority rights. Furthermore, what did this kind of recognition mean for other modes of minoritization, as tied to religion, or caste?

22 This particular collection of articles draws its legibility through the bodies of work I reference above, and through an understanding that the rise in judicial and extra- judicial means of suppressing speech and managing dissent is productive of radical thinking and politics inasmuch as it represses and erases. The forms of dissent that generated the impetus for the symposium from which this collection is derived are fundamentally tied to questions of autochthonous sovereignty. These forms of dissent have produced especially violent instances of backlash coming from the state when they are tied to questions of land use and demands for autonomous governance. A number of the discursive sites I mention above—Balochi and Kashmiri nationalism, appropriating land for mines, and other large-scale development projects in India— involve unresolved questions about the power of the state. In India, these sites of

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confrontation have historically involved the ways in which laws like the Armed Services Special Powers Act (AFSPA), the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) have all been used to suspend democratic rights in regions where the state determines that security is especially at risk. These have become sites of massive, documented abuses of state power (Singh 2007). In Bangladesh, the recently passed Information and Communications Technology Act serves a similar function, eliciting condemnations from the International Commission of Jurists (International Commission of Jurists 2013,) and Human Rights Watch (Bergman 2018). How these kinds of laws function in South Asia is perhaps clearest in Bangladesh, where neoliberal economic reforms were enacted fairly early, and where the impacts of structural adjustment programs and privatizing national assets has contributed to extreme economic stratification and a vastly expanded informal economy (Muhammad 2015). With so much at stake for corporate and political elites, any articulation of dissent or critiques that would be perceived as threats to privatized surplus wealth would be dealt with as such.

23 The innovation of this collection is in making space for reading questions of gender and sexuality against this backdrop of anti-democratic laws and practices that have acquired additional potency in recent years; many of these laws and practices facilitate the consolidation of wealth through resource extraction on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, these works evince an interest in an analytic experiment: what would happen if we could account for the history of feminist critiques of nationalism alongside newer modes of queer and trans politics? These two aspects of this curation of papers enable us to collectively ask what queerness, gender variance and feminism mean to political radicalism, particularly in a moment which seems to be dominated by rightwing populism (Mazzarella 2018). Furthermore, what do questions of sexuality and gender identity have to do with revolutionary politics, with questions of class and political economy? How and where are the spaces for radical critique constituted when the stakes of dissent and radical struggle seem to be climbing ever higher? Does it mean something to have a queer feminist analysis, or to be queer or trans in anti- democratic times? The short answer is, yes, of course, but these meanings are multiple, and the grounds on which the politics of sexuality and gender rest are highly contested. Drawing on the longstanding history of feminist engagements with and reliance upon the notion of dissent, and on work that interrogates the intersections of gender identity, sexuality and national belonging, this collection seeks to show how these kinds of critiques complicate the ways in which accusations of “national” and “anti-national” are wielded, and to what effect.

The papers

24 These works collectively examine discourses of “anti-nationalism” and attendant laws, in relation to the mutually imbricated categories of trans, queer, and feminist politics in South Asia. Given that the crackdown on student activism relating to Kashmir at JNU served as the initial impetus for the conference from which these papers are drawn, a number of them, by Khubchandani, Dutta, Bhattacharya, and Shahani, deal specifically with queer, trans and feminist politics in relation to the spaces of student activism and politics in India, where accusations of “anti-nationalism” have been deployed by the state and proxy organizations. Jegathesan draws on attendant questions of dissent to

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reexamine feminist critiques of nationalism and the state in relation to women and “gender” broadly. In this sense, we may read Jegathesan’s contribution, which deals with the status of cisgender women within instantiations of right-wing nationalism, alongside the articles by Khan, Bhattacharya and Dutta, which all address the question of nationalism in relation to the legibility of trans people and politics in South Asia. Taken together, these works take up longstanding questions within South Asian on the constitutive importance of gender for the idea of the nation “itself.” Extending these critiques, some authors in this volume also ask: if trans people and politics are now visible within various projects of both left and right wing South Asian nationalisms, then what does this visibility, and legibility, tell us about the constitution of the nation within the changing geopolitics of gender and sexuality?

25 Faris Khan’s contribution takes up this question by considering the ways in which gender nonconforming khwaja siras, people assigned male sex at birth whose gender comportment is feminine, negotiate activism in such a way as to avoid accusations of “anti-nationalism” in Pakistan, while at the same time “complicat[ing] notions of dissent through engagement in indigenous modes of resistance” (Khan, this volume). Khan’s paper considers the rubric of minority rights in Pakistan, the ways in which it has elicited accusations of anti-nationalism, and how khwaja sira activists negotiate a space which at once renders them legible to the state as equal citizens, while also relegating khwaja siras to the status of a “partially legible,” ethnicized minority.

26 Sayan Bhattacharya’s piece also examines the newfound juridical legibility of hijra and other trans-identified subjects—this time in India—as evidenced by the existence of transgender development boards in different Indian states, and the controversial Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2018. While much commentary has been generated on so-called hijra nationalism in India, where hijra activists have intentionally taken on and promoted Hindu nationalist ideology, less has been said about how hijras, transgender and gender nonconforming people have disrupted any nationalist framing of their lives using not only varied modes of protests but also varied gender embodiments (Bhattacharya, this volume).

27 Also dealing with questions elicited by trans-feminine politics, Aniruddha Dutta’s piece examines the relationships between student organizing and trans-queer activism in Eastern India. Dutta points out that, during the national protests that followed the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi in 2012 (usually referenced as “the Delhi rape case”), protests in West Bengal included trans-feminine communities, include kothi and hijra communities, who “used these protests as a platform to highlight gendered/sexual violence against trans-queer people … [at the same time] and some student activist outfits also included anti-trans violence in their agendas.” Dutta describes a number of trans-student-queer alliances over the past several years that mark a “watershed” in queer and trans activism in the region. The piece considers the ways in which these alliances are also sites of “productive tensions across variant conceptualizations of dissent and resistance to capital and the nation-state” (Dutta, this volume).

28 A number of pieces in this volume deal with the killing or suicide of activists and individuals whose very being is construed as an existential threat to the constitution of the nation. In her piece “Hierarchies of Suffering, Seditious Sexualities and Unmournable Bodies,” Dina Siddiqi discusses the 2016 murder of gay rights activist and blogger Xulhaz Mannan within the context of an extremely delimited and shrinking

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space for expressing political and “cultural” dissent in Bangladesh. Siddiqi considers why information about certain murders circulates internationally, such as the 2016 murder, while other equally horrific instances of violence and killing does not. In pointing to this disjuncture, Siddiqi asks how the fetishization of LGBTQ bodies contributes to certain erasures, to the effacement of non-fetishized “bodies” who are also targeted by the state and its proxies. Given that “[t]o the government, both queer and politically dissident bodies are disposable … [Siddiqi explores] how we might think of dissident politics in the context of ‘seditious’ sexualities within the current political climate in Bangladesh…” (Siddiqi, this volume).

29 In this vein, a number of pieces invoke the student uprisings at the University of Hyderabad during 2016, in the wake of Rohith Vemula’s suicide. Nishant Shahani’s piece considers two “institutional murders” in India, Vemula’s and that of Professor Ramchandra Siras, who was caught having consensual sex with another man by two men who broke into his home in 2010. Professor Siras, a linguist who had taught for more than two decades at Aligarh Muslim University, was found dead in his apartment some months later. Although initially thought to be a suicide, police later treated it as a case of murder. Shahani discusses these two cases of “institutional murder” in order to ask: “what does it mean to argue for queer national belonging through jurisprudence at the very historical moment in India when the rhetoric of sedition and compulsory nationalism is mobilized as a way to violently erase dissent?” (Shahani, this volume).

30 Kareem Khubchandani’s piece traverses multiple geographic terrains, following the subject of Khubchandani’s interview, Moses Tulasi, from Hyderabad to Chicago and back again. Khubchandani tells Tulasi’s story as a member of a South Asian LGBTQ organization in Chicago for many years, and as someone with deep family connections in Hyderabad. Tulasi becomes involved in the student protests at the University of Hyderabad, is eventually arrested while filming there, and accused of “un-Indian” activity. The interview traces Tulasi’s analysis through his own subject position as “a diasporic, queer, OBC (other backward caste) filmmaker” who offers “anecdotes and theorizations about how queerness, migration, and caste matter to each other. These ‘entanglements,’ material imbrications and discursive confluences, offer new facets to the study of sedition in India by centering an unlikely and even accidental protagonist…” (Khubchandani, this volume).

31 A number of works presented during the symposium in 2016 were written in the tradition of South Asian feminist critiques of the idea of cisgender women in relation to the idea of the nation. These works were presented within a contemporary critique that was both queer and feminist, and, like the rest of the articles here, these works were also informed by the histories of both queer and . Of the three such pieces presented at the 2016 symposium one is included here, Mythri Jegathesan’s article, “Discomforting the State: Narratives of Women’s Labor, Reproductive Capacity and Sexuality in Postwar Sri Lanka.” It considers three ethnographic moments from the author’s fieldwork that illustrate the complexities of Tamil and Muslim minoritization among women and girls working as manual laborers within and from Sri Lanka. These three moments—two of murder, and one of tubal ligation done under the auspices of a national family planning initiative—give Jegathesan the opportunity to examine “how representations of women’s reproductive capacity, sexuality, and choice were deployed as potential threats or affirmations to the Sri Lankan state, its economic standing at industrial levels, and its cohesion as a postwar majoritarian nation” (Jegathesan, this

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volume). Jegathesan argues that official accounts of minority women’s lives and labor are incommensurate with minority women workers’ own understandings of their work and bodies. The space between these two modes of representation also constitutes the space for feminist ethnography, in the possibilities the piece explores for displacing official narratives of non-majoritarian women.

32 The volume ends with an interview between Rohit De and Inderpal Grewal, where De and Grewal offer a historical critique of sedition in India, and its relationship to other kinds of laws in this vein, including anti-blasphemy laws in Pakistan. They discuss how these individual laws are part of a family of regulations targeting speech that is blamed for inciting violence and pubic disorder. They discuss the effect that this family of laws, and the broader discourses of nationalism of which they are a part, ultimately have on speech. In making the links between empire, the regulation of speech, gender, and sexuality, De and Grewal talk about militarized feminism and discourses of protection that sustain patriarchal norms, and how women challenge these norms through unpredictable and at times counterintuitive means. Spanning topics as diverse and closely linked as surveillance, “encounter killings,” Aaron Schwartz’s suicide,9 and the demand for an independent Khalistan, De and Grewal convey the monumentality of these questions in relation to how their history will eventually be told.

Conclusion

33 This special issue is ambitious in its scope, aiming to contribute to a scholarly literature that seeks to address the conceptual gaps between the personal and the political, the affective and the juridical, and between governance and sex. If this task is impossible in a single collection, the frames that make these papers legible within the theme I have described are perhaps more easily recognized. What is more challenging is to convey the spirit of the meeting that produced these papers, and the imperative for collecting them in this special issue. What was ultimately at stake during this event, and in this collection, is the question of what happens when national subjects in the region are asked to align their status as citizens with an institution like the military, an ostensibly “charismatic” leader, majoritarian erasure, and/or the “financialization of everything.” These are inescapably questions of class, caste, racialization, gender, sexuality and gender identity as well.

34 In the spirit of these questions and the literatures and critiques they invoke, I close by quoting a poem by gay Delhi-based poet and scholar Akhil Katyal. Katyal ended the 2016 Feminist Preconference with a performance of this piece and, fittingly, it ends this introduction as well. The poem’s provenance notes the ways in which gay and feminist activists and writers have long been engaged with questions of policing, speech and democratic rights around the world. If anything, the sequestration of feminist and LGBTQ work to a liberalized notion of gender and sexuality is relatively new, in historical terms, and perhaps already short lived. This collection seeks to expand the terrain on which we may deploy critiques of state-sponsored impunity and the repression of dissent, such that these critiques account for the lives of women, gays, lesbians, transgender people, but, perhaps more fundamentally, such that gender and sexuality are integral to our critiques of authoritarianism in South Asia.

35 To the Soldier in Siachen by Akhil Katyal (2017)

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Come back the snow is treacherous, come back they are making you fight a treacherous war, you were not born in snow you do not know snow, come back, I do not want you to fight that war in our name, I want you to rest, I want you to be able to feel your fingers, I want the snow in your veins to give way for you to be able to breathe, to melt into a corner, to sleep. Come back. Go home. Go home to Dharwad, Go home to Madurai, go home to Vellore, Satara, Mysore, do not stay in the snow, go home to Ranchi, that war is not for you to fight, that war is not for us to give to you to fight, let not our name be ice, let it not heave on your shoulders, do not let us steal your breath, the people there, the people of the snow do not need us, they do not need you to fight, come back you were not born to snow, you do not know the treachery of snow, go home, to rest, go home to the sun, to water, go home to the nights of your village, go home to the sweltering marketplace, to the noise of family-homes, to the sweat of the Ghats, to the dust of the plains, go home, may you never have to see white like that ever again, may you never have to see a colour become death in your very palm.

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WSS (Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression). 2017. Bearing Witness: Sexual Violence in South Chhattisgarh. Bhopal: WSS. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://wssnet.org/category/ publications/).

Zia, Ather. 2018. “The Killable Kashmiri Body: The Life and Death of Afzal Guru.” Pp. 103–28 in Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by H. Duschinski, M. Bhan, A. Zia, and C. Mahmood. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Newspaper articles and press releases

Chamberlain, Gethin. 2010. “Arundhati Roy Faces Arrest over Kashmir Remark.” The Guardian, October 26. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/26/ arundhati-roy-kashmir-india).

Daily Mirror. 2018. “AI Urges SL to Release Lists of Forcibly Disappeared.” Daily Mirror, May 18. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (http://www.dailymirror.lk/article/AI-urges-SL-to-release-lists-of- forcibly-disappeared-150108.html).

Daily Star. 2018. “Freedom at Last.” Daily Star, November 21. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.thedailystar.net/city/photographer-shahidul-alam-walks-out-jail-1663237).

Express Web Desk. 2019. “BHU Violence: Had Inputs that ‘Anti-social’ Elements Will Try to Vitiate University’s Atmosphere, Says VC Girish Tripathi.” Indian Express, March 16. Retrieved March 15, 2019 (https://indianexpress.com/article/india/bhu-violence-we-had-information-that-anti- social-elements-will-disturb-university-environment-says-bhu-vc-4858921/).

Farooq, Omer. 2016. “Rohith Vemula: The Student Who Died for Dalit Rights.” BBC News, January 19. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35349790).

Grover, Anand. 2015. “Viewpoint: Why India Was Wrong to Hang Yakub Memon.” BBC, August 6. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33772144).

International Commission of Jurists. 2013. “Bangladesh: Information and Communication Technology Act Draconian Assault on Free Expression.” November 30. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.icj.org/bangladesh-information-and-communication-technology-act- draconian-assault-on-free-expression/).

Johari, Aarefa, Abhishek Dey, Mridula Chari, and Shone Satheesh. 2018. “From to Paris: How a Police Investigation Turned a Dalit Meeting into a Maoist Plot.” Scroll.in, September 2. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://scroll.in/article/892850/from-pune-to-paris-how-a-police- investigation-turned-a-dalit-meeting-into-a-maoist-plot?utm_source=alsoread).

Khan, Mainul Islam, and Shashank Bengali. 2016. “Bangladesh Crackdown: More Than 14,000 Arrests, yet Machete Attacks Continue.” LA Times, June 16. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (http:// www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-bangladesh-crackdown-20160616-snap-story.html).

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Manral, Mahendra Singh. 2018. “Draft JNU Sedition Chargesheet Names Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, Anirban.” Indian Express, December 21. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https:// indianexpress.com/article/india/jnu-sedition-chargesheet-kanhaiya-khalid-anirban- slogans-5503183/?fbclid=IwAR3m9q- twemKXzDHnDY2MwYA3UUBOw3tXKtzc2Wo7_itNIk9VA9mnat_sFg).

Pal, Deepanjana. 2015. “Blocked in DU, Documentary ‘Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai’ Is a Must Watch.” Indian Express, August 21. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.firstpost.com/ entertainment/blocked-in-delhi-university-documentary-muzaffarnagar-baaqi-hai-is-a-must- watch-2408662.html).

Parmar, Tekendra. 2018. “The Persecution of GN Saibaba and India’s ‘Annihilation’ of the Resistance.” The Nation, May 2. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.thenation.com/article/ the-persecution-of-gn-saibaba-and--annihilation-of-the-resistance/).

Parshley, Lois. 2015. “The Life and Death of Sabeen Mahmud.” The New Yorker, April 28. Retrieved March 21, 2019 (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-life-and-death-of-sabeen- mahmud).

People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR). 2016. ““How Democracy ‘Uses’ a Colonial Law”: PUDR’s statement on #JNUCrackdown.” India Resists, February 2. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://indiaresists.com/how-democracy-uses-a-colonial-law-pudrs-statement-on- jnucrackdown/).

PTI (Press Trust of India). 2010. “Geelani, Arundhati to be Booked under Sedition Charge.” Times of India, October 25. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/ Geelani-Arundhati-to-be-booked-under-sedition-charge/articleshow/6810983.cms).

Safi, Michael. 2018a. “Photographer Charged as Police Crackdown in Bangladesh Intensifies.” The Guardian, September 6. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ aug/06/famed-bangladeshi-photographer-held-over-road-protest-comments).

Safi, M. 2018b. “Campaigners Celebrate as India Cecriminalises Homosexuality.” The Guardian, September 6. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/06/ indian-supreme-court-decriminalises-homosexuality).

Sahni, PS. 2018. “An Open Letter to Indian Parliamentarians to Get Section 377, IPC Repealed in Toto.” AIDS BhedBhav Virodhi Andolan (AIDS Anti-Discrimination Movement), October 6. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (http://aidsbhedbhavvirodhiandolan.blogspot.com/2018/10/an-open-letter- to-indian.html).

Schwartz, John. 2013. “Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide.” New York Times, January 12. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/ technology/aaron-swartz-internet-activist-dies-at-26.html).

Scroll Staff. 2018a. “Bhima Koregaon: Pune Court Sends Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves to Police Custody till November 6.” Scroll.in, October 27. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https:// scroll.in/latest/899855/bhima-koregaon-pune-court-sends-arun-ferreira-vernon-gonsalves-to- police-custody-till-november-6).

Scroll Staff. 2018b. “Tamil Nadu: At Least Nine Dead after Police Open Fire on Anti-Sterlite Protestors in Thoothukudi.” Scroll.in, May 22. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://scroll.in/ latest/879851/tamil-nadu-one-feared-dead-after-police-open-fire-on-anti-sterlite-protestors-in- thoothukudi).

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Tipu, Sanaul Islam, Arifur Rahman Rabbi, and Afrose Jahan Chaity. 2017. “Farhad Mazhar Requests Court to Allow Him to go Back Home.” Dhaka Tribune, July 4. Retrieved February 13, 2019 (https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/crime/2017/07/04/columnist-farhad-mazhar- taken-adabor-police-station/).

NOTES

1. This special issue draws from a set of papers presented at the 2016 Feminist Preconference of the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin. The Preconference was organized by the author and Krupa Shandilya. In addition to the authors whose work is published in this special issue, presenters and discussants for the Preconference also included Sareeta Amrute, Anjali Arondekar, Pinky Hota, Rushaan Kumar, Ania Loomba, Geeta Patel, Kavita Philip, and Akhil Katyal. A panel on this theme was also held during the same year at the Law and Social Sciences Network (LASSNET) Conference in New Delhi. That panel included Rohit De, who is also a contributor to this volume, Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Gautam Bhan, and Nitya Vasudevan. The author thanks Dr. Shandilya and all of the presenters and discussants in both events, and Eric Beverley for last minute editing help on this introduction. The author also thanks the SAMAJ editorial board, especially Virginie Dutoya and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal, for their comments on this essay and for their generous editorial work in support of this special issue, and Francie Crebs, for wonderful editorial support. 2. I use the terms “feminist,” “queer,” and “trans*” throughout this introduction. While the status of the use of “feminist” in South Asia may be less in question today, the terms “queer” and “trans*” have both been critiqued for their potential valence in promoting an imaginary of sexuality and gender identity that conforms to certain identitarian norms, and looks ultimately to the West for their forms. My use of these terms here is not uncritical, taking cognizance of these critiques while also aiming to conform to certain norms of usage and legibility for a wide readership. 3. Large, public universities meant to provide broad access to higher education. 4. I use the term “Dalit” to describe both Vemula’s caste affiliation and his Ambedkarite politics. 5. There have been overt and covert efforts to silence criticism of state policies at private Indian universities as well, induced by similar issues to those being raised here. 6. This introduction was written before the arrests of lawyers and advocates had taken place under the heading of the 2018 Bhima Koregaon protests (Johari et. al. 2018). 7. This is a fast changing landscape, with new incidents happening throughout India at an alarming rate. Since this writing, there has been widely reported violence against students by police at Banares Hindu College as well (See Express Web Desk 2019). 8. More recent engagements with questions of gender and caste are numerous. For example, please see the previous issue of SAMAJ, entitled “Caste-Gender Intersections in Contemporary India” (Ghosh and Banerjee 2018): https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4574. 9. Aaron Schwartz was an “internet hacktivist” who had made thousands of JSTOR articles free for a period of time. His case is also referenced in the interview in this collection between Inderpal Grewal and Rohit De. Schwartz was arrested in 2011 and charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and took his own life during court proceedings in 2013 (Schwartz 2013).

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ABSTRACTS

While there is a consensus that we are in a period of heightened official foreclosure of critical speech in South Asia, it would be wrong to presume that this historical period is exceptional in this regard. This special issue of SAMAJ takes up the ways in which laws against sedition and other laws controlling speech in South Asia are being used by the governments there with increasing frequency—against activists, lawyers and journalists. The issue is an examination of the uses of judicial and extrajudicial means to silence dissent throughout South Asia, and with an eye toward the historical precedents of particular contemporary instantiations of foreclosing and repressing critical speech. Here, we put these attempts at foreclosing criticism of the state in dialogue with the rise of new forms of public discourse and debate on gender and sexuality in South Asia, in order to pose a series of questions. What do questions of sexuality and gender identity have to do with revolutionary politics, with questions of class and political economy? Where are the spaces for radical critique constituted when there seems to be more space for different forms of gender and sexuality politics, sociality, and critique, and when the stakes of dissent seem to be climbing ever higher? Does it mean something in particular to have a queer feminist analysis, or to be queer or trans, in such times? Amongst these articles, the short answer to the last question is yes, but these meanings are multiple, and the grounds on which the politics of sexuality and gender rest are highly contested. Drawing on the longstanding history of feminist engagements with—and reliance on—the notion of dissent, and on work that interrogates the intersections of gender identity, sexuality and national belonging, this collection seeks to examine dissent, nationalism, and the politics of gender and sexuality within the frame of contemporary South Asia.

INDEX

Keywords: gender, sexuality, gender identity, feminism, dissent, sedition, law, South Asia

AUTHOR

SVATI P. SHAH University of Massachusetts, Amherst; African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), University of Witwatersrand, and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of Witwatersrand

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Exceptional Sexuality in a Time of Terror: “Muslim” Subjects and Dissenting/Unmournable Bodies

Dina M. Siddiqi

Introduction

1 Dominant representations of violence against queer bodies that are also Muslim invariably render such lives and subjectivities exceptional. However, this exceptionality can be sustained only if we bracket out much of what constitutes the everyday fabric of life: economic hardship, political oppression, religious difference, war, and so on (Mikdashi and Puar 2016). Once de-contextualized—or detached from locality—Muslim queer precarity can easily be reified, allowing for the production of globally legible exceptional subjects, shaped by and feeding into resuscitated imperialist tropes of sexuality and Islam (Massad 2016; Long 2009; Rahman 2014). At work is a tautology—queers who are Muslim are in danger because they are Muslims who are queer.

2 My essay seeks to complicate received understandings of violence against queer (and other) bodies in Muslim South Asia by re-visiting the 2016 killing of two Dhaka-based gay-rights activists. The murders catapulted the lives of Bangladesh’s gender and sexually non-conforming communities onto a global stage. Using a transnational lens, I track how a narrative of exceptionalism plays out, is negotiated and resisted in this particular context. Bangladesh’s place in the global imaginary—a development success story, predominantly Muslim “but” secular, the menace of radical Islam lurking in the shadows—makes it an especially instructive site for exploration. The analysis that follows is premised on the assumption that privileging sexuality as a site of particular harm or repression occludes critical aspects of the operations of power, not the least in relation to the politics of dissent.

3 The essay is made up of two distinct strands of analysis. The first calls for expanding the frames through which we read extremist violence against queer bodies in a “time of

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terror.” To be clear, my point is not to dismiss any role of religious ideology in the making of violence. Nor is it a defense of or apology for particular religious ideologies. It is, rather, to challenge a set of underlying assumptions on the relationship between violence and the secular. My concern is with the narratives that get attached to certain acts (the killing of bloggers, gay men, religious minorities), the questions that are asked or not, and the politics of circulation and citation therein. What, for instance, is lost in the framing of these deaths as exclusively—or even primarily—as a problem of free speech versus blasphemy, or the result of rising intolerance? Through an examination of the different meanings assigned to secular/state violence (enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention) as opposed to religious violence (the public- execution-style murders of bloggers, gay men, and others), I contend that queer precarity is not a mere symptom of rising intolerance/fundamentalism in Bangladesh but should be situated within a broader framework that accounts for an authoritarian state, its historically ambivalent relation to religion, and the nation’s structurally marginal transnational location. For the hypernationalist and authoritarian state, I contend, queer and politically dissident bodies are equally disposable. In contrast to this equal-opportunity indifference, the global media (and international bodies of various kinds) tend to act on a specific hierarchy of suffering in which queer bodies in Muslim nations carry a particular representational burden.

4 In a section on what I call secular blasphemies, I trace the production of the figure of the anti-nationalist in relation to long-standing fears of Islam. I go into some detail in order to foreground the historically awkward place of religion in the nationalist imaginary, and the implications thereof. I show how policing the national story is rendered an act of patriotism, while dissent from the official narrative invites accusations of anti-nationalist thought. Polarizing debates over the Shahbagh movement (see below) covered up a simultaneous proliferation of laws regulating political speech of various kinds.

5 State-sanctioned nationalist narratives and a series of increasingly draconian laws of sedition effectively collapse the Islamic terrorist onto the Razakar/war-time collaborator and anti-nationalist.

6 The second strand of the paper turns to the tensions and contradictions generated by the reification of gay and transgender violence in Bangladesh. I analyze an anonymous letter (I will refer to it as The Letter) circulated digitally just after the April killings. The authors, who self-identify as queer Bangladeshis, refuse absolutist narratives about Islam, even as they register state repression. For the authors, to do otherwise would be a form of complicity in imperialist projects and would draw attention away from transnational capitalist exploitation. Unpacking The Letter allows me to 1) address the question of the relationship of the Bangladeshi state to queer bodies; and 2) examine the ethical and epistemological dilemmas that have emerged in the so-called Muslim world since 9/11, and the resurrection of orientalist tropes to justify imperialist ventures (Abu-Lughod 2013; Farris 2017; Toor 2012). What are the consequences of looking at narratives of Islam in isolation? How do we write about violent social practices, without minimizing ground realities, but also without re-inscribing particular places as spaces of religious excess? How do fault lines between activism and academia—and the global North and South—play out in these debates?

7 In the conclusion, I bring the two strands of my argument together. I consider the consequences of the current political climate, in which some killings are unmournable

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and queer bodies are politically useful in selective ways. I end with a brief reflection on the politics of dissent in times of authoritarian terror that seems to characterize so many postcolonial states today.

8 This essay draws on over twenty years of engagement with feminist and queer activists in Bangladesh. Between 2016 and 2017, I also carried out formal and informal conversations—primarily on the pros and cons of The Letter—with friends in the LGBT community and sexual-rights activists. I first met Xulhaz Mannan, one of the two gay men killed, when I found myself at an early planning meeting for the publication Roopban.1 I remember little of that evening, except for the excitement and anticipation in the air. I rarely saw Xulhaz after he joined the US Embassy but we remained Facebook friends. I have since met the one person who survived that brutal attack. He was kind enough to read through this essay and offer his thoughts.

Geographies of Islam: local versus global?

9 On the morning of April 25, 2016, men posing as postal couriers slipped into the residence of Xulhaz Mannan, one of a handful openly gay LGBT activists in Bangladesh. Armed with machetes, the men killed Xulhaz and his friend Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy. A second friend, who locked himself in a bathroom, managed to survive. Carried out in broad daylight by assailants still at large, the murders of the two young men came as a shock to most people. Episodic attacks by self-proclaimed Islamic militants in the past generally targeted publishers, bloggers, and alleged atheists. The new focus on gay men had a chilling effect not only on various queer communities but also on professionals associated in the public imagination with sexual-health initiatives. In the backdrop of panic and uncertainty, individuals shut down social media accounts and disappeared underground; those with means sought refuge or asylum abroad.

10 Unlike much else that transpires in the country, the news made international headlines.

11 The iconic nature of the murders—the use of the signature machete favored by local Islamist militants—attracted global attention to a place generally ignored in the international media. For several weeks in a row, and long after, leading international news outlets, from The New York Times to The Huffington Post and The Wall Street Journal, carried reports and feature stories on the murders (Khaled 2016; Rahman 2017; Sanjum 2017). Xulhaz’s name and face quickly became associated with Bangladesh’s queer movement and the LGBT magazine, Roopban that he had helped to found.

12 Just two months later, a spectacularly staged, ISIS-style attack on an exclusive restaurant in Dhaka left 20 people dead. The Holey Bakery killings, as it came to be called, consolidated fears of the nation’s descent into fundamentalist terror.2 Not unexpectedly, national and international accounts of both events drew on a “default” global narrative—of yet another secular state under threat from an intolerant strand of Islam bent on muzzling freedom of thought and action. Notably, the temporal juxtaposition of the two events, and their shared discursive universe, forced an unprecedented public reckoning with questions of gay rights, religion, and the secular state. For a moment at least, the queer and terror issues came to be tied together in the public imagination.

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13 An exclusively empirical formulation—“why religious radicalism?”—forecloses an examination of the broader discursive environment in which some questions are raised and others disappear from the frame altogether. Thus I hold at bay various iterations of a question that has taken over popular and academic circles: what accounts for the emergence of such ferocious religiosity in a nation known for the “moderation”3 of its Islam?

14 The territory that is now Bangladesh has historically been represented as possessing a distinctively Bengali and moderate form of Muslimness. This is reflected as much in Euro-American Areas Studies as in vernacular scholarship and officially sanctioned narratives. The April killings and Holey Bakery attacks created a rift in this apparent Bangladeshi difference. These two violent episodes in quick succession recalled an earlier moment, when a fatwa against the writer Taslima Nasreen caused her to go into hiding in 1993. This was the first time that the image of Bangladesh as a space of religious moderation had been called into question, in South Asia and globally. In the intervening 20 years, Bangladesh seemed to have overcome the religious threats to women’s rights in particular. Thus, the popular response was one of perplexity and despair at the apparent backslide, and a renewed loss of the nation’s syncretic, secular culture. To a rather great extent, this apparent disjunction has been mediated by falling back on the analytically problematic but long entrenched binary in the study of South Asian Muslim societies: good “local” Islam (syncretic, tolerant of difference, Sufi) and bad global/transnational Islam (Arab, Wahabi, rigid, intolerant). In this respect, a major methodological challenge the paper raises is how to address the specificity of Islam in Bangladesh without reproducing the trope of the nation as a space of moderation or of excess. This calls for complicating received notions of the local, as I hope to do through my analysis.

On secular violence

15 What do we miss when we accept conventional explanations for extremist violence— those that place religion (text, practice) at the core? What ideological labor does the exclusive, near obsessive emphasis on Islam and its potential for radicalism perform? Janet Jakobsen observes that a focus on religion distracts from the role of the secular state in the production of violence (Jakobsen 2016). Building on Jakobsen, I suggest that a priori associations of Islam with (extremist) violence correspond to the common sense belief that secular regimes provide the absolute bulwark against religious violence. At work is also the presumption that secular states are not generative of violence, at least not of the kind that matters. The narrative is persuasive only because of the entrenched assumption that 1) secularity brings safety to all bodies and 2) secular violence is not real violence. This understanding also relies on a neat analytical distinction between religion and politics. As I show in the following section, we lose clarity and complexity when we mistake a larger trend—in this case against public speech—with an instantiation of religiously motivated hatred.

16 Jakobsen notes that the available solution to violence is more state violence, which is then rendered or represented as necessary violence (cf. Asad 2003 on necessary pain). In the name of threats to secularism, such countermeasures by the secular state are not only acceptable and warranted, they cannot be named or recognized as violence. The slew of military operations in the aftermath of the Holey attack—in which the

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“terrorists” weeded out of their dens were invariably shot in the back while attempting to escape—present a case in point. Despite often sloppy staging and dubious details, when carried out under the sign of security or saving secularism, these extra-judicial killings tend to elicit muted if any protest.

17 Unpacking the binary of religious/secular violence, I argue, allows us to grasp more fully the interconnected logics of violence at different scales. While there are “homegrown” individuals and groups in Bangladesh who are happy to turn to violence in order to eliminate certain kinds of speech and action—and while ISIS may well have a base in the country—an exclusive focus on “terrorists” obscures the complicity of the state (and transnational forces) in creating the context and conditions that enable such killings (see Abu-Rish [2016] on Jordan). Here, it is worth keeping in mind that the blogger Abhijit Roy was hacked to death in public, while numerous witnesses— including the police—stood by. The presence and inaction of the police is astonishing but not exceptional. The new normal in Bangladesh includes extra-judicial killings, often justified through the flimsiest of storylines. In the prevailing culture of fear and intimidation, skepticism towards state-sanctioned narratives and performances of justice coexists with a deep sense of uncertainty, of never being sure of the “truth” of events.

18 The current proliferation of laws regulating political speech, religious critique and officially sanctioned histories and hagiography must be located on this backdrop. A state that relies on eliminating political rivals through such extra-legal means, and appears indifferent to the violence visited on others, must also regulate, silence, and criminalize potentially threatening speech. The question arises: which speech and which bodies? The contours of Bangladesh’s laws of sedition produce an environment that enables tolerance for some bodies and not others, for some deaths, and not others. What are the boundaries between what can be spoken of and what must remain unspoken? Who draws the lines between the terrorist and the political dissenter, recast as anti-nationalist? These are not questions that can be addressed if we adhere to a fundamentalism/secularism binary.

Voicing dissent in a time of terror

19 Several days after the killing of Xulhaz and Tonoy, an anonymous English language document circulated briefly in the blogosphere and on private list-serves. The Letter, as I call it, was both provocation and plea. Directed at well-wishers of the Bangladeshi queer community at home and abroad, the unknown author(s) positioned themselves as voices from within the queer community. Their dispatch contained a blistering critique of national and international accounts of the murders, and global exhortations of solidarity since then. The author(s) made an ardent appeal against forging solidarities that reinforced Islamophobic and neo-imperial framings. Here they recall the paradoxical effect of the increasing legibility of queer movements in Muslim spaces. The rise of gay activism in Euro-America, and related interest in queer communities elsewhere, can result in increasing Islamophobia (See Rahman 2014). Along with unpacking the liberal language of tolerance in which the issue of gay rights (or lack thereof) had been framed, The Letter invited readers to reflect on the dangers of representing Bangladesh as “an Islamic fundamentalist country unsafe for secular

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bloggers, free thinkers or gender deviants.” The following extract encapsulates its central message: Ask yourself what is at stake when the international media focuses on some death and not others? Why “free speech” and “sexual and gender diversity” and not power-grabbing, land grabbing and coercion? Because while the West has handpicked extremist Islam as its enemy (with the banner of ISIS), speaking out against the violence of labor practices and money-making in third world nations is not high on their agenda.4 The single-spaced three page long text addressed a range of other concerns, from the dangers of queer visibility to the pitfalls of NGOized forms of organizing. The anonymous missive concluded with a bold declaration: “The queer fight is against Western hegemony, not by its side (emphasis mine).”

20 The Letter calls into question the relationship between publicity, visibility and protection, given the contemporary logics of publicity. The author(s) remark that calls for international solidarity when they result in the relentless pursuit of leads for news stories are counterproductive. The ensuing attention renders it almost impossible to remain safely in hiding. The reader is reminded of Michel Foucault’s observation in Discipline and Punish that visibility is a trap. The author(s) write: “Awareness calls for visibility. However, visibility does not ensure safety or security. Forcing visibility in unsafe situations like this might benefit those who seek asylum or humanitarian parole (super expensive!), or have top notch security but it will only make those without these options totally disposable (emphasis added).” Visibility, they suggest, may be a marker of progress and protection but only for certain bodies. Indeed, this is a long-standing debate in queer circles that exposes a general fault line between working-class, non- English-speaking hijra and affluent, English-speaking gay- and lesbian-identified individuals with access to the internet (Siddiqi 2009 and 2011).5

21 Attentive to the nuances of class and cultural capital that a cosmopolitan, NGOized selfhood confers (referring perhaps to individuals such as Xulhaz, who was related to a former Foreign Minister and a former employee of USAID), The Letter foregrounds the multiple paradoxes and inevitable fractures of deploying transnational visibility as a main strategy for queer movements.

22 Presumably conscious of the homogenizing effects/epistemic violence that global “celebrity” carries with it, the writer(s) call on their imagined audience to desist from reducing Bangladesh’s complex and layered LGBT community to one face (Xulhaz Mannan) and one organization (Roopban). The author-activists express a corresponding concern over the glorification of Xulhaz and the “forgetting” of his friend Tonoy in the numerous, globally circulating tributes produced in the wake of their killings.

23 The writer(s) clarify their use of the English word queer in the text to describe gender- and sexually- non-conforming persons. This was, they explained, “a place holder,” used in lieu of more appropriate vocabulary.

24 This “letter without a name” was signed off “in rage,” in the name of ashabhyo manushjon (literally savage or uncivilized people). The refusal to identify with the civilized or shobhya world, with all that is proper and human, presumably signifies the refusal of the civilizational framework, of liberal notions of the human, complete with their colonial, Islamophobic and racial underpinnings (see Asad [2003]). It is a rejection of the discourse of civilization that shores up development and humanitarian politics.

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25 The Letter received a hostile reception from mainstream human rights activists and gay men within Bangladesh. The latter were pre-occupied with arranging protection for themselves or their friends whose sexual identity and/or work-life suddenly rendered them vulnerable to (presumably Islamist) violence. The unnamed authors were roundly condemned, accused not only of minimizing the dangers of extremist Islam but also of acting irresponsibly “when real lives and bodies were at stake.” The consensus was that, strategically, it would be best to ignore this unwelcome discursive intervention. Neither did the provocative contents receive much traction from diaspora or international audiences.

26 As is only appropriate in these social-media saturated times, this missive arrived and (was) disappeared in the on-line world. The decision to remain anonymous no doubt arose from considerations of safety, but may also have been the result of anticipated hostility to the propositions in the letter. Calls to move away from Euro-American ideological frames and institutional apparatus would be jarring in the context of Bangladeshi civil society in “normal” times.

27 The Letter may as well have come from another planet given the fear and panic generated by the killings—which took everyone by surprise even though some form of violence was anticipated. Bangladesh had gone from a place where, in 2006, two university undergraduates “outed” themselves at an international conference on sexuality to one where, a decade later, government-approved and foreign-funded programs on MSM sexual-health services were drastically scaled down or halted altogether. The uncertainty and terror had a surreal quality, as though an epidemic had been unleashed, vectors of which had to be suppressed by any means necessary. The visceral immediacy of unexpected danger argued against any kind of discursive intervention. Notably, key mobilizing support came from the donor community, with whom many activists already had close working relationships.

28 The implicit opposition between “anti-imperialists” and “activists” that The Letter hints at recalls fault lines that have surfaced elsewhere in the so-called Muslim world. These emergent tensions center around efforts, especially since September 2001, to foreground the articulations of empire and geopolitics with hegemonic knowledge formations of Islam in relation to gender and sexuality (Abu-Lughod 2011; Haritaworn, Tauqir and Erdem 2008; Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002; Puar 2007; Toor 2012). Scholars in this vast and heterogeneous field are primarily but not exclusively located in Euro- American universities. They have been particularly attentive to the subtle and overt harnessing of colonial and orientalist narratives—of Muslim backwardness and the need for external salvation—to justify violent projects of empire. The singular focus on an ostensibly timeless Islam, such analyses contend, displaces the critical role of global political economy, imperialist relations, and state bureaucracies, inter alia. Effectively, this body of scholarship brings into question prevailing development initiatives and related donor politics that are central to the livelihoods and subjectivities of mainstream women’s and human rights activists/professionals. As such they directly implicate what we might call practical field operations.

29 Some critics have dismissed such efforts on the basis of geographic origin. In this view, elitist scholars based in Euro-America, removed from their putative realities on the ground, have the luxury of critiquing imperialist policies in a vacuum (Zia 2018; see also the critique by Nafar, Nafar, and Jrery 2012). By extension, scholarship generated from such locations is neither credible nor authentic. In contrast, activists fighting “in

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the trenches” of the global South are cast as having real stakes in the struggle against Islamist extremism since they are the ones who face actual violence (see Zia [2015]).

30 One result of this problematic North-South/global-local distinction, mapped on to a stark activist-academic divide, is a systematic misreading of calls to complicate and situate readings of Islamist violence. Abu-Odeh, for instance, argues that anti- imperialist critiques are externally generated, contain minimal institutional analysis and display a remarkable lack of knowledge of, or even curiosity regarding, “the complicated world of local activists, the fluid difference between them and their causes, and between their causes and those causes’ various articulations” (Abu- Odeh 2015). The title of her piece, “Holier than Thou? The Anti-imperialist versus the Local Activist” sets up mutually exclusive categories. The figure of the anti-imperialist is constructed through a series of exclusions; she can be neither activist nor local, and certainly not a “local” activist. Complex theoretical interventions can be dismissed as accusations of Southern activist “submission to the imperialist West” (Abu-Odeh 2015).6 External locational privilege is said to encourage paternalism toward “local activists,” much like that of colonial officials toward so-called “natives” (Abu-Odeh 2015). In fact, the charge of complicity can travel in the other direction. “Anti-imperialists” are frequently accused of being apologists for Islamists and other right wing forces.

31 Such reductive and essentializing tendencies do nothing to move the conversation forward. The authors of The Letter offer a way out of this seeming impasse in their implicit call to dismantle the binary of imperialism versus rights. Highlighting instead the terrain of land, materiality, and power, they remind us that state regulation of sexuality—and resistance to it—is imbricated in multi-scalar and transnational structures of governance, both discursive and material.

32 Historically, the relationship of the Bangladeshi state to (some) queer bodies was mediated by a rarely invoked colonial provision criminalizing sodomy. More recently, a combination of development and public-health initiatives turned the governmental gaze on those classified as Men who have Sex with Men (MSM). State interest in non- normative sexualities tends to hinge on the availability of funding for HIV/AIDS prevention. In addition, through the availability of funding, the new global interest in non-normative sexualities in the global South enhanced already existing initiatives surrounding gay rights. The murders of Xulhaz and Tonoy added a layer of complexity in which the state has been forced to protect its secular reputation, without changing its stance on questions of queer identity. In other words, and as The Letter indicates, LGBT politics in Bangladesh are deeply entangled in the mechanisms of global governance and a humanitarianism ethos, and thereby regulate the modes of solidarity available.7 The effect is to stabilize international NGO and donor narratives that hinge upon the assumption of a backward, religious space that must be saved or civilized through developmental aid and models. By default, mainstream NGO and civil-society actions rely upon this individuated form of human rights discourse.

33 How individuals from the queer community negotiate this complex terrain is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say, those to whom I spoke on the subject are perfectly aware of the uses of their bodies and sexualities by state agencies and transnational bodies. Some are more critical of imperialist/developmental politics than others. Divided on the question of visibility, there is consensus that funding is essential to both organizing and bodily protection.

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34 In asking why the deaths of Xulhaz and Tonoy are nameable and mournable internationally but not those killed or disappeared by the state, The Letter provokes us to rethink why some forms of violence constitute Terror while others—perpetrated against those who dissent politically—do not. In the next section, I contextualize the trope of the secular Bengali nation under attack, and historicize the violence of certain secular nationalist utterances. This “detour” into recent political history provides an example of what is possible if the reading of queer precarity in Bangladesh (and elsewhere) were to be unanchored from the conditions and framing identified by the authors of The Letter.

Secular blasphemies and nationalist dissent

35 The Bangla term rajdroho—literally revolt against the raja or ruler—is akin to the Merriam-Webster definition of sedition as the incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority. This is somewhat distinct from the 1898 Code of Criminal Procedure from which the current sedition laws are derived. The original code, put in place to “manage” intercommunity relations, “restore” law and order and of course to crush political dissent, defined “seditious material” as that likely to incite “disaffection” towards the Government of India or “class hatred” between India’s different communities. As I show, sovereignty resides not in the body of the Raja but in the nation and its national story, quite literally today.

36 If, as Lotte Hoek (2017) contends, the melodrama of nationalism is the hallmark of contemporary Bangladeshi politics, what are the stakes for those who dissent? Any answer must attend to the moral force of what Hoek calls “the master discourse of 1971” (p. 69) that is, to officially sanctioned modes of remembering the (implicitly sacred) time of independence.8 Hoek rightly observes that this master discourse has classically melodramatic features, operating through “highly conventionalized rhetoric and gestures that point to a Manichean order of right and wrong” (p. 69).

37 It is the structuring of Bangladesh’s nationalist drama—popular ideas of how “1971” is or should be remembered and corresponding economies of affect—that is relevant for my analysis. Any nationalist storytelling is at the same time an effort to mask multiple fractures and inconsistencies. In this respect, Bangladesh’s political history tends to reinforce a Manichean outlook. Almost from its inception, the origin story of 1971 has been the subject of bitter disputation. One outcome of the numerous official erasures and exclusions, of the interchangeable nature of heroes and villains is a popular desire for historical clarity or a resistance to ambiguity. Under the circumstances, calls to protect the nation through policing the “real” story of independence cannot but carry a particular emotional charge. Policing national history is thus rendered an urgent act of patriotism.

38 The competing and extraordinarily partisan versions of history in circulation leave little room for nuance or complexity.

39 Asad Ahmed (2009) writes that (religious) blasphemy as a trope enlists “a tested set of binaries to reductively make sense of the world: secular/religious, liberal/ fundamentalist, rational/irrational, and, by simple deduction, ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’—as if all these categories were internally coherent, consistent and informative about the imagined orders they describe” (p. 172). What we might call secular blasphemy, I

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suggest, performs a similar task—making sense of the world in reductive binary terms through the nationalist liberal imaginary. Blasphemy as concept allows us to understand the affective attachment—the extraordinary passion for and defense of —“shothik itihash,” that is, of the right version of the national story. In other words, the story of 1971 has taken on something of a sacred quality, so that any criticism of the sanctioned narrative appears to verge on the blasphemous. In particular, the figure of 3 million dead—precisely because it is so disputed—has become sacrosanct. In the face of long-term denial of wartime atrocities, the number carries profound symbolic weight, and easily mobilizes violent nationalist affect.

40 If the formal and informal policing of the 1971 story corresponds to revisionist political projects and the continued deferral of war crimes trials, the razakar/traitor/anti- nationalist features centrally in these contestations, not the least because of such deferrals. The literal embodiment of sedition, the image of the razakar has over time been folded into that of the bad Muslim—fanatical, irrational and violent, secretly desiring Pakistan. In this view, today’s “fundamentalists” are the razakars of 1971. 9 By extension, “incorrect” readings of 1971 are not just tantamount to sacrilege. They also constitute a serious threat to the national interest.

41 Paradoxically, efforts to right a major historical wrong—the deferral of justice for the victims of 1971—gave new purchase to the already stark moral universe of Bangladeshi cultural politics. In 2009, the ruling Awami League finally established an International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) with the objective of prosecuting individuals suspected of committing crimes against humanity during the war. Primarily from the JI, most collaborators (razakars) had until then enjoyed a remarkable degree of legal impunity and political authority, several having served as ministers in previous governments.

42 Forty years in the making, the Tribunal was the object of eager anticipation. The absence of pubic reckoning or a national reconciliation process for so long magnified the moral authority of the Tribunal and the affect that it generated. Emergent grammars of justice—popular and official—hinged on long-sedimented binaries around nation and Islam: Pro-Liberation War : Pro-Pakistani Freedom Fighter : Razakar (war time collaborator) Awami League : Jamaat I Islami and the BNP Patriotic : Anti-national/Seditious Secular (Progressive) : Religious (fanatical) These binaries map on to ontological anxieties about the nation itself. This may be one reason why the lines between wartime collaboration, by definition anti-national, and the expression of ideological or political dissent tend to be blurred—not just by an increasingly authoritarian state but also the intellectual gatekeepers of the nation.

43 Recalibrated periodically, these oppositions—and the moral force they represent—came into stark relief in 2013 with the spectacular irruption into political life of the Shahbagh movement. In early February, a small group of young leftists gathered at the crossroads of Shahbagh to protest the life sentence awarded to a JI member convicted by the Tribunal. Rumors abounded that the AL had come to a political understanding with the JI over the issue. Concerned that a change in government would lead to the latter’s release, the group insisted instead on the death penalty. Their demand resonated powerfully with otherwise “non-political” citizens who had seen too many criminals walk free after a regime change, and who had waited a long time for these trials. Dubbed Ganojagoron Moncho or Platform for People’s Awakening, at its peak, it

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drew in an audience of several hundred thousand men, women and children daily. The demand for judicial impartiality quickly transmuted into a collective demand for the hanging of all war criminals. The slogan Phashi chai—we demand hanging—became the movement’s key rallying cry. Put differently, state violence—the death penalty—came to stand for the closure of the national wound of deferred justice.

44 Fractures emerged almost as immediately, revealing unspoken rules about what could and could not be spoken out about the 1971 war and, by extension, about the Tribunal. Readily re-inscribing older binaries, Shahbagh worked as a litmus test of sorts: one was either for the movement, and thereby for liberation and secularism, or against it, and thus by implication for Pakistan/JI and fundamentalism.

45 Fault lines surrounding the movement’s relationship to Islam appeared soon enough. The figure of the traitor (razakar), already dense with meaning, took on a life of its own. Nayanika Mookherjee (2012:50) notes that denunciatory practices toward razakars are primarily performed and staged. In non-nationalist counter-publics, Shahbagh’s strident secular nationalism came to be read as implicitly against-Islam. A counter- movement led by a heretofore-obscure group of Islamists capitalized fully on older binaries and associations, successfully labeling Shahbaghis as atheists. The contradictions inherent to the nation were quite literally staged as public drama.

46 At a time of heightened emotions, the slogans and chants enacted a form of rhetorical bloodletting. While there was no uniform Shahbagh worldview, dominant voices expressed concerns about the danger not just from religious extremists but also from the anti-nationals in their midst. In the prevailing environment, any form of dissent could be reductively recast as anti-national, standing not just against the nation but also the 1971 war and the spirit or sentiment represented by that war (muktijuddhor chetona). A casual remark on a talk show by a BRAC University professor that the Shahbagh movement exhibited “fascist undertones” garnered death threats and demands for him to be fired. A (prurient) short story that depicted the numerous and visible young women who spent their nights protesting at Shabbagh as sexually lax drew enormous condemnation. In other circumstances, such an accusation would have elicited murmurs of puritanical approval. In this instance, the backlash was so severe that a public apology from the prominent elderly male author did not suffice. The newspaper in which the story appeared was forced to permanently withdraw the piece and issue an apology of its own.

47 When cast as essential to the protection of the nation, the extraordinary violence of certain secular-nationalist utterances, and their generative potential, is effectively occluded. What in other contexts would be considered censorship comes to be seen as sensible and necessary measures. The trope of the secular nation under attack from all sides actively invites the regulation or criminalization of speech. Under these circumstances, attempts to construct a counter-public can also be dismissed as dangerous, anti-national activity. In late 2015, British journalist David Bergman, who ran a blog on ICT proceedings discovered this first hand after referring in his blog to academic studies that differed from the official Tribunal-sanctioned figure of 3 million dead. The ICT charged Bergman with contempt for having “caused grave hurt to the emotion of the nation and also belittled the authority of a court of law” (Ali 2015).10 Here the nation itself is personified, a sentient being with emotions capable of being wounded. In turn, 49 signatories to a petition that challenged the charge against Bergman found themselves threatened with contempt of court. The message was clear

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—deviation from the sanctioned narrative would not be tolerated. Any such speech act would be deemed unacceptable, a “profanity” that had to be excised urgently from the body politics before it could defile the realm of the sacred territory of 71/Shahbagh.

48 The tussle over the dead body of Piash Karim, the professor mentioned earlier, offers a sobering illustration in this regard. In death, his body took on a political life of its own (cf. Verdery 2000).11 A popular if controversial public figure on the talk show circuit, Piash (as he was known) was an outspoken critic of the AL government. Following his unexpected death, his family requested official permission to display his body at the iconic nationalist monument, the Shahid Minar, so that the public could pay their respects. This routine ritual of remembrance for public figures provoked enormous resistance from those who felt Piash’s body would defile the sacred space of the Shahid Minar. A popular chant from that time, “The burden of Piash Karim’s body will not be borne by the Shaheed Minar” signaled that Piash’s views were a burden to the nation. Another, “The sacred Shaheed Minar will not bear the body of a (Pakistani) agent, take it to Pakistan” collapsed the distinction between Piash the critic of Shahbagh, his corpse and Pakistan itself. The framing of the dead body as national burden called for its symbolic expulsion from national territory into enemy/Pakistani territory.

49 Riding on a tide of populism generated by the Tribunal and Shahbagh, in 2013 the government amended the 2006 Information and Communications Technology Act, rendering it even more draconian in content and reach.12 Notably, the amendment sharpened colonial era provisions on hurting the religious sentiments of a community.”

50 Official media policy, The National Broadcasting Policy introduced in 2014, effectively criminalizes any speech judged to be anti-state, or that goes against national ideology, the national interest or is “inconsistent with Bangladesh’s culture” (Bangladesh Gazette 2014a). Among other things, the policy restricts reporting on “rebellion, anarchy or violence” (Bangladesh Gazette 2014b) if such reporting is deemed to be against the national or people’s interest. The Digital Security Act of 2018, under consideration by Parliament, prescribes a maximum penalty of life in prison for the crime of spreading “false information” about the 1971 war, or about the national founder Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; seven years for disturbing public order; and two years for defamation or harming religious sensitivities. It is worth noting that the penalty for defaming Mujib’s reputation is much higher than it is for hurting religious sentiments.

51 Since then, the formally secular state has invoked the ICT law to silence not just journalists questioning state actions but also several bloggers accused of atheism and/ or of producing disparaging commentary on Islam. It is no small irony that these bloggers were charged with the colonial crime of “hurting” the sentiments of a religious community.

52 Paradoxes abound. The secular Bangladeshi state has used sedition laws to silence “atheist” bloggers charged with hurting the sentiments of a religious community, even as it calls for (must be seen as calling for?) the protection of the same bloggers from Islamist terror (but not other kinds).

53 Threatened in its monopoly over the national narrative, the current regime presents itself as sole guardian of the secular Bengali nation. The state must also contend with not being perceived as anti-Islamic or pro-Indian, which often slides in the right-wing imagination into being “pro-Hindu.” As a result, the moral defense of the nation includes a defense of (moderate) Islam, one that is acceptable and non-threatening to

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global investors and the donor community. The unstable place of Islam in the nation and the imperatives of global finance generate their own contradictions. This explains the police refusing to grant permission for a gay pride procession at the annual Bengali New Year’s celebration that Xulhaz had organized for the week preceding his murder. The ostensible reason was the inability to provide security to the procession in the face of Islamist threats. Yet this same police force arrested several of Xulhaz’s gay comrades who decided to attend in their own capacity. Ultimately, to the state, both queer and politically dissident bodies appear equally disposable.

In lieu of a conclusion

54 The current moment stands out because of the peculiar prominence granted to Muslim sexual subjectivity in discourses of global governance and as well as the striking emotional charge such discourses carry. Sexuality, arguably, is increasingly central to the production of an idea of an Islamic difference, as Momin Rahman has argued recently (Rahman 2014). Given the global obsession with Muslim terror, the existing developmental and humanitarian focus on non-normative sexualities in the global South takes on a particular salience in the Muslim world. Thus, “gay killings” in Muslim spaces garner special attention. The Bangladeshi state and its actions must be located in this broader context.

55 In a set of reflections on the production of queer theory from locations where war and colonization are quotidian contexts of life, Mikdashi and Puar (2016) ask if we should “rethink what sexual injury is and the economic, political and military work that designations of sexual or gendered injury does in the first place. How do these designations affect which deaths or injuries are internationally nameable and mournable and which deaths are merely ‘collateral damage’ in the Middle East?” (p. 220).

56 In the spirit of Mikdashi and Puar, in this essay I have mapped the political and economic work of exceptionalizing Muslim “queer precarity” in the context of NGOization and developmentalism rather than war. As I contend in the introduction, privileging queer sexuality as a site of special harm obscures key aspects of the operations of power. While all kinds of bodies and speech are policed by the state, only some bodies and injuries are globally legible/mournable in the prevailing narrative. The analytical frame through which the dominant discourse is organized simplifies and obfuscates a much more complex set of circumstances in Bangladesh.

57 The slippage between the fear of Islam and fear for the nation’s integrity generates conditions for silencing political dissent. The effect is to normalize state or secular violence, which then appears to be the only bulwark against religious extremism. At the same time, contestations over who owns the national narrative allow the lines between terrorist and anti-nationalist (those who dissent politically) to be blurred. In effect, secular blasphemies and the production of fear of Islamist terror/Pakistani traitors mask the state’s systematic silencing of dissent.

58 The defensive posture of the Bangladeshi state opens the door to thinking more broadly about the nature of democracies in contemporary postcolonial states, and in relation to the global trend toward right-wing authoritarian rule. The intensely contested nature of postcolonial nationalism signals an inherent fragility and instability. Anxieties around the viability of the nation—that which has been fought for

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with blood and which promised a certain freedom—are harnessed to legitimize authoritarian state structures. Indeed, framing non-normative sexuality as an external, “western” threat to national purity, is a well-worn strategy of postcolonial states (see the essays in Picq and Thiel [2015]). The figure of the anti-nationalist—Islamist, terrorist, sexual renegade, whatever specific circumstances call for—is crucial to such maneuvers. As a result, state violence appears necessary and normal, distinct from other forms of violence that constitute Terror.

59 What stands out in the Bangladeshi context is that sexuality as threat can be appropriated by the state to justify interventions against real and imagined threats of Islamist violence. Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers, and Svati Shah, for thoughtful, detailed, and generous comments on an earlier draft. Special thanks to Tanvir Alim, Ali Asgar, Hiya Islam, and Joya Sikder for time, adda, and insights.

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NOTES

1. For more on the history of Roopban, see Hossain (2019). 2. See BBC News (2016): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36692613 3. The qualifier “moderate” assumes that Islam, in general, is not. 4. This letter has vanished from the internet. I am quoting from a personal printed copy. 5. Hijra are not named but the text notes that it is “lower income folks, or those who are isolated and not networked” who are vulnerable. 6. https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/lama-abu-odeh/holier-than-thou-antiimperialist- versus-local-activist 7. The question of funding remains a thorny issue. What kind of inadvertent complicities and compliances are involved, for instance, in taking US State department funding? For Bangladesh and other Muslim transnational spaces, LGBT rights are deeply entangled in global governance structures that legitimate certain forms of governance and prescribe a certain direction. Indeed, as The Letter indicates, a complex structure of asylum-seeking has developed in the wake of these killings. 8. Military operations in March 1971 to quell an “insurrection” in the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) turned into a nine-month-long struggle for Independence. The (West) Pakistani army, in collaboration with some local Bengalis, raped, pillaged and murdered with impunity. Post-war agreements shielded Pakistani-army personnel from prosecution by the Bangladeshi

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state. For some people, the phrase—tirish lokkho bhai boner rokter binimoy shadhinota (“Freedom was won in exchange for the blood of 30 lakh brothers and sisters”) arguably possesses the quality of a religious chant. 9. Mookherjee (2012:66) traces critical shifts in popular constructions of the collaborator that correspond to the reintroduction of parliamentary democracy in the 1990s. Earlier literary accounts stressing complicity, contradiction and economic self-interest gave way to imagery of razakars as fanatical Muslims who possessed secret sympathy for Pakistan and were poised to undermine secular nationalism. 10. http://www.thedailystar.net/contempt-charge-against-david-b-23430 11. The professor mentioned earlier who passed away several months later. 12. Government of Bangladesh (2013) states: “If any person deliberately publishes or transmits or causes to be published or transmitted in the website or in any other electronic form any material which is false and obscene and if anyone sees, hears or reads it having regard to all relevant circumstances, its effect is such as to influence the reader to become dishonest or corrupt, or causes to deteriorate or creates possibility to deteriorate law and order, prejudice the image of the state or person or causes to hurt or may hurt religious belief or instigate against any person or organization, then this activity will be regarded as an offence” (italics added). Before the amendment, maximum punishment for offences under the section was 10 years’ imprisonment and a fine of Tk 1 crore. The amendment increased the maximum jail term to 14 years and crucially, empowered police to make arrests without a warrant. Between March and July 2017, at least 21 journalists were sued under section 57 of the ICT Act (Adhikary 2017).

ABSTRACTS

This essay complicates received understandings of violence against queer (and other) bodies in Muslim South Asia by re-visiting the 2016 killing of two Dhaka-based gay-rights activists. It challenges underlying assumptions of the relationship between violence and the secular through an examination of the different meanings assigned to secular/state violence (enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention) as opposed to religious violence (the public-execution-style murders of bloggers, gay men, and others). The essay also explores the tensions and contradictions generated within Bangladesh by the reification of gay and transgender violence. The conclusion considers the consequences of the current political climate in which some killings are unmournable and queer bodies are politically useful in selective ways.

INDEX

Keywords: Bangladesh, Islam, Holey Bakery, secular violence, Roopban

AUTHOR

DINA M. SIDDIQI Faculty of Liberal Studies, New York University

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Queer intimacy during seditious times: revisiting the case of Ramchandra Siras

Nishant Shahani

I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan I loved Science, Stars, Nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs colored. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt. The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In every field in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living. Rohith Vemula

1 It is not without significance that Rohith Vemula’s suicide note articulated the violence of the caste system and the vision of the Ambedkar Student Association through a language of desire—the difficulty of loving “without getting hurt.” In this essay I want to return to the tragedy of Vemula’s suicide and the campus activisms that his death triggered as the occasion to revisit another suicide—or what Arundhati Roy more appositely terms “institutional murder” (2016)—on a university campus: the case of gay professor Ramchandra Siras at Aligarh Muslim University.

2 I want to ask what it might mean to retrospectively re-think the case of Siras through the language of political and public desire that Vemula’s case at the University Hyderabad (UOH) and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student protests present.

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Siras, whose apparent suicide in 2002 as a consequence of forced outing has thus far been framed almost exclusively as a case of privacy violation, buttressing activist urgency around the repeal of Section 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860)—the “anti-sodomy” law that became the locus of resistance of LGBT activists in India over the past three decades, and that was struck down as inapplicable to homosexual sex as of September 6, 2018 by the Supreme Court of India. I want to suggest that these dual suicides on University campuses, when viewed in tandem, offer a way of framing queer politics through a more assemblaged lens that is not limited to the discourse of privacy rights, or to the concerns of class and caste elites.

3 My goal in re-thinking the Siras case via more contemporary discourses around “sedition” on university campuses is not to point out superficial similarities or argue for simple a simple analogy between “queer” and “Dalit” (which only always reifies the caste and class privilege of the former and the heterosexuality of the latter). Neither is it to simply underscore the similarities between a tale of two suicides that both take place under the aegis of universities that have become flashpoints for contestations around caste, sexuality, communalist violence, and discourses of compulsory nationalism. Undeniably, the lures of analogy beckon when positing Siras and Vemula in proximity with one another, through easy temptations of “just like” formulations: for example, the love of writing and investments in aesthetics, the struggles against reification in which “value” is reduced to identity (untouchable and gay), the desire to love without hurt, the rejection of mind/body dualisms, the “fatal accidents” of birth that mark their precarity, the attempts to transgress the “nearest possibilities” presented to them, and ultimately, the loneliness that proves too painful and violent to bear. But to analogize this “likeness” between Siras and Vemula is to ironically repeat the very modes of injury that reduce them into votes, numbers, or things, to use Vemula’s own language. Analogies use the assumed internal coherence of one category as the fulcrum to level the other, reducing it to, in Vemula’s words, “immediate identity” and what is already presumably known.

4 My purpose in this essay, however, is to move beyond the lures of analogy. The occasion for this refracted and retrospective reading of Siras is mediated by the release of the film Aligarh (Mehta:2016) just one month after Vemula’s death, and a few weeks after the JNU controversy in which students protesting capital punishment were arrested and charged with sedition by the Delhi police. On the basis of the professor’s life during the months leading up to his death, I offer a critique of the film to ask what is lost from our analytical and political categories when the Siras case is read exclusively as one that belongs to a genealogy of intimacy and illegal privacy violation. In what ways is queer intimacy predicated on constitutive violence of class, caste, and communalist bracketing? Even though my analysis performs a fairly close textual reading, my arguments transcend the specifics of both cases to gesture toward the following question: what does it mean to argue for queer national belonging through state-sanctioned structures of law at the very historical moment when the rhetoric of sedition and compulsory nationalism is mobilized as a way to violently erase dissent? Before I grapple with this question, I want to offer a few qualifying comments on the essay’s methodological interventions and the political/theoretical contexts of sedition that subtend both the Siras and Vemula cases.

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“Assembling” critique

5 The epistemological weight of the above question might admittedly seem too broadly ambitious in scope, especially when filtered through a close reading and critique of a single cultural text, as I attempt in this essay. But my methodological investments in textual critique are not entirely divorced from conceptual concerns. In my analysis of Aligarh (Mehta:2016), the place of critique functions both as a kind of reading practice and as an intervention into state-centered logics of queer activism tied to the repeal of Section 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860). In asking what is left (out) of queer appeals to the state, the conventional riposte is most often articulated through logics of rhetorical pragmatism and political instrumentality: “If not this, then what is the alternative?” The demand for “real” politics that is implicitly opposed to “merely” symbolic critique can function to obviate the work of a broader political imagination that dares to ask what might exist beyond the altar of equality before the law (an equality that is always qualified by the limits of its own regulatory productions). In their interrogation of state-centered legalism, Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (2002) theorize the notion of critique as a reading practice that functions as a useful tool to describe both the methodological and conceptual thrust of this essay. Brown and Halley point to how the critique of state-sanctioned legalism is often accused of “being … intellectually indulgent, easier than fixing things or saying what is to be done” (p. 25). In other words, critique gets framed as apolitical or abstractly theoretical as opposed to the material muscularity of legal change. Rather than a defensive posturing against critique’s ostensibly more tangential relation to “the real,” Brown and Halley argue for an embrace of its performative uncertainty.

6 The knowledge produced by critique is precarious in that its outcomes are not predictable in advance through the promised assurance of policy reversals or legal repeals—in fact, the consequences of critique might seem permanently deferred or momentarily suspended. And yet, such forms of epistemological stuttering do not foreclose critique’s reparative or pleasure producing possibilities. Brown and Halley (2002) thus write: “Not knowing what a critique will yield is not the same as suspending all political values while engaged in critique” (p. 27). In fact, the unpredictability of these forms of not-knowing brings its own kinds of textual pleasures since “there can be a kind of euphoria in being released to think critically about something that one experiences as constraining, limited, or gagging” (p. 29). The attention to critique as a source of euphoria puts it in the same methodological vicinity as Eve Sedgwick’s (2003) theorization of reparative reading that is, according to her, “keenly pleasure-oriented” (p. 144). Sedgwick offers the notion of reparative reading as an alternative to those critical practices that are mired in “paranoid thinking”—the hermeneutic of exposure that is always already vigilant for the “bad news” of hegemony that must be exposed at all costs. Since paranoid readings are implicated in anticipatory methods that only confirm what they suspect, they result in critical tendencies that have tautological relations to questions of temporality. In contrast, reparative reading practices are more mutable in their temporal logics. They recognize how texts are recursively structured by the past, but also allow for readings in which “the future may be different from the present” (Sedgwick 2003:146). Critique, in other words, even when not offering some stable ground for political “solutions” can be, in Sedgwick’s (2003) words “additive and accretive” (p. 129) in scope. My reading of Aligarh (Mehta:2016) in this essay mobilizes

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reparative critique in this sense, as a way of piecing together “fragments and part- objects” into what Sedgwick (2003) calls “something like a whole—though … not necessarily like any preexisting whole” (p. 128). This qualifier is crucial since reparative critique as I mobilize it does not culminate in the certitudes of what Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala (2015) call “an illusory point of arrival” (p. 21) that marks state-centered queer activism in India. Reparative critique, in refusing to simply lapse back into the rigid tautologies of a “preexisting whole,” aims to articulate possibilities beyond the entrenched faith in “liberal legalism” (Brown and Halley 2002:5) and state protection.

7 But there is yet another sense in which my methodological engagements “assemble and repair” (Sedgwick 2003:128) fragments, even while resisting the rigid temporalities that would merge these discrete parts into a reified whole. Sedgwick’s use of “assemble” (as opposed to “unify”) and my mobilization of “assemblage” at the outset, while not synonymous, do function in the same methodological vicinity. In the field of queer theory, the most noteworthy use of “assemblage” is associated with the work of Jasbir Puar whose critique of intersectionality and its rigid co-options is useful for my own investments in arguing for more “assemblaged” understandings of caste with queerness. Even while intersectionality remains a politically imperative project, its standardization and academic institutionalization have resulted in its mobilization as a way to simply foreground supplemental subject positions (in which a performance of radicalism gets cathected through the multiplication of identities). Thus in arguing for an assemblaged lens, I am making the case for a kind of methodological critique that does not simply bestow political or epistemological authority on marginal identities. Nor do I simply want to make a politically imperative but fairly well-rehearsed call for broader alliances within progressive social movements. Instead of instrumentalizing intersectionality as a performance of political capital, an assemblaged method theorizes social categories and identities, as “events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than simply entities and attributes of subjects” (Puar 2012:58).

Sedition, security and the politics of desire

8 If we are to understand the assemblaged logics beyond identity politics, Puar (2012) suggests a critical focus on the “patterns” and “intensified relations [that] have given new capacities to … entities” rather than “the entities themselves” (p. 60–61). Puar’s attention to the “assemblage of the event-space” (p.13) is apposite for my purposes in which the 21st-century politics of sedition function as the site through which patterns of relations between caste and sexuality can be mapped and articulated. In what sense do the politics of sedition become the “event-space” for an assemblaged understanding of caste and sexuality? Before detailing the range of actors and “event-spaces” that subtend contemporary mobilizations of sedition by the Indian state, I want to point out the term’s capacious reach to unpack its implications for scholarship and activism around gender and sexuality.

9 In her analysis of the relationship between sedition and liberal democracy India, Anushka Singh (2018) theorizes sedition as a kind of performative excitable speech “which is forbidden for exceeding the limit of legitimate criticism and, therefore, not protected by the right to freedom of speech and expression” (p. 3). The ideological limits of speech on account of its seditious potential—as that which exists outside the bounds of “legitimate” or “reasonable” criticism— resonate with the injunctions

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against critique-as-method on account of its threats to liberal political value. If critique, as Brown and Halley (2002) remind us, is “risky” and at times, even “a disruptive, disorienting, … destructive enterprise of knowledge” (p. 28), the managing of seditious discourse similarly threatens to disrupt democracy’s claims to freedom and liberty. Democracies, writes Singh (2018), are “fraught” since they must manage “conflicting tendencies which inhere in the logic of ‘democracy’ and the logic of the ‘state’” (p. 2). Singh (2018) thus suggests that in the Indian context, “coagulating state security” (p. 2) plays a crucial role in rationalizing the legal restrictions around speech that is considered anti-national.

10 If seditious discourse constitutes an assemblaged “event-space,” I want to foreground how the notion of desire is also central to its constitutive elements. In a powerful speech at a sit-in at JNU entitled “What the Nation Really Needs to Know,” Lawrence Liang, co-founder of the Bangalore Alternative Law Forum, articulated the assemblage between sedition and desire only a few weeks after criminal cases were registered against students accused of making anti-national slogans in support of Kashmir’s self- determination. In his speech, Liang returns to the colonial state’s wielding of sedition law via Section 124-A (Indian Penal Code 1860), through which Gandhi was accused of treasonous activity. Quoting Gandhi, Liang (2016) points to the language of coerced desire at the heart of seditious law: “Affection cannot be manufactured or be regulated by the law; one should be free to give full expression to their disaffection.”1 In Gandhi’s protest, compulsory “affection” works in tandem with the demand for the production of loyal national subjects. But in response to compulsory affection for the nation, Liang does not suggest the eschewal of this emotive language of desire that is central to seditious discourse, however coercive and violent it might be. Instead, he points to the discourse of love that is endemic to dissent. Liang encourages a reading of Gandhi’s protest as an illustration of Socratic love that framed its own protests against the sovereign state as a kind of dissenting disidentification. Dissent then becomes a kind of love rather than a form of treachery. Liang (2016) thus remarks: “What it means to be seditious—let’s take it away from the language that has been given to us of national/ anti-national, or traitor, betrayal etc. and argue instead (for) another kind of politics that reclaims what we may mean to think about a different form of love.”2 In his speech, Liang argues for a politics of reclamation—of retaining sedition’s proximity to desire as a way of expressing dissent as a “queer” kind of love that is not mandated by the state. To bring these broader questions back to my reading of Aligarh (Mehta:2016), what is lost from maps of contestation when queer love can only be cathected via state recognition? What is missed when “seditious” practices of (dis)affection are bracketed within queer scenes of arrival? How might reparative critique return us to pleasures that can be gleaned from disaffection?

Contexts of critique

11 Refracting the “cases” of Siras and Vemula through one another requires some more context on the broader “event-spaces” that would permit an assembled reading. In “On the Case,” Lauren Berlant (2007) usefully differentiates between the “genres” of the case and the event, suggesting that “a case is what an event can become” (p.9). The emphasis on becoming ties the logics of the case to the assemblage whose patterns are not organized into a seamless whole, but in which putatively discrete elements are

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drawn into one another’s social and affective fields, allowing for new affinities and ways of being. Thus the contexts that I detail below cannot be read simply as sequential descriptions of truncated and spectacular events; instead, they constitute the assembled logics of security, seduction, and sedition on which critique is predicated.

12 In 2016, the Hindu Right’s experiments in saffronization, privatization, anti-affirmative action politics, and compulsory nationalism all came to head in a tragic and violent fashion when Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student at the University of Hyderabad, committed suicide. A few months before the tragic incident, Vemula and five other activist friends were suspended and prevented from entering their hostels and using University public spaces on account of their participation in ostensibly “anti-national” activities on campus. As members of the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA), Vemula and his friends had frequently clashed on campus with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student chapter of the right-wing Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Ironically, it was not caste discrimination, but the ABVP’s communalist agenda—what Vemula called “the bloodthirsty nationalism”— that sparked the central conflict between the two groups at the University of Hyderabad. In 2015, the ASA protested against the death sentence of Yakub Memon, a Muslim who was accused of collaborating with the masterminds behind the 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai. Given that the largest percentage of Indian citizens killed by capital punishment were Dalits and Muslims, the ASA planned a protest called “Resistance Gathering against Capital Punishment: In the Wake of Death Sentence to Yakub Menon.” A poster at a rally held up by one of the ASA students read: “Public conscience is Brahmin conscience. Satisfy with Muslim blood: ASA-UOH” (Donthi 2016). Much of this activism in the service of anti-communalist ideology was a way of distancing Dalit politics from co-option by Hindutva logic against the fabricated common enemy of the Muslim minority. A member of the ASA articulated these coalitional endeavors as efforts in “creating a universal language of discrimination” in order to counter the supremacy of Hindu nationalist ideology. While the ASA’s protests were branded as anti-national and anti-Hindu, the real threat on the campus that the group posed was their ability to, in Arundhati Roy’s (2016) words, make “connections between caste, capitalism, and communalism.”3

13 In a poignant photo that circulated in the news media following his death, Vemula is pictured with two friends carrying assorted remnants of their private possessions: a suitcase, a mattress, a blanket, a bag full of clothes, a couple of towels. The “private,” in this instance, quite literally spills over into the public. The humble belongings in their hands are dwarfed by a giant-sized portrait of the Dalit leader, B. R. Ambedkar held by Vemula. Epitomizing a demand for accountability in the midst forced precarity, the photograph also illustrates the University’s enforcement of dispossession that is privative in intent. The suspension from the public space of the University was accompanied with orders to campus security for locks to be placed on the hostel room doors of Vemula and his friends. In addition to the material realities of lost accommodations and scholarship funds that poor first-generation students depended on, the symbolic dimensions of removing Dalit students from the University’s premises were not lost on students in the ASA. Importantly, their protests were not simply framed as demands for re-entry into the private zones from which they had been jettisoned. More ambitiously volatile and public in scope, they were aimed at

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transforming the political and intellectual climate of their campus by challenging the University’s “Brahmin conscience.”

14 In the days following Vemula’s death, various political groups on campus joined the ASA to form the Joint Action Committee in order to protest the reinstatement of Vice Chancellor Appa Rao Podile. The VC had a vexed history with Dalit students and soon came to personify the institutional biases behind the cause of Vemula’s death. Protesting his re-appointment, the students surrounded his private residence where the administrator was having a meeting with an executive council comprised mainly of ABVP students. In the clashes that ensued, some of the chancellor’s private property was destroyed, leading to the involvement of law enforcement. Media reports of the event stressed vandalism and loss of private property as justification for police intervention, with no attempts to address the larger systemic conditions that had motivated the protests to begin with. Several women involved in the demonstrations documented instances of sexual abuse by the police, with one constable demanding that these students “behave like girls, not like prostitutes” (Donthi, 2016).4

15 The ripple effects of Vemula’s suicide were not only contained within their local context. Only a few weeks after Vemula’s passing, progressive and leftist students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) began distributing fliers for an event under the aegis of a protest “against the Brahmanical collective conscience.” The event combined its challenge to caste Hinduism with the commemoration of the death anniversary of Afzal Guru—one of the accused in the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, who was sentenced to be hanged by India’s Supreme Court without a fair trial. As at the University of Hyderabad, the JNU events were spurred on by students with discrete yet shared investments in interrogating Hindutva and nationalistic projects. Anticipating the power of these inchoate but powerful alliances to undermine the hegemony of Hindu nationalism on college campuses, the ABVP demanded both police and media presence to monitor “treasonous” elements at JNU. When A Zee TV camera captured some groups of students in masks shouting “Pakistan Zindabad” (long live Pakistan) and “Kashmir ki azadi” (freedom for Kashmir) as responses to the ABVP’s nationalist chants of Bharat Mata ki Jai (Victory for Mother India), the soundtrack of the footage was superimposed over that of a different student rally headed by Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the JNU Student Union (the student branch of the ). While his own slogans of “azadi” were uttered in the context of freedom from communal violence and caste hierarchies, the manipulation of the footage made it easy to dismiss any dissident voices as anti-Indian. Kanhaiya and two other students were subsequently arrested under charges of sedition.

16 For Hindu nationalists, JNU epitomized what current BJP UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath characterized as “a blot on education.” Significantly, to maintain this narrative, the right deployed the rhetoric of dissident sexuality in order to construct the University as a seditious site that warrants regulation and management. For example, a 200-page dossier submitted to JNU’s administration prepared by the ABVP along with faculty who were BJP sympathizers contends: Over one thousand boys and girls students (sic) have been fined from Rs. 2000/- to Rs. 5000/- for consuming alcohol, for indulging in immoral activities in their hostels. On a casual glance at the gates of the hostel one can see hundreds of empty alcohol bottles. Sex workers have been openly employed in hostel messes, where they not only lure JNU girls into their organized racket but also pollute the boys. How come big and high brand cars are moving round the hostels particularly in the

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night hours. Some security staff is also involved in this racket. Freshers are particularly inducted in this ring of vice by luring through money, sex, drugs and alcohol, so that they become tied up with the cause of foreign agencies. (Donthi 2016)5 The document goes on to name certain progressive faculty members for “actively recruiting young minds in JNU campus and elsewhere by addicting them to night parties/revelries, alcoholism … In this process JNU has become a den of organized sex racket…” (Donthi 2016).6 One of the contributors to the dossier, Sanskrit professor Hari Ram Mishra, makes links between the need to contain the viral spread of communist ideology on campus and the rampant proliferation of illicit sexual activity: “so many girls are found to be present in the hostel rooms meant only for boys. Who knows where these girls are from?” (Donthi 2016).7 Mishra called for University administration to install CCTV cameras in hostels in order to “sanitise the hostels [without which] the university cannot be run properly” (Donthi, 2016).8 Similarly, the discourses of sex and sedition are mutually and violently implicated in one another in BJP minister Gyandev Ahuja’s concern over “illicit activities” committed “with our sisters and daughters,” noting 10,000 butts of cigarettes and 4,000 beedis that were found daily on JNU campus, along with 50,000 pieces of bones left by decadent meat eaters, 2,000 wrappers of chips and namkeen, along with 3,000 used condoms (Donthi 2016).9

17 These salacious fictions of student recruitment and decadent drug-fueled orgies mobilize casteist and normative logics of gender and sexuality in order to construct a seditious subject who undermines the progress of nation-building projects. In addition to anxieties surrounding ideological “pollution,” the desire to “sanitise” the campus of subversive elements draws on stigmatized taboos regarding the touching of ostensibly impure lower caste bodies—especially relevant given the increased number of Dalit and OBC students who have joined the JNU student population over the past decade. It is this very desire to “cleanse” the University that must physically remove Rohith Vemula and students of the ASA from hostel premises and University space.

18 It is not without significance that the consternation surrounding uncontainable and hedonistic sex, typically mapped on to women’s bodies in these examples, centers around the repeated invocation and explicit imagery of erotic abundance and illicit touch: group sex, decadent parties, “dens” of organized sex, sexual activities in hostels, and perhaps most vividly, the flagrant and shameless panoply of used condoms. The surplus of illegitimate touch in these (imaginary) encounters constitutes the “blot” on the university’s public reputation—reminiscent of the dishonor that Siras purportedly brought to AMU by transgressing heteronormative convention. In all invocations of carnal abundance, the filth of sexual activity transgresses the idealized and antiseptic space of privacy, marking the domestic bedroom that functions as a replacement symbol for both the University and the nation. Narratives of excess thus operate as regulative instruments of access—both in terms of which bodies can occupy the physical space of the university, but also how the university itself is re-framed as a zone of privacy that must be guarded against immorality. Sexual excess from the public domain that spills into the private—in this case, the college campus as “sanitized island”—potentially defiles its stainlessness and marks it as seditious.

19 The above public domains that mark the university as a contested site of struggle appear far removed from the private landscapes of intimate touch that I began with. But if the Indian university, as I have suggested above, is closely tied to the production

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of national and moral culture via exclusions based on caste and normative sex, then the suicides of both Rohith Vemula and Ramchandra Siras can be read as modes of touching that are connected through cognate narratives.

20 What might it mean then to consider the Siras case, the charges of sedition against JNU students, as well as the protests of the ASA surrounding the death of Rohith Vemula as constitutive of one another rather than discretely comparative or analogous in some simple sense?

Aligarh: text and context

21 Hansal Mehta’s film Aligarh (2016), offers us some clues in responding to this question. Critically and almost universally acclaimed for its sensitive portrayal of Ramchandra Siras, the Marathi poet and professor at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Aligarh (Mehta:2016) depicts the events of the last few months of his life, leading up to his mysterious death—declared a suicide by the police. Siras’s story made national headlines when he was suspended from his job as a professor of Marathi Literature in the Department of Modern Indian Languages on grounds of “gross misconduct.” On the night of February 8, 2010 (referenced in the opening scene of the film), a group of three men forcibly entered the professor’s apartment where he was involved in an intimate sexual encounter with a rickshaw puller. After filming the encounter, the men— suspected of being affiliated with a local TV station’s camera crew—threatened to expose Siras in the media, claiming they had received complaints about the professor’s “homosexual attitude.” The very next day, the local media published various reports of the incident, after which the professor was officially suspended from AMU. A public relations officer who represented AMU suggested that the incident was a stain on the character of the University that “no institution of repute [could] overlook” (Narrain 2010).10 Along with his suspension, he was also ordered to leave the premises of the University quarters where he resided. On February 24th, Siras was served a formal charge sheet with a statement that he had “indulged himself (sic) into immoral sexual activity and in contravention of basic moral ethics while residing in Quarter 21- C, Medical College, AMU, Aligarh thereby undermin[ing the] pious image of the teacher community and as a whole, tarnishing the image of the University” (Narrain 2010).11

22 Aligarh’s (Mehta:2016) central plot revolves around the emergence of Siras (played by Manoj Bajpayee) as a reluctant activist for the gay rights movement in India just a year after Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (1860) was declared unconstitutional by the Delhi High Court in the NAZ Foundation vs. Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi judgment (2009). The film poignantly contrasts Siras’s bewilderment at his newly imposed public role to the familiar comfort of his private life, spent in the solitude of his apartment surrounded by the joys of poetry and the music of classic songs sung by Lata Mangeshkar. Deepu Sebastian (played by Raj Kumar Yadav), a journalist who befriends Siras, serves as his (and the viewer’s) mediator between the interior world of solitude and the public arena of law and social justice that he is unwittingly thrust into. The viewer’s own will to knowledge is sutured via the Deepu’s character, whose initial prurient curiosity is transformed into a more perceptive empathy by the end of the film. It concludes with the April 1st ruling in which the High Court ordered Siras’s reinstatement at his AMU job along with the mandate to return him to the campus accommodations that were rightfully his until his

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retirement. A week after the landmark legal judgment (Ramchandra Siras vs Aligarh Muslim University 2010), Siras was found dead under mysterious circumstances. Traces of poison in his system raised suspicions that Siras might have been murdered. Officially declared a suicide by the police, however, the case was closed and remains unresolved on account of lack of evidence.

23 The film begins with the primal scene of violation when Siras brings his lover, the rickshaw puller Irfan, up to his apartment. The camera simply remains still, shooting the outside of the apartment without any cuts or edits for a while, disabling any scopic visual consumption of interiority that marks the viewer’s desire to see. At least at this very early stage, we are thus denied participation in the technologies of surveillance that invade the professor’s privacy by the limits of the camera’s gaze. The viewer’s will to knowledge is sutured via the character of Deepu, the Express journalist, whose initial prurient curiosity is transformed into empathetic companionship by the end of the film. Deepu’s journey in getting to know Siras more intimately constitutes the crux of the film, ultimately functioning as a metonymic substitution for the professor’s relationship with Irfan, which can exist only at the margins of the film’s diegesis—a point to which I will return shortly.

24 Aligarh’s (Mehta:2016) plot grapples not simply with the story of AMU’s suspension and harassment of Siras that thrusts him into the unlikely role of a gay activist, but also with a narrative of solitude and quiet bewilderment at the legal proceedings that ultimately lead to his reinstatement at the University, just a few days before his untimely death. The film bookends and contextually situates the story of Siras through the contrasting legal outcomes surrounding attempts to repeal Section 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860). Aligarh (Mehta:2016) begins by foregrounding its temporal proximity to the 2009 Delhi high court decision (NAZ Foundation vs. Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi 2009) that “declared Section 377 as unconstitutional, effectively decriminalizing homosexuality” (this information appears on screen right after the opening credits). This prefatory context is followed by the first scene of the film that takes place just a couple of months after the high court decision in February 2010. Similarly, the film concludes with a reference to 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860), informing viewers of the Supreme Court’s reversal of the high court decision (Koushal vs. NAZ Foundation 2013). The “recriminalization” of homosexuality that ends the film is implicitly tied to the professor’s death, which, at a broader level, is also indicative of the death of Indian democracy and the failure of the legal system to guarantee the right to privacy.

25 I am interested in these temporal markers of legalism that frame Aligarh (Mehta:2016) since despite the protagonist’s own indifference to an investment in legal proceedings (Siras is seen nodding off during trial proceedings at one moment, and translating his book of poetry from Marathi to English at another), the film underscores violation almost exclusively in terms of legal injury and the failure of the court system to uphold its investment in the professor’s right to privacy. When Deepu reassures his colleagues that the Siras case was not simply a “gay issue,” but one that was more universally concerned with privacy rights, this ostensibly broader vision is compressed down to a narrowly defined horizon of intimacy. At stake in the Siras case, at least according to the film, is a notion of freedom and citizenship that is predicated on negation—i.e. the right not to be intruded upon by the state.

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26 Significantly, despite its investment in the preservation of privacy against government intrusion, Aligarh’s (Mehta:2016) narrative remains relatively uninterested in a representation of intimacy between Siras and Irfan. The rickshaw-puller—referred to in court simply as “that lower-class Muslim”—ultimately remains the film’s absent presence. We see Irfan for a few minutes during the film and only in few scenes via flashbacks—one in which the couple is intruded upon, and the other in which Irfan insists on a darkened room before he and Siras have a sexual encounter. Irfan is literally Aligarh’s (Mehta:2016) silent subaltern who has no place in the film’s present tense: the script offers him a total of 4 speaking lines. As Aligarh’s (Mehta:2016) scriptwriter, Apurva Asrani himself remarks: “The film is about Siras and what happened to him, not their relationship” (2016: Chatterjee).

Queer longing and the voice of nationalism

27 The bracketing of Irfan is accompanied by a set of dual replacements that function as proxies for an intimate encounter between the two men. The first substitution comes in the form of a different kind of love story that the film must invest in—between Siras and his passion for the music of Lata Mangeshkar. At various moments in the film, the camera’s gaze lingers on its protagonist’s face without any directorial or editorial interference. In these scenes, it is Lata Mangeshkar’s voice that constitutes the only companion to Siras, exacerbating the sense of solitude and isolation that he experiences. The elongated cinematic time is soundtracked by the Madan Mohan compositions Aap ki Nazron Ne (Anpadh) and Betaab Dil Ki Tamanna (Hanste Zakhm), both iconic tunes sung by Mangeshkar. Director Hansal Mehta has suggested that the film serves as an homage to the Bollywood playback singer—not only because the real-life Siras was a fan of Mangeshkar, but also because her voice, according to him, has functioned as a significant symbolic influence on the gay community in India. Mehta contends: “Her most intimate songs of heartbreak like Chalte Chalte (Pakeezaah) and Jaane Kyun Log (Mehboob Ki Mehndi) connect deeply with the gay community’s sense of unfulfilled love and incomplete relationships that they often have to face” (Jha 2016).12

28 However, in this affective ventriloquization of Siras via Mangeshkar, there is more than simply the desire to interpellate queer attachment through embodiments of female iconicity. If the figure of the “lower class Muslim” is written out of the film’s diegesis, then what gets folded back into its narrative as a substitute warrants closer examination. In an oft-quoted statement that serves as a testament to the centrality of Mangeshkar as a national archetype of ideal femininity, music director Naushad has suggested that “the very heart of India” (Sundar 2008:144) throbbed in her voice. Naushad’s reference has much to do with a post-partition history of playback singing in Bollywood, when popular singers like Noorjehan migrated to Pakistan, enabling a select few like Mangeshkar to dominate the industry in the following decades (Sundar 2008). Thus Mangeshkar’s voice served the dual purpose of consolidating an authentic Indian identity post-independence, but also of constructing a pure Hindu voice as representative of the nation, both formally and ideologically. In “Meri Awaz Suno,” Pavitra Sundar (2008) contends that Mangeshkar’s distinctive vocal style “moved away from the vocal heaviness and nasality of her predecessors, singers like Noorjehan and Shamshad Begum. In effect, her voice was ‘cleansed’ of all those qualities that would in time be read as markers of decadence, immodesty, and by extension, in the warped

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logic of Indian nationalism, Muslimness” (p. 149). Such modes of ideological “cleansing” had quite real impacts on Mangkeshkar’s contemporaries—for example, despite releasing a successful pop record, Bangladeshi artist Runa Laila left the Bombay music industry following rumors that she was an anti-national spy. In her analysis, Sundar (2008) suggests that the timbre of Mangeshkar’s voice served as an antithesis to the more “seductive” and “throaty” voices who were relegated to playback singing for vamps and supporting characters. Asha Bhosle, while also enjoying a successful and ascendant career like her sister, often performed songs sung by characters who represented seductive (conflated with “western”) qualities. Thus while Bhosle’s voice represented what Sundar (2008) characterizes as characteristic of commonplace publicness—“a tinge of the bazaar (or market place)”—Mangeshkar’s voice was associated with “the woman in the respectable private sphere” (p. 150). More recently, Mangeshkar’s presence has been folded even more explicitly into nationalist and communalist discourse through her public support for both Narendra Modi and the local government in Maharashtra. In 2017, she publically congratulated Modi and party president Amit Shah on their “shandaar jeet” in the state assembly elections as reported by The (2017).

29 Given this history of what Mangeshkar’s voice comes to stand for in the ideological needs of nation-building, the significance of her repurposing as a gay icon in Aligarh (Mehta:2016) moves beyond the logics of innocuous fandom for female iconicity. If Mangeshkar serves to index the “heart of India,” then the centrality of Siras’s attachment functions to suture the gay body to national citizenship so that the potential threat of queerness (historically marked as western and “anti-Indian”) gets circumvented. Instead, the legibility of queerness as refracted via Mangeshkar must depend on its proximity to national belonging so that it can be justified as deserving of protection from the law. Mangeshkar’s symbolic presence in the film thus confers legitimacy on Siras, compensating for the putative seditiousness of queer public scandal. After all, Siras’s transgression was coded as one that tarnished the reputation of a public educational institution in which the University functioned as a microcosm for the nation. Thus instead of aligning Siras with other figures who have performed “seditious” acts on University campuses—Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad or Kanhaiya Kumar at JNU—the folding of Siras into the symbolic realm of essential and authentic Indianness allows for the incorporation of queerness into the nation. If Mangeshkar is the voice of respectable privacy—serving as a foil to the more public sexuality of the vamp, seductress, or prostitute—then Siras’s queerness aspires toward the same symbolic intimacy that must be cordoned off from the stigmas of public sexuality. The tethering of Siras to Mangeshkar thus allows queerness to be insulated from the broader counterpublics in which it is implicated. It is not surprising then, that in his comments about the film in , director Hansal Mehta moves away from the queer specificity of the Siras case in order to generalize the film’s investment in a universal desire for privacy. He contends: “what happened to Siras could happen to us. This film is not on homosexuality but it is on the right to privacy. No one has the right to interfere in our personal lives” (Anon. 2016).13

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Looking for Irfan: the presence of absence

30 But even with this focus on Mangeshkar as Siras’ primary cathexis, the film does make room for an investment in a relationship between men—not Siras and Irfan, but Siras and Deepu. Like Mangeshkar, Deepu functions in Aligarh (Mehta:2016) as a kind of substituted switchpoint for Irfan, who gets written out of the film’s diegesis. Ironically, it is Deepu himself who tries to locate Irfan in the slums where he resided with his family in an attempt to interview him—a doomed endeavor that results in violent failure when he gets roughed up for his intrepid journalistic persistence. The failed search guarantees the absence of Irfan from the film’s temporal present, allowing Deepu to then assume the central role and become the character who most intimately shares narrative space with Siras. In a scene that operates via conventional romanticized visual tropes, we see the two men take an intimate foggy boat ride during which Deepu asks Siras for a selfie together, and mentions how handsome the professor is. While the homoeroticism of the moment is undercut by the clear establishment of Deepu’s heterosexuality elsewhere in the film, the substituted triangulation between men functions as a kind of replacement system for the interrogation of class, caste, and communal difference.

31 For example, the romantic filter through which the Deepu/Siras relationship is presented performs a substitution at yet another level by papering over some of the messier narratives around the professor’s relationship with Irfan. In press reports containing interviews with Irfan following Siras’s death, he intimated that his relationship with Siras was purely a matter of financial convenience. We will never know the “exact” nature of their relationship (is there such a thing?), and to try and uncover some kind of monolithic narrative of authenticity betrays a different kind of will to knowledge: did Irfan suggest a money contract to frame queerness as simply a function of his poverty that sublated desire? A response to such a question can only be speculative, and must, of necessity, be opaque. Besides, this question problematically deflects from the film’s framing of Siras through the device of romantic coupledom rather than one of a mutually convenient arrangement between the two men, born not simply out of sexual desire, but also perhaps out of poverty, class, and caste difference. An acknowledgment of the hypothetical financial contract between Irfan and Siras, however, would contaminate the film’s hagiographic reading of the latter—not simply through a re-thinking of romantic intimacy between men, but also through the essentially foreclosed account of the discrete social locations that the two men inhabited. In this light, the hints of homoeroticism between Siras and Deepu operate as a kind of repressed metonymy in which intimacy between those two substitutes for the representation of a more dangerously complicated union with Irfan.

Racialization and the politics of privacy violation

32 In foregrounding the absence of Irfan, my point is not to make a case for the liberal cause of enhanced visibility via the representation of male intimacy or even gay coupledom; at stake is not the desire to see Irfan and Siras together on screen, as if unmediated visual representation is axiomatically coterminous with radical politics. Instead, I am interested in the ideological terms through which the centering of Siras’s story (or hagiography even) and the relative bracketing of Irfan’s role gets narrated

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through “racialized” forms of bracketing that haunt narratives of queer progress. In her analysis of sexuality, the state and antisodomy laws in India, Jyoti Puri (2016) argues that governance practices around Section 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860) have not only impacted gay men and hijras, but also Muslims who are seen as “inherently hypersexual and criminal” (p. 75). Drawing on Ania Loomba’s arguments on how discourses of religion operate as a form of racialization in postcolonial India, Puri’s (2016) ethnography of the Delhi police reveals their insistence on the idea that “unnatural sex crimes are mostly committed by Muslims” (p. 83). For Puri (2016), these contemporary assertions that are mobilized in the context of unnatural sex draw on broader intertwined “genealogies of race and communalism” in which race is not simply the product of phenotypical difference, but of “cultural discourses that produce the body as the site of unequal difference” (p. 85).

33 It is this logic of racialized bracketing that it is at the heart of Aligarh’s (Mehta:2016) arguments for queer freedom—a mode of social belonging that is predicated on privacy, and that can only be guaranteed by the promise of decriminalization. The film’s inscription of Siras as the central figure of violation performs a bracketing, for instance, of the real-life Irfan’s treatment by the police. Despite registering various first information reports since the death of Siras, none of the University administrators were questioned; instead, the police continued to harass and beat up Irfan, leading to a reported suicide attempt.

34 There is another sense in which the subsuming of racialization into the logics of privacy is performed through the Siras case. In his analysis of racialized intimacy, David Eng (2010) suggests that for 19th century European notions of personhood, intimacy in a private domestic sphere marked the very essence of subjectivity: “Ideals of privacy in bourgeois domesticity were thus configured as the individual’s possession, to be politically protected, as in ‘the right to privacy.’” Eng (2013) thus draws attention to the “history of intimacy as property and possession” (p. 44) that was dependent on slavery and labor of colonized subjects. It is thus ironic that some critics of Section 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860) have adopted the ostensible anti-colonial posture that condemns the law under the aegis of its seemingly archaic colonial genealogies. If we are a postcolonial nation, the argument goes, then Section 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860), a colonial inheritance, is incompatible with the seamless telos toward democratic Indian modernity and postcoloniality. But in founding this argument on right-to-privacy claims, with their implicit investments in domestic property and possession preservation, the argument paradoxically relies on the very colonial logics that it appears to contest. In this light, Aligarh’s (Mehta:2016) focus on property and the home as a scene of violation—i.e. the flat on the AMU premises Siras is forced to vacate as a result of his sexual transgressions with Irfan—reconstitutes the primal scene of injustice as one that denies the professor the legal claims over his inalienable property rights. The cleaving apart of sexuality from the racially inflected categories of class, caste, or religion frames this exclusion as abjection from bourgeois domesticity rather than one that has a longer violent history in the Indian state’s complicity in the creation of landlessness, residential segregation, housing discrimination, and rural displacement. David Eng (2013) has suggested that “the right to be left alone from state interference, surveillance, and criminalization is a negative liberty that does not … require the material redistribution of resources” on the part of the state (p. 35). It is worth recalling that, in part, the protests on university campuses began when

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administrators prohibited a group of young Dalit students from using their hostels and the university’s public space. Like Siras, Rohith Vemula was displaced from his home on campus. At the time of his death, Vemula was using the hostel room of Uma Maheshwara Rao, a senior ASA leader. But student demands were not limited to the rallying against negative liberties—i.e. the spatial exclusions from campus; instead, they were invested in contesting power through what Dickens Leonard, an ASA member, called “a universal language of discrimination” that is “not just about Dalits,” but about creating “a counter political space [that] … has the potential to question the hegemony of Hindutva politics … we see it as a coming together of marginalized communities” (Donthi 2016).14 Leonard’s vision was born out in the alliances that the ASA created with leftist and Muslim student groups—particularly surrounding the controversy informing the execution of Yakub Menon. The ASA opposed capital punishment on grounds of the Indian government’s long history of state-sponsored killings of religious and caste minorities. It is this assemblaged “language of discrimination” called for by the ASA through which one can re-think the Siras case. Rather than Mangeshkar and Deepu, we can more usefully read Aligarh (Mehta:2016) through its constitutive absences and exegetic traces—i.e. via the figures of Irfan or even Vemula.

Seditious touching, touching sedition

35 To conclude then, I wish to return to a moment in the film in which we can retroactively read these absences and melancholic traces in light of “seditious” activities at various centers of higher learning. My critique is not intended as a way to simply fold back that which has been excluded. Instead, it is to consider what epistemological and political possibilities arise when we shift our understanding of the Siras case as one that offers assemblaged frameworks to theorize queer politics beyond matters of privacy violation. In Aligarh (Mehta:2016), the seamlessness of Irfan’s replacement with Deepu is threatened only momentarily when professor and journalist share a lunch date during which Deepu offers to share his food with Siras. In response to this gesture, the professor replies: “tumhara haath lag gaya, nah? … this is non veg, we are brahmins.” (“you touched this, no?…”). When Deepu suggests that he doesn’t understand religious or caste distinctions, Siras contends that “dharm samajne walle cheez nahi hain” (“religion is not something that you can rationalize”)—that rationalizing faith actually sacrifices its purpose. During this exchange, Siras notices a bruise on Deepu’s face and questions him about the origins of the wound. The distinguishing mark, as the viewers of the film are already aware, was a consequence of his scuffle during his search for Irfan. I want to read these two moments in Aligarh (Mehta:2016)—the rejection of meat and the recognition of a wound—in close proximity to one another so that they “touch” in ways that than the rest of the film cannot account for.

36 The proximity of these two moments does not compensate for the missed touches between queer and race/caste/class (or even between Siras and Irfan) in the film. And yet, it is in this moment of the film’s acknowledgment of caste difference, however seemingly fleeting, that we can read caste (and Vemula, by association) back into the exegesis of the Siras case in order to re-think the framing of queer politics as one that is predicated on constitutive forgettings. While the brutal violence of caste is

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manifested on a daily basis—for example, through lynchings for the transport or consumption of beef, or through sexual violence against Dalit women—its appearance is also predicated on its perpetual disappearance. In other words, caste is both exceptional but also rendered ordinary to the point that it is relegated to a distant place (rural villages) and time (a less developed past). In “Caste Lives on, and on,” Prayaag Akbar (2017) suggests that caste’s persistence as a mode of forgetting is enabled by its operations not simply as varna (hierarchy) but also as jati (endogamy). Jati functions as a mode of privatization by hermetically sealing itself off not only through disciplinary acts of prohibition but also through ostensibly caste-neutral and benign rituals of food consumption, arranged marriage, and seemingly harmless “community” practice.

37 It is worth recalling how the “universal language of discrimination” demanded by Vemula and other members of the ASA was a way to push back against naturalized endogamous rituals on college campuses. The ASA’s articulation of a “universal language” was a way to link Brahminical ideology with the projects of Hindu nationalism that implicated both caste and communalist logics. Through this universal language, one can read Aligarh’s (Mehta:2016) reference to the politics of food purity as that which maintains caste endogamy; simultaneously it is also that which implicitly references the macabre violence inflicted on Muslims under the aegis of cow protection. This moment of dissonance between Siras and Deepu, however, is quickly resolved through the “violence of forgetting,” to invoke Eng again. Irfan’s presence in this scene is hinted at only through the “melancholic trace” of the wound that must eventually heal and then disappear. The wound leaves its mark as a reminder of a once violent past that must be expunged from the present. It is not different then, from the bracketing of caste that haunts the nation’s political present, which, despite its brutal frames can only be acknowledged via a euphemistic trace—its appearance as disappearance. Thus the recognition of the wound on Deepu’s face becomes precisely the moment when it must metaphorically begin to fade. Siras’s investments in maintaining caste purity through vegetarianism ultimately only foregrounds benign contradictions—i.e. the Brahminical logics preventing him from touching food “contaminated” by a meat eater that do not, however, stop him from having sex with a non-Brahmin lower-class Muslim. With Deepu, the irony of this investment in caste decorum only functions to humanize Siras’s contradictions rather than point to the violence of caste hierarchies.

38 The attempt to re-think the Siras suicide through the assemblaged lens of the Vemula case and the protests on University campuses cannot be, as I have suggested at the outset, an occasion to analogize between Siras and Vemula, or more broadly, between “queer” and “caste.” Instead, through a close reading of Aligarh (Mehta:2016), it would be more appropriate to say that this critique raises speculative questions of what it might mean to think of Siras and Vemula as being “undone by each other” or “given over” (2004:19–20) to one another to use Judith Butler’s phrase: i.e. how are they implicated in each other’s lives (and deaths) as subjects whose putative transgressions are framed as “seditious?” The politics of relationality marking Butler’s (2004) formulation contravenes logics of private intimacy that constitute Aligarh’s (Mehta: 2016) vision of sexual citizenship. It is not without significance that in Butler’s framework, the possibility of being undone by one another is marked by scent, feel, memory, but also centrally—and significantly, for the purpose of my arguments—by touch. In the context of this reading, “touching” references assemblaged meanings

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simultaneously: the proscriptions around touch that mark caste hierarchies at the University of Hyderabad, or the touching between Irfan and Siras that can only exist beyond the frames of the film (or, at best, at its margins). But it also suggests the speculative touching between Siras and Vemula that places queerness in assemblaged contexts that are more messy and public than what Aligarh (Mehta:2016) allows for. It is only when sexual politics touch these realms that we can begin to imagine how “queer” as a political and epistemological category might challenge rather than simply reproduce neoliberal imperatives of an “incredible” and democratic India. Rather than insisting on queers as model national citizens who are deserving of the nation’s benevolent protection, perhaps the time has come to articulate the seditious impulse at the crux of sexual politics.

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NOTES

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRwXJmtE2SM 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRwXJmtE2SM 3. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/essay/seditious-heart-arundhati-roy

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4. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/from-shadows-to-the-stars-rohith-vemula 5. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/from-shadows-to-the-stars-rohith-vemula 6. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/from-shadows-to-the-stars-rohith-vemula 7. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/from-shadows-to-the-stars-rohith-vemula 8. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/from-shadows-to-the-stars-rohith-vemula 9. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/from-shadows-to-the-stars-rohith-vemula 10. https://justiceforsiras.wordpress.com 11. https://justiceforsiras.wordpress.com 12. http://dnasyndication.com/showarticlerss.aspx? nid=rxssuE7A17YNLiKRDgGclxUuCh6ICFIP4tVljqVLmCw= 13. https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/aligarh-about-right-to- privacy-not-homosexuality-hansal-mehta/ 14. http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/from-shadows-to-the-stars-rohith-vemula

ABSTRACTS

In this essay, I theorize a relation between sexual and caste politics to consider the interfacing between two suicides on university campuses that made public headlines for different reasons: the Dalit student Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad, and the gay Marathi professor, Ramchandra Siras at Aligarh Muslim University. In analyzing these two cases together, I want to ask what it might mean to retrospectively re-think Siras’ case through the language of political and public desire that Vemula’s case at the University Hyderabad (UOH) and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student protests present. To textually ground my arguments, I analyze the recent film Aligarh (Mehta:2016) praised for its sympathetic portrayal of Siras whose legal fight for privacy (and subsequent suicide) when he is caught having sex with another man constitutes the text’s central premise. Through an analysis of the film, I inquire into the occlusions that calls for queer privacy are predicated on. I thus ask: what is lost from queer analytical frames when public domains are disavowed in favor of rights to privacy? In triangulating the notion of privacy with queer politics (via the Siras case) and questions of caste and communalism (through the Vemula case and subsequent student uprisings), this essay gestures toward an articulation of queerness that would move beyond single-issue calls for judicial protection and instead reconsider the “seditiousness” at the heart of a sexual politics.

INDEX

Keywords: Rohith Vemula, Ramchandra Siras, JNU, sedition, privacy, legalism, nationalism

AUTHOR

NISHANT SHAHANI Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington State University

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The Transgender Nation and its Margins: The Many Lives of the Law

Sayan Bhattacharya

1 On August 12, 2015, a video was uploaded to YouTube that went viral overnight (Yathartha Pictures 2015). Uploaded by Yathartha Films, a film production house, and commissioned by Humsafar Trust,1 the video shows seven hijras singing the national anthem. We see Paras, Madhuri, Urmi, Samina, Fida, Rani and Shreya come on screen, one after the other and sometimes in pairs. While they sing the anthem, a write-up comes on the screen spelling out what alternative careers they could have had. So, for example, Paras could have been a teacher, Madhuri could have been a lawyer while Rani could have been a police officer. The viewer knows that hijras constitute one of the most marginalized communities in India. Battling stigma and multilayered forms of violence, ranging from the sexual to the physical, they are often left with no livelihood options other than begging, sex work or collecting money from families celebrating weddings or the arrival of a new born. Thus, without spelling it out explicitly, the video talks of work opportunities that have been violently foreclosed for a group of people in this country. When viewed against the backdrop of the nation’s Independence Day (August 15), the violence is projected all the more starkly because here we have a group of people who have not yet had the chance to participate in the fruits of citizenship rights, that is the right to employment and a life of dignity even after seven decades of independence from British colonial rule.

2 A year earlier on April 14, 2014 the Supreme Court of India had upheld the right of Indian citizens to self-identify their gender, regardless of gender affirmation surgery in the National Legal Services Authority (henceforth NALSA) v. Union of India case. It also stated that no person can be discriminated against on the basis of gender identity. In order to ensure nondiscrimination, the Court advocated for reservations for transgender individuals in jobs and education. So then, Yathartha’s video featuring hijras is not only about the rights they have been denied but also about what they can potentially achieve and aspire to, thanks to the NALSA judgment. The video was therefore a call to the government to act on the Supreme Court ruling and ensure its implementation. Thus, what the video effectively did was to present the stake that this

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much stigmatized and reviled group of people has in achieving full citizenship in the Indian nation, a message delivered, in this case, on the eve of India’s Independence Day on August 15. The video is titled Bharatiya… (Indian), highlighting the fact that these people have not yet found a space within the framework of Indian citizenship. The ellipses are followed by the words, Hum bhi hain (We are also there). The two sets separated by the ellipses put together would thus read, “We are also Indian.” The video was thus, a straightforward audiovisual statement that uses the trope of nationalism to advocate for the inclusion of a group of marginalized people within the discourse of citizenship.

3 This paper interrogates the terms on which such citizenship is granted to transgender individuals. Or put differently, who can have access to such citizenship rights? Does such an access also create violent exclusions, as in a group of transgender individuals who must be denied such rights? The paper is divided into three sections. The first section offers a brief summary of some of the debates happening around nationalism in India’s queer and transgender communities. The Yathartha video was not the only media campaign that used the template of nationalism to advocate for transgender citizenship. There have been other campaigns as well. Most importantly, the current government which is aligned with a majoritarian Hindutva ideology has approved a Bill that is supposed to safeguard the citizenship rights of transgender individuals. Hence the imbrications of nationalism with the queer and transgender communities must be interrogated. However, I argue that any totalizing framework fails to account for the complex and multiple challenges which India’s queer and transgender communities pose for nationalism. Instead, I argue for a thick description of such challenges as a way to complicate any meta-narrative about transgender citizenship in India. In the second and third sections of the paper, I offer such thick description from the site of law. I closely read The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2018 that the Government of India has recently approved and which will become law once it is passed in the parliament. This Bill was passed following the NALSA verdict and is supposed to be that one piece of legislation that will enshrine the citizenship rights of transgender individuals in India. I examine this Bill in conjunction with the Supreme Court verdict to understand how law discursively produces the transgender citizen and how India’s transgender communities are reacting to such constructions. The second section focuses on the definition the Bill proposes for the category “transgender” and the ramifications that such a definition has had on representations of the transgender identity in popular media. The third section focuses on how the Bill addresses the right to work for transgender individuals, tying back to the Yathartha video, which focused on various employment opportunities that transgender individuals must have. A discourse analysis of the legal and popular representations of transgender individuals alongside reactions from India’s transgender communities towards law allows me to examine the various contestations around transgender citizenship in India. Here it must be noted that for reactions from India’s transgender communities, I cite both anecdotal evidence of meetings and protest marches as well as blog entries and commentary on social media written by transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in India. This is to acknowledge and pay close attention to the abundance of community-based critique generated in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling and the approval of the Bill by the Indian government. Taken together, the paper stages two questions: What does it mean to deploy nationalism as the pathway to citizenship

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and respectability? And, does it mean that the hijra subject can find a “home” in the nation-state only by performing nationalism?

The narrative of nationalism

4 In the light of anti-colonial struggles in India in the nineteenth century, Partha Chatterjee argues that nationalism was established in colonial society by “dividing social institutions and practices into two domains—the material and the spiritual” (Chatterjee 1993:6) The material was the outside, that is the economy, state institutions, science and technology while the spiritual was the marker of cultural identity. While Western domination in the realm of the material was accepted, it was in the domain of the inner that a cultural sovereignty was staged. Thus, national culture was that unifying historical object that produced the charge of Indian nationalism, a domain beyond the intervention of imperial governance. Even as the state was under colonial rule, the imagined community of the Indian nation was fashioned through the crafting of a national culture that was to be distinct from any Western influence. This culture could be in the form of vernacular literature, distinctive from the influence of English as a colonial language or the status of women in the middle-class, upper caste household, among other examples. This active crafting of a national culture could perhaps be connected to Sudipta Kaviraj’s theorization of the narrative contract in relation to the imaginaries of the Indian nation. Kaviraj argues that narratives are used to impose stability on groups of people and to unify them. However, narratives are not universalizing discourses. They are not for all to hear or to participate in. Kaviraj (1992) writes, “the recipient of the narrative cannot be just anybody: it is only some people belonging to particular categories who are privileged by the narration” (p. 37). Kaviraj gives the example of writer and visual artist Abanindranath Tagore’s illustrated folktales to show how the intended audience of these tales could never be Muslim children because the Muslim was always constructed as an outsider to a national culture that was always already Hindu. Thus, the spiritual sanctity or the national culture of the nation is produced through narratives that extend the ideology of nationalism, which can only be accessed by some and not others. For Kaviraj, narrative is both storytelling as well as the connecting links between events. However, these connecting links are about selecting objects that clearly mark those connections. Some other selections could set off disjunctures and contradictions in the space between events. The realm of the inner domain, which in Chatterjee’s thesis is the site of the national culture, is thus also a narrative construction, full of resistances and contestations. In fact, even though Chatterjee marks out the material and the spiritual, he also says that the divisions are not so neat. Not only do the domains put pressure on each other but they also inform each other (Chatterjee 1993:13). Narratives produce both national belonging as well as unbelonging. In this paper, I will argue that micro- narratives of unbelonging continuously disrupt any meta-narrative of national belonging. We could extend these debates on nationalism to the realm of the Indian queer and transgender movements to examine how belonging and unbelonging are produced.

5 In a special issue for the Jindal Global Law Review, the editors Oishik Sircar and Dipika Jain recount the invocation of “Jai Hind” at a pride march and draw on Jasbir Puar’s formulation of homonationalism to argue that this is India’s homonationalist moment.

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Following Partha Chatterjee, they term this the “nationalist resolution of the homosexual question,” whereby a majoritarian conception of the Indian nation as a Hindu state subsumes the so-called deviancy of the homosexual within its fold (Sircar and Jain 2013:19). In other words, homosexuality is an internal matter that does not constitute a problem for the Hindu nation. Jai Hind is not incommensurable with a pride march. Thus, homosexuals belong to the Hindu nation, the obverse of which is that Islam and homosexuality are incommensurable. Jai Hind at the pride march produces the narrative of Hindu homosexual belonging within the nation, where the Muslim homosexual cannot belong.

6 Sircar and Jain’s theorization of homonationalism in the Indian context finds further credence in some recent developments surrounding Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (1860), the colonial era law that was used to criminalize any form of sexual contact other than peno-vaginal penetration. In effect, Section 377 criminalized homosexuality in India. The Supreme Court of India finished hearing a series of petitions against the law in July, 2018 and pronounced on September 6, 2018 that consensual sex in private cannot be criminalized. However, the hearings on Section 377 that culminated in this judgment prove instructive in understanding the imbrications of Hindu nationalism and the Indian queer and transgender movements. The central government, ruled by the Hindu right-wing party, Bharatiya Janata Party (henceforth BJP) submitted to the Court that it would leave the decision on Section 377 to the court, which meant it would neither contest nor advocate for decriminalization of the law. This is indeed a shift in BJP’s position on homosexuality. Svati P. Shah recounts that when Fire—a film about a lesbian relationship—was released in 1998, Shiv Sena, one of BJP’s partners and part of the Hindu right, proclaimed that such films should not be allowed to be screened as it might promote lesbianism and destroy Indian families. In other words, in the 1990s, the domain of national culture did not have space for non- normative sexualities. However, almost a decade later, BJP’s stance underwent a subtle shift and it declared that homosexuality is an elite issue, symptomatic of the Bharat- India divide (Shah 2014:646). From there, BJP has now further shifted to a position in which it is not opposing the decriminalization of homosexuality. This position has caused a lot of cheer among those queer individuals and activists who are ideologically aligned with the Hindu Right because now there is no opposition between the Hindu Right and gay rights. Hence, the invocation of Jai Hind at a pride march is not incongruent any longer, as national culture is now capacious enough to take homosexuality into its fold. Against such a backdrop, Nishant Upadhyay argues that any attempt to portray Hinduism as a religion that is tolerant towards gender and sexual minorities obfuscates the violent structure of caste that is at its foundation. A religion cannot be simultaneously tolerant towards minorities and at the same time sanction caste-based violence. They continue: Following global anti-Islamophobic homonationalist formations in the US, the UK, Israel, and elsewhere, Hindus are also mirroring these processes. This allows them to construct themselves as “modern,” “progressive,” and accepting of queer and trans peoples, what we can call as homohindunationalism. (Upadhyay 2018) This forceful articulation of Hindu nationalism within queer and transgender movements can be detected in some other instances as well. In an article published on September 24, 2016, in Dainik Bhaskar, one of India’s most widely circulated Hindi dailies, prominent hijra activist and mahamandaleswar (the main leader) of the Kinnar akhada,2 Laxmi Narayan Tripathi claims that transgender women have carved out their

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space in religion; it is now time for them to find their niche in the Indian army. Laxmi goes on to proudly proclaim that there should be a “kinnar battalion” that would wipe Pakistan from the face of the planet. She was responding to questions from the media, on an alleged strike by Pakistan (the Muslim other of Hindu India) on India’s northern borders. While Laxmi’s proclamation chimes in with the jingoist climate currently dominating India, this invocation of nationalism as a trope to claim Indian citizenship and thus legibility in the Indian polity is similar to the Yathartha video depicting hijras singing the national anthem. A similar video can also be found on the YouTube channel of the External Publicity and Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs: it depicts a group of transgender women participating in a drill, preparing for the Independence Day march in Bhubaneswar, Odisha in 2016.

7 It is no coincidence that the Yathartha video was commissioned by Humsafar Trust, one of India’s most renowned non-profit groups for gay and transfeminine individuals. The founder of Humsafar, Ashok Row Kavi, arguably the father of the Indian gay movement having been one of the first individuals to have come out in public in 1984, is well- known for his Hindu right-wing politics. One of the most prominent illustrations of his politics can be found in Nivedita Menon’s introduction to the Sexualities anthology published in 2007. Menon writes that when the premises of Bharosa (a partner of Naz International), a Lucknow based NGO working on HIV-AIDS were raided by the police and its employees were charged under Section 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860) and under obscenity laws in 2001, Kavi wrote an article highlighting that a Muslim of Anglo- Bangladeshi origin (Shivananda Khan) was at the helm of Naz and that Naz was supposedly extending its activities to cities such as Chennai, which was the “capital of Dravidian sub-nationalism.” Kavi has always spoken for gay assimilation within a Hindu India and has steadfastly maintained that India is tolerant of minority communities because it is a Hindu-majority state (Singh and Rampal 2018).3 The reason to highlight Kavi’s politics is to underline that the visual of hijras singing the national anthem and claiming they are Bharatiya, a Sanskritic version of Indian, has a longer history in his majoritarian Hindutva politics. All these examples illustrate how Hindu nationalism is becoming a conduit to staking a claim to citizenship for queer and transgender communities in India.

8 Thus, studies of the connections between Hindu nationalism and the queer and transgender movements are important and timely indeed. However, I argue that such theorizations also betray a problem. They produce totalizing narratives about the Indian queer and transgender movements without paying closer attention to the complex ways in which the imaginary of the Hindu nation is also intensely resisted and contested by queer and transgender communities. These contestations resist any singular narrative about queer and transgender lives in India. I argue that theorizations of the imbrications between Hindu nationalism and queer and transgender movements need to be complicated by the varied ways in which the Indian state manifests itself in queer and transgender lives. Jyoti Puri (2016) argues that the state is culturally and historically produced and it relies on an “active fashioning through ideas and practices, giving it the illusion of being monolithic, coherent, rational, permanent, and irrefutably there” (p. 9). Instead, she draws on Timothy Mitchell to argue that the management of sexuality and sexual labor serves to discursively produce the state and its state effects. I draw on her theorization of state effects and extend it to the realm of gender to examine the diffuse ways in which the

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state deploys law to both regulate as well as extend rights to non-normative genders, and it is through such regulation as well as rights extension that the state seeks to reproduce itself. However, such regulation also meets resistance that disrupts the stability of the state. It is in paying close attention to these regulations and their disruptions that theorizations of Hindu homonationalism can be problematized.

9 For instance, if we closely follow our earlier example of the Indian state headed by BJP not actively opposing the decriminalization of homosexuality, then we will observe that this is only one part of the narrative. Through its additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta, the Indian government also discouraged the Supreme Court from guaranteeing sexual orientation as a fundamental right of Indian citizens, lest such a right promote incest, bestiality and sadomasochism. It reminded the Court of the Hindu Marriage Act, which governs heterosexual marriages between Hindus and cautioned that if the court were to decide to extend marriage rights to queer people, then the government should be given adequate time to respond. Thus, what is noteworthy here is not only the state’s conflation of homosexuality with sexual practices that are deemed perverse but also its anxieties about protecting the very foundation of the heteronormative state that is marriage. Marriage between heterosexual individuals leading to the birth of future citizens is what keeps the wheels of the nation-state turning, and hence even if a concession can be made for the right of sexual practices in private, such a right cannot become public, leading to same-sex marriages. The same state, headed by a Hindu right wing party that is not opposing the right to choose one’s sexual partner is unwilling to expand that right to include marriage. Thus, examining the state effects of law precludes any singular narrative of the relationship between Hindu nationalism and India’s queer and transgender movements.

10 In an essay about how globalization has informed social movements in India, Mary John argues for the need for thick description from different situated locations to understand how they disrupt so-called overarching frameworks, such as globalization or the nation (John 2009:49). In the next two sections, I draw on John’s methodology and Puri’s theorization of state effects to provide a thick description of how law, in this case, The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2018 constructs the transgender citizen in India and how such a construction informs popular imaginations about the transgender subject.

Gender, law and the citizen

1. Who is the transgender subject in law?

11 In August 2016, the Government of India approved The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 20164 that was supposed to protect the rights of transgender people in India, once passed in the Parliament. The Bill had incorporated none of the feedback given from the country-wide transgender community-led consultations when a draft version of the Bill was circulated at the beginning of 2016 for community feedback (Government of India 2015).5 In fact, the Bill was a much-watered down version of the draft circulated in January, 2016. The Bill defined “transgender” as: (A) neither wholly female nor wholly male; or (B) a combination of female or male; or (C) neither female nor male; and

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whose sense of gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at the time of birth, and includes trans-men and trans-women, persons with intersex variations and gender-queers. (Government of India 2016:2) Thus, the State’s definition of gender was rooted in the binary in which “transgender” as a category is simply a lack which needs to be pathologized. Also, by defining “transgender” as combinations of both or being neither, the State refused recognition to those trans individuals who identify themselves as simply “male” or “female.” In other words, the State refused to dissociate one’s gender identity from the gender assigned at birth—a definition that is, in short, biologically deterministic. A Standing Committee was constituted later in 2016 that asked for community feedback on the Bill and this body incorporated community feedback and advocated for a change in the definition. On December 17, 2018, Lok Sabha passed the Transgender Persons’ (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2018 and the current version of the Bill has amended the definition of transgender: “transgender person” means a person whose gender does not match with the gender assigned to that person at birth and includes trans-man or trans-woman (whether or not such person has undergone Sex Reassignment Surgery or hormone therapy or laser therapy or such other therapy), person with intersex variations, genderqueer and person having such socio-cultural identities as kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta. (Government of India 2018:2)6 Even though the current version of the Bill makes an improvement on the definition of “transgender,” it has not taken into account, community feedback on the mechanisms of gender recognition. It does not mention self-affirmation of gender which directly contradicts the 2014 verdict of the Supreme Court of India that upheld the right of all citizens to the self determination of their gender. One could identify as “male,” “female” or “third gender” regardless of the gender assigned at birth. For this identification, gender affirmation surgery would not be a criterion. In fact, the current Bill explicitly contradicts the NALSA verdict by stating that transgender individuals will have to apply for a transgender certificate to the District Magistrate, who will then refer the application to a District Level Screening Committee to be constituted by the appropriate government. This committee will be comprised of: (a) the Chief Medical Officer; (b) the District Social Welfare Officer; (c) a Psychologist or Psychiatrist; (d) a representative of the transgender community; and (e) an officer of the appropriate Government to be nominated by that Government. (Government of India 2018:3) While the provision of the screening committee was mentioned in the 2016 version of the Bill as well, the 2018 version makes it even more complicated. While those who identify as “transgender” will have to be approved by this committee, those who identify as “male” or “female” will have to produce evidence of gender affirmation surgery. The Bill states, “such person may make an application, along with a certificate issued to that effect by the Medical Superintendent or Chief Medical Officer of the medical institution in which that person has undergone surgery…” Thus, even though the state has made a concession on the definition of transgender, in effect, its conception of gender is still rooted in the medical establishment.

12 These criteria raise a number of questions. On what basis is a government-constituted Board the custodian of one’s sense of self? On what basis will the transgender representatives on the Board be selected? Such a screening committee could flatten out the complex lived realities of those people who do not undergo surgery but still

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identify as transgender, those who want to be referred to as simply “men” or “women” or those who do not identify with any category. How will this Board decide to whom they will give the “transgender certificate”? Also, how will the State ensure that the Board is representative of the varied caste and geographic locations of transgender people? For these specificities also closely inform one’s understanding of gender and how that understanding plays out in public and private spaces. Moreover, the presence of psychiatrists on the Board despite the long history of how the clinic is often a site of pathologization of one’s sense of self shows how the State refuses to go beyond the medical model of gender. For example, West Bengal, a state in eastern India, constituted a Transgender Development Board in 2015 following two consultations in which mostly non-governmental organizations from the state capital, Kolkata and its suburbs participated. Groups outside the circuits of funding from international donor bodies, located in various districts of the state were largely unrepresented in these meetings. Finally, when the names of the Board Members were announced, there was no representation of groups outside Kolkata and its suburbs.7

13 Beyond the immediate ramifications in terms of an affront to one’s sense of self, a screening committee also has other far-reaching consequences. To understand such consequences, one needs only to look back a couple of decades. The discourse surrounding non-normative sexualities in India became charged with debates on the authenticity of identity labels in the 1990s. Shivananda Khan, the founder of Naz Foundation International, contended that the term “gay” was a Western imposition and that many men in India simply had sex with men, or with anyone of any gender without necessarily identifying as gay. For HIV prevention programs to be effective, Khan argued that the authentic way to articulate same-sex desires in India would be to use the category MSM (men who have sex with men) as opposed to gay and lesbian which were used in India only in elite circles. However, Khan’s arguments are self- contradictory, as demonstrated by Nivedita Menon (2007:16–18). Firstly, his notions of the West and authentic notions of Indian culture were essentialist. Secondly, if gay/ lesbian as identity markers are solely used in the West, then why is it that not all homosexual men and women in the West use these terms to identify themselves? Isn’t MSM also an English term, coined by NGOs working on AIDS, and that would require translations into several cultural and linguistic contexts as not everyone would automatically identify as MSM? Then how is it different from gay? Identities are contingent on socio-political and historical conditions. They are relational in the sense that they derive their meaning from what they are not and their formation is a process, not frozen in time. Identities are forged through the “positive technologies of power” as well as through resistance to these mechanisms (Foucault 1975:50–52). The normalization techniques of power ensure that identity labels keep proliferating. Thus, MSM necessitates the heightened visibility of other categories such as “transgender” and “kothi” and each tries to outdo the other in embodying the so-called authentic identity that can claim funding from transnational donor bodies.

14 In fact, Ani Dutta and Raina Roy point out how it was only in the third phase of the National Aids Control Program (NACP) that the category “transgender” came into official circulation as yet another “high risk group” requiring attention in India. “Transgender” was used as an umbrella category that subsumed regional variations like kothi and dhurani, but at the same time it was strictly differentiated from MSM, the latter being deemed a sexual behavioral category while the former was a gender

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identity. Accordingly, AIDS funds were allocated to the transgender population, thus heightening the homo-trans binaries (Dutta and Roy 2014:327–28). These identity wars became intense in the 1990s and 2000s as more funds started flowing in for HIV-AIDS. The last few years have witnessed a steady shrinkage in funds for HIV-AIDS and so the identity wars seemed to be cooling down too. However, with the institution of screening committees and the promise of welfare, the wars around authentic transgender identities have received a new charge.

2. The state effects of legal definition

15 A month after we witnessed the Yathartha Films video featuring hijras singing the national anthem, another video went viral overnight before it was taken down as the result of widespread condemnation. The video uploaded on September 22, 2015 by The Logical Indian was titled “A Real Transgender Exposing a Fake One.”8 It documents a hijra publicly beating up a transwoman whom she suspects of being a “man.” The hijra threatens to “expose” this transwoman by stripping her. She is supported by the bystanders. The transwoman’s transgression was that she was begging at the traffic signal. The hijra accused the transwoman of making money while not being transgender. The implication was that “real” transwomen were being shortchanged by “fake” ones. The discourse of “real” and “fake” is not a new one. In the context of hijra communities in south India, Gayatri Reddy writes how a hijra derives izzat (respect) based on whether or not she is asli (real) or nakli (fake). The statuses of asli or nakli are arrived at based on a “performance of various embodied acts, within the arenas of kinship, (a)sexuality, sartoriality, and religion” (Reddy 2005:260). Kinship would include guru-chela (master-disciple) relationships between hijras, religion would mean performance of Islamic rituals and sexuality would mean castration. However, the danger lies in a community-based understanding of gender becoming a national reality through a pan-India law. When a law mandates the formation of a screening committee that will decide if a person is transgender, then ideas of “real” and “fake” receive institutional approval and this approval engenders a lot of violence as depicted in the Logical Indian video. These divisions solidify into identity categories which are then pitted against each other to decide who is eligible for welfare and who is not. Ani Dutta (2013) argues: Divisions between “real” and “fake” hijras, or more and less feminine kothis, are translated into the distinction between transgender persons and cisgendered (sic) MSM, reifying such divides through institutional discourses of identification … the attempted formalization of this distinction into an overarching divide between communities tends to elide extant forms of gender/sexual variance between and beyond these specific identities… This especially affects socio-economically marginalized communities like kothis, whose classification as MSM or TG is debated. (P. 498) There are kothis who do not identify as men but at the same time do not feel trapped in the “wrong body.” There are those who do not undergo surgery for a wide range of reasons like lack of funds, health-related issues, or simply because they do not derive their ideas of self solely from their bodies. Each of these gendered expressions are lived realities but a screening committee will only render some of them eligible for state recognition.

16 The Logical Indian video also signals how the site of gender expression is being used to pit one set of marginalized people against another. What the video showed us was how

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two marginalized people were fighting for their claim to resources that are already scarce. The violence captured in the video is not an isolated incident. Based on personal communication with kothis in my capacity as a volunteer with a transfeminine collective in Kolkata, I have heard of several instances when transfeminine individuals have had their hair cut by so-called “real” hijras. The chopping of hair serves as a warning to “fake” hijras—meaning those kothis who have not undergone castration—to prevent them from soliciting clients in cruising spaces or begging at traffic signals. This is to assert that only “real” hijras have the right to these spaces. Often these physical assaults are audio-visually documented and then disseminated via social media like WhatsApp groups as a warning to other “fake” hijras. Each time such an incident is reported, the justification offered by the assailants is the bogey of authenticity. At a time when the Indian State has been withdrawing itself from its welfare responsibilities such as health, housing and education even as it heightens control on how resources are allocated by way of such eligibility criteria as boards and committees, large swathes of the trans population are being rendered even more economically vulnerable. This results in these fierce gender wars.

17 Even though the Transgender Persons’ Bill has been vague about the nature of welfare schemes that transgender people can have access to by simply stating in Section 9(2) of the Bill, “The appropriate Government shall take such measures as may be necessary to protect the rights and interests of the transgender person, and facilitate their access to welfare schemes …” (Government of India 2018:4), the constitution of screening committees still offers that small window of opportunity for some to gain access to resources and to have such an access, it becomes imperative to ensure that most others fail the screening criterion.

18 The transgender turf wars have had other violent manifestations as well. Firstly, be it the NALSA verdict or its coverage in the media or the way political parties have spoken about the issue, the categories “transgender” and “hijra” have almost always been deployed interchangeably. Whereas the category “hijra” does not constitute a gender identity, but a specific group of people (which could include transfeminine individuals, kothis and women) with specific religious and linguistic practices, “transgender” serves as an umbrella category for a wide range of people on the gender spectrum who do not identify with the gender they were socialized in. Though the NALSA judgment makes note of the regional specificities of trans* identities (like Hijras, Aravanis, Shiv Shaktis, Jogappas and so on), it mentions transmen and other transmasculine identities only twice in the 150 page ruling (Semmalar 2014). One look at the coverage of the verdict in the mainstream media and it becomes amply clear that the NALSA verdict has been thought of as pertaining to hijras only and to a certain extent, transwomen. Popular media campaigns like the “Bridging the genderation gap!” by Amul9 or Seatbelt Crew (VithU 2014), a collaboration between Channel V and the advertising agency, Ogilvy and Mather10 perpetuate these elisions engendered by the NALSA verdict. They produce a monolithic identity called “Transgender,” who is a hijra by default. When a Supreme Court verdict that recognizes the right to gender expression is reduced to a verdict that recognizes transgender individuals simply as “third gender,” then one wonders whether such recognition is easily palatable because the third gender finds space in our Hindu scriptures. Be it at the time of the consultations with the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment prior to the NALSA verdict or during the constitution of the

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transgender welfare boards in various states, transmasculine and gender variant people have been totally sidelined.

19 While screening committees institutionalize violent borders between “real” and “fake” hijras, popular representations of “transgender” only depict hijras. Both these phenomena expose the imbrications of Hindu nationalism with India’s transgender movements. This is because, by dint of practicing some Hindu rituals (for example the formation of a kinnar akhada as discussed earlier in the paper) and because of gender expression that can get easily folded into Hindu nationalist ideas of gender, some transfeminine individuals become legible to the state as authentic transgender subjects eligible for citizenship rights. However, such forms of legibility foreclose access to rights and welfare to those transgender individuals who fail to meet these institutionalized criteria and it is mostly the working class, Dalit transwoman or the transman who become illegible to the state.

20 However, it would be simplistic to argue that hijra subjectivities always reap benefits from their correspondence with Hindu nationalist conceptions of gender. This is because such a relationship gets complicated by the stigma associated with hijra communities on account of their traditional professions, such as begging and blessing newborns. Hence, the constant conflation of “hijra” with “transgender” undergoes backlash in the form of campaigns by upper-caste, upper-class transfeminine individuals who try to distance themselves from the stigma associated with being a hijra. They often try to highlight the fact that, unlike hijras, they are better positioned to have successful careers and therefore they need to distance themselves from the latter.11 Jeff Roy (2016) writes that this distancing of transgender from hijra engenders a, “shift from socially transgressive, devalorized modes of hijra social identity toward an embrace of respectable, middle-class transgender ones based on self-understanding and empowerment” (p. 415). So, what we are witnessing is a continuous reification of the very category of gender through which authentic citizen subjects are being produced, who are then to be imbued with rights. What is such reification if not gender policing along the lines of class, caste and the state of the biological body?

21 To understand its dangers, one could also look at the career of screening processes in India’s neighboring country, Bangladesh. In November, 2013, the government of Bangladesh officially recognized hijras as the third gender. Earlier in 2011, the parliament of Bangladesh passed a proposal to “rehabilitate” hijras on account of their “disability.” Hijras were granted disability allowances. Such measures ultimately culminated in their official recognition as third gender in 2013. One could claim that even though the construction of the hijra identity in Bangladesh as disabled is pathologizing, it could still be a means for them to access welfare from the State. However, a closer investigation of the ramifications of reading non-conforming gender identity as a disability belies such hopes. Adnan Hossain (2017:1418–19) writes how after being selected for the position of office clerk, twelve hijras were forced to undergo a medical examination in 2015. The examination concluded that all twelve of them had male genitalia and therefore were impersonating hijras. Their job offers were immediately rescinded. Yet not all hijras are intersex, many of them do not undergo castration or gender affirmation surgeries. This is a situation that is already playing out in India where different transgender groups are often seen dismissing each other’s authenticity by shoring up the specter of gender impersonation (that is the trope of asli and nakli which we discussed earlier in the paper). The constitution of a screening

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committee will only heighten such turf wars because it is obvious that not all transgender subjectivities will pass the test of the screening committees. On the other hand, against the backdrop of khwaja sira12 activism in Pakistan, Faris Khan writes that performance of gender ambiguity is a common strategy adopted by them to demand rights in Pakistan. By maintaining an aura of mystery on anatomy and choice of sexual partners, khwaja siras not only conform to the Islamic ethos but also resist prurient interests in their bodies and desires. Hence Khan (2016) writes, “Situated between the poles of normativity and queerness, gender ambiguity offers a form of productive power over mainstream society by preserving the mysterious aura of khwaja siras” (p. 164). What if there were screening committees awarding gender certificates to khwaja siras? The constitution of district level screening committees and the state’s pathologized idea of gender will only solidify gender hierarchies further where genderqueer individuals, transmasculine and working-class transgender individuals without any backing from nongovernmental organizations or those who have not gone for surgical transition will be rendered even more vulnerable by medical representatives and community gatekeepers serving on these committees.

22 In this section, I have attempted to underline the messiness of how the transgender identity is being defined by the state and the impact such a definition has had on transgender communities in India. My attempt has been to show that, even as a Hindu nationalist imaginary of gender allows some transgender individuals to belong to the Indian nation, there are many other gender identities which cannot be part of such an imaginary. I have also tried to show how the very feeling of national belonging is fragile given how discourses of class and respectability disrupt such modes of belonging, as depicted by the campaign against hijras put together by upper class transwomen. In the following section, I take up the site of labor to see how law addresses a fundamental question—any citizen’s right to work.

Labor and the transgender citizen

23 Most of the media representations of transgender narratives we have discussed so far hinge on the promise of respectability. The Yathartha video portrays transgender women as doctors, engineers, beauticians and police officers, thus distancing the transgender identity from the stigma of sex work and begging at traffic signals. While a proliferation of livelihood options is a desired goal indeed and transgender individuals must be able to choose what careers they will pursue, in reality, there are very few opportunities available for transgender individuals. Even as the state tries to police gender identity by differential allocation of rights, when it comes to the question of labor, the state is near silent. For example, the Transgender Bill states that there should be no discrimination against transgender persons at the workplace. For this purpose, the 2016 version of Bill defined the workplace or establishment as: Every establishment consisting of one hundred or more persons shall designate a person to be a complaint officer to deal with the complaints relating to violation of the provisions of this Act. (Government of India 2016:4)

24 The Bill defines establishment as: (i) any body or authority established by or under a Central Act or a State Act or an authority or a body owned or controlled or aided by the Government or a local authority, or a Government company as defined in section 2 of the Companies Act, 2013, and includes a Department of the Government; or

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(ii) any company or body corporate or association or body of individuals, firm, cooperative or other society, association, trust, agency, institution; (Government of India 2016:2) By stipulating that an establishment must have a minimum of one hundred employees and that it should be registered with the government, the State made it clear that it is keeping only the small formal economy within its ambit, leaving out the large swathes of the informal economy where most transgender people, primarily from the subordinate castes are employed. Svati P. Shah (2014) defines the informal economy as the “vast segments of national economies that are bureaucratically invisible; this is the untaxed economy, that part of the economy that does not have official governmental oversight but in which everyone participates as producers, consumers, or workers” (p. 9). Be it small factories, domestic work, non brothel-based sex work or beauty parlors—these are all part of the informal economy where many transgender people are employed. The daily harassment faced by them at these work spaces, ranging from low pay, no leisure to sexual harassment are thus rendered invisible because they do not count as discrimination, as the workplace where such discrimination takes place is not even a workplace under Indian law. Yet, these are also spaces which provide them livelihood options within a severely circumscribed field because most establishments turn them away on account of their gender non-conformity. For example, one of the most important options of income generation for transgender women is sex work, coupled with other forms of labor. Shah’s (2014) multi-sited ethnographic exploration of sex work in the city of Mumbai shows that it is “one of many livelihood strategies that poor migrants engage in” and is embedded within a “complex discursive matrix that includes life and livelihood histories, the production of urban space, the mutually constituted discourses of caste and gender, and the ways in which economically impoverished migrants navigate the idiosyncrasies of state institutions, from the police to systems of health care” (p. 10). Though Shah conducted her research with female sex workers, such a framework is also relevant for transgender sex workers. Left with almost no option in the formal economy,13 often turned out of their natal homes, sex work becomes one of the very few modes of income generation available to them, one that pays for their gender affirmation surgery in the absence of health benefits, pays for housing rent in urban spaces where property prices are soaring and also attends to other basic needs.

25 Yet the production of a hierarchy of what forms of labor practices are honorable and hence deserve legal protection and what labor practices are not, does not entail newer livelihood options for transgender individuals. It only means pushing them towards further economic precarity. Perhaps, the best way in which this can be proven is this: though the NALSA verdict and later the draft version of the Bill advocated reservations for transgender individuals as Other Backward Classes (OBC) in jobs and educations,14 the final version of the bill has totally done away with the provision for reservation stating that OBC groups objected to including gender and caste categories within the same framework. However, the Indian government has not specified who raised these objections and has not even debated the ramifications of reservation for transgender people.

26 It is also important to note here that the Standing Committee constituted to give feedback on the Transgender Persons’ Bill asked the government about harassment at a workplace which has less than 100 employees. The government responded, “It is not practically feasible for small establishments to designate a Complaint Officer. However,

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the mechanism of the police system is robust in India for taking care of such grievances” (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment 2016:77). Given that it is often the police who harass, torture and detain transgender women in public spaces, how will the State ensure that the latter can find the most accessible forms of justice from the police? The only concession that the 2018 version of the Bill makes with regard to the definition of “establishment” is that it has removed the stipulation of 100 employees but the rest of the definition remains the same. In other words, the informal economy is still outside the scope of this Bill.

27 I focused on the question of labor in this section to demonstrate how discourses of nationalism and their connection to transgender citizenship could sometimes lack any material basis. Unlike in the case of screening committees that aim to give an ontological stability to a Hindu nationalist conception of gender that becomes eligible for welfare, the state has made no such concessions when it comes to labor rights for transgender individuals. Thus, nationalist depictions of transgender citizens as successful professionals in the Yathartha video are more for effect than rooted in material realities. In other words, the state effects of the way transgender labor is addressed by Indian law undermine the meta-narrative of the complicities of transgender movements with Hindu nationalism.

Conclusion

28 In the previous two sections, I have tried to highlight some of the violent foreclosures engendered by the Indian state’s formulation of transgender citizenship. However, foreclosures are also sites of radical possibilities (Dave 2012). For example, even as the Transgender Bill, or the respectability discourse in the media, push out working-class transgender sex workers further to the margins, they continue to find newer ways of eking out livelihoods. A lot of sexual commerce has now moved on to not only newer physical spaces but also to social media. While for some, performing nationalism accords legibility, the lived realities of many others mean a ceaseless battle with the state for better policies, laws and implementation practices. It needs to be underlined here that it was only in the face of country wide protests against the Transgender Bill, where transgender activists burnt copies of the Bill on the streets and conducted protest meetings and marches,15 that the central government altered the pathological definition of “transgender” in the Bill. At the time of writing this paper, protest meetings are being conducted across the country against the current version of the Bill. On December 28, 2018, transgender groups from across the country assembled in Delhi to protest against this Bill that was passed by the Lok Sabha. The Bill is currently pending before the Rajya Sabha and in the face of these protests, members of Parliament from the opposition parties have assured transgender activists that they will not allow the Bill to be passed in the Rajya Sabha. However, the Bill did not come up for discussion in the Rajya Sabha and the country goes into general elections soon. Thus, India's transgender communities have successfully stalled the Bill until its next iteration comes up in the Parliament after the elections. Even as the State tries to fix the meaning of gender and everything it can mean, gender as a category and the way it is inflected by class, caste and other specificities continues to disrupt any teleological narrative from chaos to order. The intense contestations around the category of “transgender” proves how even as the state tries to order gender, it fails to do so in the

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face of proliferating oppositional accounts of self making. These oppositional narratives are rooted in complex lived realities that exceed the mandate of law. It is in a careful reading of these excesses that any meta-framework, in this case nationalism, be disrupted.

29 At the time of writing the conclusion to this paper, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi issued a statement asserting that she supports the construction of a temple in Ayodhya on the land where Babri Masjid stood until it was demolished by Hindu right-wing forces on December 6, 1992 (Verma 2018).16 Her statement underlines how Hindu nationalism could be aligned with transgender communities in India. However, this meta-narrative is not the only narrative about transgender movements in India. Tripathi’s statement is being severely contested by India’s queer and transgender communities. A statement condemning her has been signed by 183 transgender, intersex and gender non- conforming individuals, 20 LGBTQIA+ groups, 8 allied organizations, and 146 individual allies in India. The statement details how the current government has bypassed the NALSA verdict and is criminalizing transgender people through the Transgender Persons Bill and connects such laws with the larger climate of intolerance towards religious minorities in India. Tripathi’s vision of a Hindu India for transgender people meets its fiercest challenge in these words from the statement: Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a dominant-caste brahmin trans woman, has been appealing to Hindutva ideology and justifying the existence of the caste system in India ever since she began aspiring for a political position within the current ruling party. Her position negates the politics of communal harmony that is espoused by Hijras and Kinnars, who have historically maintained a syncretic faith of belonging to both Hinduism and Islam. Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s position idealises a mythical past of the Sanatan Dharam and supports the right-wing politics of communal hatred in the guise of “we were always accepted.” (Sampoorna 2018)17 My heartfelt thanks to Saptarshi Mandal for reading multiple drafts of this paper and giving feedback.

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NOTES

1. Humsafar Trust is one of India’s oldest and most well-funded non-profit groups, working on advocacy programs around HIV-AIDS awareness. Their founder is Ashok Row Kavi, who could arguably be referred to as the Father of India’s gay movements, as he gave an interview about his sexuality all the way back in 1986 that encouraged many others to come out. See the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBRtIxMtGfA.

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2. Kinnar is a Sanskrit word that approximately translates as transgender. Akhada is a space for communal living for Hindu celibates, religious leaders and even wrestlers who live and practice together. See Sudhir Kakar (1990) for the inherent homosociality of such spaces. 2016 saw the formation of India’s first Kinnar Akhada led by internationally renowned transgender activist, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. Different akhadas across India congregate on the banks of the river Ganga, considered a Goddess in Hinduism, for a holy bath, symbolizing the ritual cleansing of one’s mortal sins. This happens every three years. In 2016, despite much opposition from male dominated akhadas, the transgender akhada participated in the holy bath in an earmarked zone. Thousands of devotees who gathered for bathing paid their respects to the Kinnar Akhada, after the holy bath. For a report on this, see The Quint (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- UiSCODGc6Q. 3. https://theprint.in/politics/indias-first-and-oldest-gay-activist-uses-a-brand-of-hindutva-to- fight-377/85919/ 4. The Transgender Person (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016 can be accessed at: http:// www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Transgender/Transgender%20Persons%20Bill,%202016.pdf 5. Available at http://orinam.net/content/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/TGBill_2015.pdf 6. The full text of the Bill can be accessed http://orinam.net/content/wp-content/uploads/ 2018/12/2018_LS_Eng.pdf 7. On the lack of transparency in the constitution of the West Bengal Transgender Development Board, see Bhattacharya (2015): http://kindlemag.in/board-mysteries/. 8. See Pheba (2015) on this video. 9. Amul is a cooperative of dairy farmers. They are most noted for their logo of a girl, with a slab of Amul butter. The girl is seen in various places reacting to important news of the day. See Amul’s artwork based on the NALSA verdict at https://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/ scrollstorage/1419320789-1045_Amul3.jpg 10. The video of the Seatbelt crew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muCU6_Y_Kyo 11. A non-profit group named Transgender India made this video (2016) featuring five transwomen with established careers and asked them what freedom meant to them. Each of them carried a placard, which had the words “I am not a hijra” written on it. See at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=A3vgcN241Js&app=desktop 12. Khwaja Sira serves as an umbrella category for various gender and sexuality configurations in Pakistan, including those with congenital genital variations (khunsa), feminine males who cross dress (zennana) and also those zennanas who undergo castration (hijra). Between 2009 and 2012, the Pakistani Supreme Court granted a host of rights to khwaja siras, including the recognition of khwaja sira as a distinct gender category besides male and female. However, when it comes to the daily performance of gender, these categories are not neat. 13. A recent example of how the formal economy does not employ transgender individuals came to light when Air India rejected Shanavi Ponnusamy, a transwoman for the position of female cabin crew. Air India did not cite any reason for this rejection even though Shanavi had met all the eligibility criteria for the job. Even when Shanavi filed a petition with the Supreme Court, Air India did not respond. Finally, having devoted all her resources to the legal battle, Shanavi filed a petition for mercy killing with the President of India. It was then that the Ministry of Civil Aviation asked Air India to respond. Instead of apologizing to Shanavi, Air India threatened to file a case against her for forcing them to give her the job. 14. India’s subordinate castes, because of their historical marginalization, are guaranteed reservations in jobs and higher education, in the government sector. The three categories for caste reservation are the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBC). The Supreme Court recommended that transgender individuals be granted reservations as OBCs. While the conflation of caste and gender requires further discussion

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because even among transgender individuals, there are many upper castes, the current Bill has foreclosed any further analysis by removing the reservation clause. 15. An audiovisual reportage on the protests against the Transgender Persons Bill by India’s transgender movements was made by NewsClickin (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=5US0AbIOGmo. 16. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kinnar-akhara-bats-for-ram-temple-in-ayodhya- second-term-for-pm-narendra-modi-5435495/ 17. https://sampoornaindiablog.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/trans-gender-nonconforming- intersex-collectives-strongly-condemn-kinnar-akharas-support-for-ram-temple-at-ayodhya- india/?fbclid=IwAR0h_InJV3cQpAPeU5VC9Z6m6fPqABextqWK3RK0a4wnBjTXNFwGKPyy6wI

ABSTRACTS

In a 2014 judgment, the Supreme Court of India affirmed the right of every Indian citizen to choose their gender identity regardless of gender affirmation surgery. Following this judgment, states across India have been constituting transgender welfare boards and the Indian government has approved the Transgender Persons’ (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2018 that is supposed to be the one law that will safeguard transgender individuals from any form of discrimination. This legal recognition also coincides with a series of media campaigns that depict transgender individuals staking their claim to Indian citizenship through the trope of nationalism, which is always already majoritarian Hindu nationalism. Thus, these twin developments raise the question of whether performing Hindu nationalism is the only way to claim Indian citizenship. Recent queer studies scholarship from India warns us of the danger of queer and transgender movements getting folded into majoritarian Hindu nationalism, creating constitutive outsides comprised of non-citizens who cannot perform such nationalism. This paper argues that such a meta-narrative risks the danger of missing out on the micro-narratives of resistance and protests emerging from within India’s transgender movements that disrupt any singular narrative of transgender individuals performing nationalism to seek citizenship rights.

INDEX

Keywords: transgender, movements, law, nation, nationalism

AUTHOR

SAYAN BHATTACHARYA GWSS, University of Minnesota

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Dissenting Differently: Solidarities and Tensions between Student Organizing and Trans-Kothi-Hijra Activism in Eastern India

Aniruddha Dutta

Introduction

On the 21st of December at 9:30 pm, five of us trans persons … were standing and waiting for two other friends … when seven-eight men … began verbally abusing us … we protested … (they) started raining blows on us … we register our strong protest against this incident. (Babui 2015)1

1 The above quote, illustrating a particular incident of transphobic violence, is excerpted from an “open letter” in Bengali authored by activists associated with Samabhabona, a transgender community organization based in Kolkata, the capital of the state of West Bengal in eastern India. The letter was circulated as a public post on Facebook on January 1, 2015. Remarkably, apart from the trans collective that authored it, the letter was mainly disseminated by cisgender-heterosexual student activists based in universities in Kolkata, rather than by LGBT groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the area. The subsequent street protest was also largely attended by students, in addition to the affected trans persons. This gathering spurred protests against similar incidents elsewhere in the state, organized through coalitions between student activists and transgender/queer groups, particularly collectives of largely working class and Dalit (oppressed caste) communities such as kothis and hijras. These terms signify a regionally varied spectrum of feminine- expressing persons usually assigned male at birth—including transgender women, feminine males and people with fluid or overlapping subject positions—who may also refer to themselves as transgender or gay in Anglophone contexts (Dutta and Roy 2014).2

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2 How and why did such alliances emerge between trans-kothi-hijra groups and non-LGBT student collectives with, in some cases, trans/queer collectives even preferring to collaborate with student activists rather than other LGBT organizations? In this article, I explore some of the solidarities and tensions that have developed in this emergent political terrain, drawing on participant observation, collaborative activism and dialogues with kothi-hijra and student activists, conducted between 2012 and 2017. The first three sections of the article chart how alliances emerged between the trans feminine kothi-hijra spectrum and leftist-feminist student collectives based in and around Kolkata, creating new political configurations and possibilities. I argue that these alliances challenge the hegemony of single-axis identity politics based on gender or sexuality alone, and emphasize the role of intersections based on class, caste and language in the process of movement building. Under certain circumstances, trans- kothi-hijra collectives may prefer to work with student groups associated with pro- working-class politics, rather than LGBT organizations dominated by upper class/caste activists. Referencing Raka Ray’s (1999) theorization of the hegemonic “political field” of Kolkata (p. 49), I argue that such alliances interrupt established fields of both leftist and LGBT politics in India. On one hand, they destabilize a primary emphasis on class on the left, on the other, they underscore the importance of class/caste politics within LGBT mobilizations.

3 However, subsequent sections of the article go on to show how these alliances evidence an unpredictable oscillation between the subversion of hegemonic political fields and the reinscription of hierarchies within activist spaces, which challenges a linear teleology of political progress. Rather, as I attempt to demonstrate, these evolving coalitions reveal both “paradoxes and possibilities” (Roy 2012:3)—such as emerging intersectional critiques that bridge feminist, Marxist and trans/queer politics, versus persistent hierarchies of class, caste and gender within coalitional spaces that circumscribe the potentials of student-trans solidarities. Indeed, radical political agendas may co-exist with disciplinary and governmental technologies of power that seek to regulate “proper” revolutionary conduct. This analysis resonates with recent examinations of governance within feminist activism (Roy 2017:3), and examines how strategies of governance function in spaces of leftist-feminist student activism. However, while much of the analysis of feminist governance has focused on funded, institutionalized forms of activism (Soderlund 2005; Karim 2011; Roy 2017), I explore forms of governance within amorphous, informally structured and non-funded alliances. Such collaborative activist spaces evidence non-linear and non-teleological tendencies, such that hierarchizing maneuvers and governmental technologies may be ruptured even as they are consolidated, rather than crystallizing into an institutionalized pattern.

4 I analyze this unstable terrain as symptomatic of larger tensions between, on the one hand, hierarchical structures and ideological authoritarianism that have long characterized the organized left in India, and on the other, challenges to hegemonic leftist structures and discourses. Such challenges were enabled by the emergence, in the 2010s, of an “independent” left in West Bengal, unaffiliated with any political party. This shift is marked by ideological clashes between the traditional left and independent student collectives, and within the independent left itself, as student activists interrogate orthodox left positions and seek to define their stances around issues like sexuality, transgender politics and sex workers’ rights, which were typically dismissed

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or neglected by the left. While this process is marked by ideological factions and debates, repertoires of political concepts and rhetorical strategies also unpredictably travel between seemingly opposed sides, undoing rigid dichotomies of political praxis.

5 Of course, student politics and the LGBT movement in India are each richly diverse terrains in their own right, and this cannot claim to be a comprehensive analysis of either, or even of all intersections between the two. Rather, this article focuses on specific conjunctures that developed between leftist student collectives and trans/ queer groups in the 2010s. It is written as a series of reflections from the vantage point of personal experiences—including my own—meant to spark reflection and dialogue across academic and activist spaces.

Charting emerging solidarities

6 In several ways, the year 2012 marked a turning point for the LGBT movement and associated communities in Kolkata and West Bengal. It was a year of disillusionment for many, especially for trans-kothi-hijra people who worked in HIV-prevention projects funded by the Indian government’s AIDS control departments, which supported several LGBT NGOs in the state. In 2012, the West Bengal state AIDS control department stopped funding MANAS Bangla, a network of community-based HIV prevention projects, due to alleged financial corruption by senior staff, thus depriving hundreds of trans-kothi-hijra workers of their livelihood (Dutta 2012). Several junior staff from kothi and hijra communities complained to me that the upper class-caste leadership of the network did nothing, beyond making a few token protests, to protect their interests. Some of the discharged staff went on to work at other LGBT organizations, but even there, they encountered exploitative labor dynamics, including salary cuts and misappropriation of funds meant for workers. The limits of single-axis identity politics that emphasized gender/sexual rights, but ignored class/caste hierarchies within LGBT spaces, became increasingly evident in the growing sense of disillusionment with the LGBT leadership among many transgender, kothi and hijra people. This was exacerbated by the gentrification of activist spaces such as the annual Kolkata rainbow pride walk, which was increasingly appropriated by middle class LGBT people.

7 This larger context prompted trans-kothi-hijra activists to look beyond LGBT spaces and seek alliances with a variety of leftist, feminist, Dalit and students’ movements in West Bengal. Solidarities between trans-queer activists and students, in particular, intensified in the aftermath of the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, a young female physiotherapy student who was sexually assaulted and tortured in a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. She later succumbed to her injuries (Mandhana and Trivedi 2012). Like elsewhere in the country, this incident prompted a spate of protests in West Bengal. A spectrum of leftist and feminist student groups were involved in these actions, which placed gender and sexuality at the forefront of student activism in an unprecedented way. Trans/queer communities such as the kothi-hijra spectrum joined these protests, and used them as a platform to bridge the issue of violence against cisgender women with gender/sexual violence against LGBT and especially trans feminine people.

8 Unlike cities like Delhi that have had active queer campus collectives since the 2000s, the initial intersections between LGBT and student activism in West Bengal typically developed as alliances between largely cisgender heterosexual student communities

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and trans/queer groups located outside campus spaces, with queer student groups emerging later.3 A few trans/kothi activists deserve special mention for their pioneering role in these early dialogues: Anurag Maitreyee, Bobby Kamalini De, and Raina Roy in Kolkata, and Sumi Das in North Bengal.4 Among them, I collaborated particularly with Raina and Sumi in initiating dialogues with student groups. Responding to advocacy by these activists, several student collectives also started including LGBT issues in their agendas. One of the most active groups in this field was Ardhek Akash or “Half the Sky,” a loosely organized and non-funded feminist collective comprising a floating population of students and alumni from Presidency, Jadavpur and Kolkata Universities, as well as small-town colleges. Ardhek Akash, which began as a magazine on women’s rights in 2006 and later expanded into an initiative against gender-based discrimination, comprises people from a variety of socioeconomic positions, including upper-caste men and Dalit women. It is associated with other overlapping student outfits like Jubo Andolon Moncho or the Revolutionary Youth Forum. None of these collectives are associated with any political party and they position themselves as part of a larger non-party left, sometimes referred to as the tritiyo front or third front.

9 Such collectives are situated within the larger diversified terrain of student politics in West Bengal, which features both structured, organized fronts and more unstructured, fluid groups. Student politics in Bengal has traditionally been tilted toward the left, but also evidences the increasing presence of right-wing groups. There are at least three broad elements within this terrain: firstly, organized student groups affiliated with political parties, for example the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) affiliated with the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); the Trinamool Chatra Parishad, affiliated with the centrist and populist Trinamool Congress (TMC); the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M); AISA (All India Students’ Association), affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, and so on. Secondly, there are more “independent” but structured groups with formal membership, like the PDSF (Progressive Democratic Students’ Federation) or the USDF (United Students’ Democratic Front), which are to the far left, but not explicitly associated with any party. Some independent groups focus on specific campuses, for example the Independents’ Consolidation (IC) at Presidency University, or the Forum for Arts Students (FAS) at Jadavpur University. Independent groups tend to be suspicious of party-affiliated organizations—even leftist ones—and have attempted to wrest control of student unions from party-affiliated groups (The Telegraph 2015). Lastly, there are more amorphously structured independent political platforms or collectives that do not contest student elections. They have fluid boundaries and a floating membership, which may spring up or dissipate around particular issues, causes or initiatives. These groups, such as Students for Democracy, Jubo Andolon Moncho and Ardhek Akash, often utilize social media platforms to recruit volunteers, rather than a formalized membership process. Collectives of this type participated in, and drew inspiration from, “independent” non- party-affiliated student mobilizations in Kolkata in the 2010s, such as a series of protests at Jadavpur University in 2014 against the university administration’s handling of a case of sexual molestation and subsequent police brutality against student protestors. This came to be known as the Hok Kolorob movement, based on its slogan “Hok Kolorob” or “let there be noise” (Ghoshal 2014). However, students from party-affiliated outfits or structured independent groups may also float in and out of initiatives organized by these collectives.

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10 It is these independent, loosely structured groups that were most amenable to the early intersections between student and trans/queer activism. Several of these student groups actively organized protests against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (1860)— a colonial-era law that criminalized non-peno-vaginal sexual intercourse and was occasionally used against LGBT people, before the Indian Supreme Court partially struck it down to exclude consensual sexual activity from its purview in 2018 (Rajagopal 2018). In turn, trans/queer communities also joined in student-led protests during the Hok Kolorob movement.

Beyond gender/sexuality: solidarities around class, caste and language

11 A major factor underlying the coalitions between student and trans activists is solidarity based on class and language, rather than on gender or sexual identity, although a shared sense of gender-sexual politics remains important. As mentioned above, the elite character of the LGBT leadership became increasingly clear to many trans, kothi and hijra people following the debacle of MANAS Bangla in 2012. Among the aforementioned activists, Raina comes from an urban upper caste, yet lower middle class family, while Sumi hails from a rural Dalit background. Both experienced exploitative working conditions as well as humiliation and abuse by upper class/caste leaders while employed as lower-end staff in HIV projects run by NGOs. This eventually led them to quit these jobs and form collectives with kothi-hijra people of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. In this context, leftist student groups offered a more explicitly class-oriented political platform that promised greater equality. Further, several kothi and hijra community members in Kolkata told me on various occasions that they were more comfortable in Bengali-speaking student spaces than in Anglophone LGBT contexts. For example, Anindita and Ragini, two Dalit trans women who work with Raina at the abovementioned trans collective Samabhabona, expressed their discomfort with attending seminars and panel discussions organized by funded NGOs: “everything is in English … don’t take us to such spaces. We much prefer to go to events organized by Ardhek Akash or by Dalit groups.”5 Raina herself praised the ways in which Ardhek Akash produced accessible leftist and feminist material in Bengali: “they make a lot of posters in Bengali … and do it really well.”

12 The posters and slogans used by Ardhek Akash and similar student groups represent an amalgamation of various discursive tendencies ranging from liberal to , adjusted to the demands of the occasion, and largely expressed in colloquial Bangla.6 For example, some posters carry messages against rape culture and violence against women, such as “stop the patriarchal viewpoint of questioning the clothes a rape victim was wearing”, or “marriage gives the legal right to rape every night.” Others deploy liberal humanist standpoints to critique patriarchal constructions of gender, such as “softness, caring and forgiveness should not be feminine but human virtues.” Occasions such as International Women’s Day are used to articulate Marxist feminist demands for better working conditions for domestic workers. This convergence of distinct (but not necessarily opposed) political registers has proven amenable to the incorporation of LGBT issues. Since 2013, posters protesting violence against LGBT people also began to appear at Ardhek Akash events, bearing messages

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such as “stop sexual violence and corrective rape against people of marginalized sexualities (prantik jounotar manush).”

Challenging hegemonic fields of left and LGBT politics

13 Trans people have used this flexible discursive space to critique hierarchies within the LGBT NGO sector and to build alliances that subvert the domination of elite LGBT leaders. In a meeting with Ardhek Akash in December 2014, community members associated with Samabhabona articulated a strong critique of how, in their words, “NGOs are selling communities for funding.” This was a reference to the way NGOs used kothis and hijras as target groups to obtain funded HIV-prevention projects, while simultaneously exploiting them and neglecting their needs. Ragini, a Dalit trans and kothi-identified person, narrated how she had approached an NGO after being assaulted, but the organization put the onus of filing a complaint on her, and did not follow up on the case. Those present at the meeting decided to create a collaboration between Ardhek Akash and Samabhabona, which would directly intervene at sites of transphobic violence and harassment through protests and advocacy meetings, especially in non-metropolitan areas neglected by funded LGBT activism. This ongoing collaboration has sought to shift the movement’s priorities from a narrow focus on sexual health in the HIV sector and celebratory and performative events like Pride walks, to put the emphasis back on countering violence against poor trans-kothi-hijra people.

14 These collaborations also mark a critical departure from traditional forms of leftist politics in India. As in the West, the organized left in India has long been critiqued for perpetuating gender and caste hierarchies within and beyond party ranks (Kranz 2015:153; Desai 2016:13). Organizational hierarchies reproduce the ideological de- prioritization of gender and caste relative to class. Social actions focusing on gender or caste may be seen as fringe or elite issues in comparison to “mass-based” struggles, and even as fracturing or undermining mass unity (Omvedt 1994:37; Kranz 2015:239). Upper-caste male leaders of leftist political parties have even decried such movements as “imperialist plots” (Omvedt 1994:37).

15 Such dismissals extend to LGBT issues—most parties within the traditional left in West Bengal and India have been homophobic and transphobic. While the CPI(M) has come around to supporting LGBT rights, other parties such as the SUCI(C) (Socialist Unity Center of India (Communist)) still vociferously oppose LGBT issues as imperialist and bourgeois (Muktangan 2009). In 2009, after a Delhi High Court judgment temporarily removed consensual same-sex behavior from the purview of IPC 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860), Nihar Mukherjee, general secretary of the SUCI(C) said, “this judgment … will simply open the floodgate of degraded degenerated imperialist culture that … instigates perversion and sexual promiscuity with the vile objective of destroying the very moral backbone of … the youth. This nefarious design … is being assiduously pursued by the ruling capitalist class … to disturb growth and development of revolutionary movement based on … higher ethics and culture” (Muktangan 2009). Such evocations of anti-imperialism end up mirroring right-wing condemnations of LGBT practices and identities as foreign incursions. They underscore nationalist and protectionist understandings of Indian “culture,” marking political continuities

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between the “left” and the “right,” and the discursive transfer of common tropes across apparently opposed ideological frames.

16 Such tendencies also mark the domination of men from the “Bhadralok” class (upper caste Bengalis) within left spaces. According to Raka Ray (1999), in comparison to other Indian metropolises like Mumbai, Kolkata evidenced a more uniformly hegemonic political field “with concentrated power and a homogeneous culture” ruled by the ostensibly leftist CPI(M) (p. 49). However, in the 2000s, this hegemonic field was ruptured when attempts by the ruling CPI(M) to acquire land for corporate interests were opposed by powerful farmers’ movements at Singur and Nandigram. These protests garnered widespread support and led to the electoral defeat of the CPI(M) and the rise of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) that came into power in 2011 (Bose 2011).

17 In this context, leftist students dissatisfied with the repressive tendencies of the traditional left joined and bolstered “independent” fronts. During the “Hok Kolorob” protests at Jadavpur University, many student activists, including members of Ardhek Akash, opposed both the TMC and the CPI(M) for their deployment of statist machinery and police violence, and hailed Hok Kolorob as a bannerless, independent, non-party movement. As one activist said, “it is political but … independent of the clutches of political parties … independent from … age-old governmental, power-centric political organizations of different colours but of similar vested interests” (Times News Network 2014). To date, the cover photo of Ardhek Akash’s public group on Facebook exhorts readers to “pledge to take initiatives in their own spaces outside conventional party banners,”7 underlining an ethic of independent mobilization that resists institutional consolidation.8

18 In this changing scenario, student mobilizations became more sensitive to issues of gender-sexuality and caste, particularly after the anti-rape protests of December 2012 that helped shift the focus from single-issue class politics. Living in a family of active SUCI(C) workers, Raina had personally experienced the oppressive effects of leftist conservatism and she utilized this conjuncture to enter “independent” leftist spaces. In July 2013, Raina and I were invited to a panel discussion on rape culture at Presidency University, organized by Ardhek Akash. The description of the event announced: “Ardhek Akash opposes any kind of violence based on gender discrimination, not just violence against (cisgender) women.”9 This marked a significant shift within the discursive sphere of anti-rape protests in Kolkata. As Raina said, “subsequently, I started sitting on various student panels … associated myself with left-liberal politics … gradually I understood that only students can bring about change through their unity!”

19 The departure from the erstwhile hegemony of the left crystallized in December 2013, when the Indian Supreme Court overruled the aforementioned Delhi High Court judgment and reinstated IPC 377, although it eventually struck down parts of Section 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860) that criminalized consensual sex between adults in 2018 (Rajagopal 2018). The 2013 judgment prompted protests across the nation. Student and left allies in Kolkata, including participants from Ardhek Akash, helped organize a “grand rally” against the judgment on December 19, 2013. One of the organizers, Chhandak Chatterjee, explicitly critiqued previous left dismissals of sexuality relative to more “basic” class issues: “I’ve heard many left groups decry, “no thought for food- clothes-shelter, but excessive attention to sexuality!” But think once, brother, what if you were told you cannot kiss your wife? If you kiss her the cops will haul you off to jail? Brother, the BJP is coming to power … it is this BJP that, along with some Hindu

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and Muslim fundamentalist groups, had opposed the Delhi High Court judgment” (Chatterjee 2013).10 Addressing an imagined figure, the typical “Bhadralok” leftist male (“brother”), the statement counters leftist suspicion of the liberal sexuality rights framework. It positions sexuality rights within a larger discourse of protest against state and police oppression, commonly espoused by the “independent” left since the Singur-Nandigram movements, as well as against right-wing fundamentalism. Such coalitional politics thus facilitates convergences between political frameworks that had remained hitherto distinct in West Bengal, while rupturing former continuities between the “left” and “right” on LGBT issues.

Gendered hierarchies and limitations of trans acceptance

20 However, the coalitions did not always function smoothly, and fault lines began to emerge at the outset. Despite the break from the conventional left, “independent” leftist student fronts show persistent patterns of male dominance and class/caste hierarchies, which have constrained trans participation within such spaces. This critique, gleaned from personal narratives of trans/kothi activists like Raina and Sumi, is not directed at any specific student collective. “Independent” student spaces are fluid and activists flow between different fronts and collectives. Relations between different student groups have tended to be dynamic and evolutive, sometimes evidencing intense disagreement. Thus, hierarchical tendencies are neither homogenous nor attributable to particular fixed groups, but may surface—and also be resisted or ruptured—across various collectives or spaces.

21 Early on in their collaborations with student groups, Raina and Sumi received a mixed reception from the broad spectrum of students who attended these events. While groups like Ardhek Akash are strongly committed to including trans people in activist spaces, the larger masses of students within which such collectives are embedded manifested varied reactions to the presence of trans people, including persistent curiosity about, and an objectification of, trans bodies. After a gathering at Jadavpur University in June 2013, Raina noted, “I spoke at a street corner on the Jadavpur campus … a crowd gathered seeing a kothi like me speaking in a place like Jadavpur!” Sumi also noticed how her very presence in leftist student spaces sometimes provoked surprise and unease. In the summer of 2015, while on her way to a panel discussion on intersectionality in Kolkata, she met some cisgender female students who were also on their way to the discussion. Sumi narrates that, “two of the women made a strange face after hearing that I was one of the speakers … like turning up their noses (nak-shitkano) … they didn’t say anything explicitly, but one can still understand things left unsaid!” She also noticed adverse reactions during the panel discussion itself: “I saw that some well-known student leaders were laughing during my statement, not giving it that much importance.” While incidents like this may be glossed over as microaggressions (Wing Sue 2010)—difficult to verify or call out—precisely for this reason, they contribute to creating a transphobic and unwelcoming atmosphere.

22 Sumi also noted the ways in which gendered subordination and class/caste hierarchies may contextually reinforce or undercut each other, resulting in trans people from differing class/caste backgrounds being treated differently in “progressive” spaces: “In 2016, I went to the little magazine fair at Kolkata, where I happened to meet Manobi

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Bandyopadhyay (a well-known trans activist). Some students from Presidency University were also there … whom I’d met at various activist programs … but I noticed that they avoided me and talked to Manobi, though I was standing right beside her!” For Sumi, this incident underscored the relatively high status of upper caste urban LGBT activists like Manobi and the redoubled marginality of Dalit and rural trans people like herself. Sumi also noted that students treated her with more respect when she was with me, an Anglophone academic from a privileged class/caste background. Her critique suggests that the social convergence of elites across LGBT and student spaces limits the class-disrupting potentials of left-trans-queer alliances.

23 Equal participation of trans people is also undercut by the way in which revolutionary leadership is often gendered male in leftist spaces, subordinating both cisgender women and trans people. Raina observed, “I started noticing patriarchal tendencies across both leftist parties and the non-party left, though there is much to learn from them as well … most of the time, men would lead the slogans … male seniors carried a certain special power. Competition about who would be on the front lines was prominent even among these groups!” At an event in June 2013, she spoke out against a persistently masculinist rhetoric of revolution in which biplobis or revolutionaries were often gendered male: “There was this intolerable man … who was lecturing … that boys should become revolutionaries … I objected, saying do revolutionaries have a gender?” In this scenario, women were potential allies: “when I first spoke at street-corner protests among independent left groups, it was the women who would come up and speak to me.”

24 Yet both Raina and Sumi felt that women were not always able to access higher levels of leadership. Sumi said: While participating in a panel discussion in 2015, I felt many times that the women who were present were not really in charge of managing the event, the speakers or audience … some of the male leaders were in charge of such things … one woman did read a statement on intersectionality at the beginning, but I heard an audience member joke to her boyfriend, “you do not like it when she mouths such feminist statements, do you?” … many male activists from Kolkata universities write feminist statements, I doubt how much of that they really believe and practice! While women did play leading roles in other events, Raina felt that they were relegated to certain kinds of activism (especially around gender), and men tended to retain leadership in more “general” spaces. Raina also noted the relative absence of explicitly Dalit-identified feminists within the “independent” left, though some female activists were from oppressed caste backgrounds.11 However, some student groups did attempt to address latent hierarchies around gender and caste. For instance, in 2016, activists associated with Ardhek Akash and related overlapping collectives organized internal discussions on gender, sexuality and intersectionality, where participants critically examined their privileges and disprivileges, and men endeavored to be self-reflexive about their gendered and class-caste positions.

25 Nonetheless, sometimes even seasoned activists have lapsed into forms of gendered condescension toward working class/Dalit trans people, positioning them more as pathetic victims than as agents or equal participants in activism. In October 2015, Chhandak Chatterjee—the activist who had critiqued the leftist dismissal of sexuality— published a public post on Facebook against a case of transphobic violence. Chatterjee sought sympathy for the survivors in a melodramatic narrative about trans women who desperately try to pass as women and cry when looking at their genitalia—tropes

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highly reminiscent of the “pathetic trans” archetype critiqued by Julia Serano (2007:35). Ventriloquizing trans voices, Chatterjee wrote: “if people laugh at me, I fear … does that mean that my waxed hands still show hair? … one cries again after reaching home, for that day I could not become a woman … one hates one’s genitals… God, I’d just wanted to become a woman!”12

26 In a panel discussion in January 2016, Sumi vehemently objected to this narrative: “this ends up depicting kothis as if they are always helpless … but not everyone is… and do we not have any other aim in life other than becoming women? For many, obtaining food is a bigger problem … and not all trans people are pained or ashamed of their genitalia!” Chatterjee was not present; when I brought up the issue in a comment under his post, he replied that he had meant the post only as “one version” among many potential transgender narratives.

27 Such “pathetic trans” portrayals also occasionally emerged at protest meetings comprising students from Ardhek Akash and related collectives. For example, at a protest in Kolkata in 2015, a speaker described hijra professions, such as blessing people for money, as not just a limited employment choice given the lack of mainstream options, but also as a particularly pitiable one: “just think … what if you had to put on garish make-up and wear sarees to go beg for money?” In response, I pointed out that hijras may be proud of their professions. The speaker, a young woman who is otherwise a passionate advocate of trans rights, was very receptive to the dialogue. Thus, depending on the context, hierarchizing tendencies may be more or less easy to counteract, given the diversely gendered constituency and uneven concentration of power among student activists.

Regulating dissent

28 Ideological schisms around particular issues posed another tactical problem for trans activists collaborating with student collectives. Such divergences may take the shape of clashes between distinct groups, or internal differences within student collectives that leaders may attempt to suppress. In both cases, trans activists experience pressure to delimit their political allegiances in order to maintain alliances.

29 These tendencies came to the fore during protests against right-wing nationalism in February 2016. On February 9, 2016, student activists at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi held a protest meeting supporting self-determination in Kashmir and questioning the hanging of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri man who was executed, despite insufficient evidence, for his alleged links to a 2001 “terrorist” attack on the Indian parliament (Chatterjee 2016). The activists were attacked by the right-wing student group, ABVP, and dubbed “anti-national” in the media; some were subsequently arrested. Students at Jadavpur University organized a rally protesting the arrests and the suppression of campus democracy. The organizers followed the lead of Hok Kolorob in not associating with any political party. While they condemned right-wing “fascism” and “terror,” they also sought to overturn the “anti-national” allegation by positioning themselves as true patriots, who loved the land and people of India, in contrast to the fascist state that was actually betraying the country by suppressing democracy: “let our revolutionary pledge burn down the unjust Indian state; let the light of our torches sanctify our motherland India” (Sit, Dasgupta and Mukhopadhyay 2016a).13 One participant published a post stating that the right-wing fascists were the true “anti-

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nationals” (deshdrohi) who would be destroyed through revolutionary patriotism (deshprem).14

30 However, this attempt to reclaim patriotism against statist deployments of nationalism proved to be an unstable move that collapsed under pressure into liberal nationalism. During the rally, some people, associated with a far left group called Radical, shouted slogans supporting Kashmiri freedom (azaadi) from India and condemning Afzal Guru’s execution. As in Delhi, the media labeled them “anti-national” and the police cracked down on the protestors (Banerjie 2016). The organizers responded by quickly distancing themselves from any “anti-national” viewpoint: We organized today’s rally to condemn the state atrocity against the students invoking nationalism… However, a section of the media is trying to portray today’s rally as a “pro-Afzal” one. This press statement univocally condemns this mal-effort (sic) … There may be the possibility of “anti-India” sloganeering by some fringe elements in the gathering. But … these slogans don’t depict the spirit of the rally at all. If any such incident happened in the gathering, violating the common minimum program of the rally, we strongly condemn that. (Sit, Dasgupta and Mukhopadhyay 2016b)15 Another participant in the rally condemned “fractions … with their own vested interest” for risking the “unity of the general mass” with their “extremist views.”16

31 Here, the old left bogey of threats to mass unity—which, as Omvedt (1994:37) notes, was used to condemn social movements around gender or caste—is evoked to label and silence dissenting voices as “extremists” and “fringe elements.” The condemnation of dissenters as pursuing vested interests evokes the declaration of independence from “governmental, power-centric political organizations of different colours but of similar vested interests” by Hok Kolorob activists (Times News Network 2014). Ironically, the political goal of independence from “governmental” political organizations is refashioned here into a disciplinary technique (Foucault 1990:140; Joseph 2012:35)—one that seeks to regulate dissent and discipline activists into proper revolutionary conduct by condemning outliers as politically extremist factions that threaten the wider interests of the independent student mass, thus implicitly consigning them to punitive police action.

32 These attempted strategies of governance demonstrate how the patriotic critique of the “unjust Indian state” buckled under pressure, and sought to discipline the students into a unified body, replicating the nationalist suppression of “anti-India” stances to produce a unified nation—ironic for a rally that had been organized precisely to protest the stifling of “anti-national” dissent. This irony was not lost on other activists. One activist, Agniswar, wrote: “No such slogan was raised at the rally that would need to be disavowed… I personally think that the highest court committed an extreme injustice in hanging Afzal Guru… And are the hopes of Kashmiri people for self-determination unjustified? … (It is) political poverty … to not take a stand against the relentless campaign to taint the right to self-determination of a people as ‘separatist.’”17

33 Within this fractured political terrain, alliances became a fraught question for trans activists. Like Agniswar, Raina questioned the dissociation from “extremist” viewpoints. At an event at Jadavpur, she said, “if we don’t stand by the accused when an arrest warrant is issued based on the Kashmir issue, then people in the opposition are acting like the state themselves!”

34 In response to her critique of the statist imbrications of independent student politics, some student activists accused Raina of siding with Naxalite (Maoist) political groups,

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as opposed to “bannerless” collectives: “Some of them said that I was propagating a Naxalite ideology … which would result in fragmentation of the country… sometimes I heard I was an anti-nationalist … but we were ourselves often branded Naxalites when we spoke at street-corner protests … should we not stand with people labeled Naxalite? … at one point, one of the senior male leaders became angry and screamed at me!” She remarked, “they call themselves the non-party left … but some of them belong to a stereotypical authoritarian leftist structure only!”

35 However, other student activists were more open to dialogue on the issue. In July 2016, Ardhek Akash organized an event supporting Kashmiri self-determination titled “Ravaged Kashmir: Aspiring for One Sky,” where trans activists were invited to speak alongside speakers from Kashmir. Significantly, Ardhek Akash members utilized repertoires of protest drawn from the Hok Kolorob movement that had also been evoked in the February rally, including similar slogans. For instance, one poster made for the event, bearing the message “andoloner bohu shoor/ Kashmir theke Manipur” (the movement has many tunes/ from Kashmir to Manipur), referenced the Hok Kolorob slogan “lathir mukhe gaaner shoor/ dekhiye dilo Jadavpur” (Singing in the face of batons/ is the way shown by Jadavpur). Such crossovers demonstrated how authoritarian tendencies could not contain conversations and flows of ideas across ideological divides, pointing the way to a more fluidly structured left in which trans activists continued to participate.

Commoditization and sex work

36 Another significant ideological fault line concerned the critique of the commoditization of feminized bodies in professions like sex work and the entertainment industry. This raises a question central to the conjuncture of leftist, feminist and trans activism, regarding how an intersectional critique of and capitalism should be articulated. Feminists in India, like their counterparts transnationally, hold a variety of positions on sex work. They include abolitionists who see the sexual marketplace as inevitably objectifying and enslaving women who must be “rescued” or “rehabilitated,” feminists who advocate for sex workers rights considering them the same as those of other laborers, and “middle ground” feminists who support sex workers’ rights, but seek to ultimately dismantle the sexual marketplace (Kotiswaran 2011:31–35). Kolkata is a rich site for such debates—it has a globally known sex workers’ collective (Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee), as well as various anti-trafficking groups that express a range of positions on sex work, from the “middle ground” to abolitionism.

37 Within this contested terrain, Ardhek Akash and related leftist-feminist student collectives have avoided taking a strong public stance on sex work per se. However, they have organized several protests targeting the commoditization of women’s bodies in the capitalist marketplace in more general terms, drawing from both Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism and the radical feminist critique of female objectification. For instance, a street event organized by Ardhek Akash in May 2013, titled “Nari Ponyayon—Dhorshon” (“Women’s Commoditization and Rape”), sought to draw connections between rape culture and the commoditization of women’s bodies in films, advertisements and pornography (Indialatest 2013). The event evidenced varying political approaches, manifested in a rich plethora of (largely Bengali) posters displayed on the pavement or carried by speakers. Some posters critiqued the

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sociocultural reception of female bodies and distinguished agential self-expression from objectification: for example, “if you see a woman’s cleavage or curves, do not think of her as an object for consumption!” Another English-language poster cited Marilyn Monroe: “I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.” But other posters critiqued any sexualized display of women’s bodies as wholly symptomatic of market-driven commoditization, ignoring the intentions or agency of women who perform such display labor: “stop the vulgar commoditization (asleel ponyayon) of women’s bodies in films and advertisements!”; “to sell leather goods one need not sell women as flesh!”; “women are not objects for your sexual pleasure, discard the culture of sexualization!” At a subsequent protest in June 2013, organized by a broad coalition of activists, some participants wanted to burn newspapers carrying advertisements displaying women’s bodies.

38 While not addressing sex work directly, these positions parallel radical feminist critiques of sex work and may similarly lapse into a unidimensional understanding of power. The entry of women into sexual marketplaces can only be perceived as the “reduction of women’s bodies to a singular, objectified image and function” and sexual labor is conflated with “the summary objectification of women” (Shah 2012:28). Such stances also echo conservative moralism; a censorious critique of the “vulgar” (asleel) sale of feminized bodies in capitalist marketplaces tends to erase the complex interplay between objectification and agency, thus erasing the labor-based struggles waged by sex workers and entertainment workers (Kotiswaran 2011:31).

39 At the aforementioned event of May 2013, the potential lapse into moralism was reflected in posters that critiqued female entertainers for fostering commoditization. Referencing a Bollywood song sung by the playback artist Shreya Ghoshal, and featuring actress Kareena Kapoor, one poster read: “when they sing ‘I am a tandoori chicken,’ don’t Shreya or Kareena have any sense of self-respect?” The emphasis on a proper sense of “self-respect” (atmoshomman) based on bodily sovereignty, which precludes erotic pleasure in objectification, was further elaborated in a subsequent online discussion on Facebook among activists associated with Ardhek Akash. One activist opined: “if a woman sacrifices her own selfhood (satta) … then the fault of those who use that is merely an excuse.” Another activist argued that such an approach to the female body is the result of social conditioning, rather than the actions of actors or models per se: “I learn from my childhood, from the television, from magazines … that if I cannot have a ‘zero figure’ then I’m bad … through such education … I am … making myself into a commodity.”18

40 This conversation reflects more general attitudes to sexual labor that run through both party-affiliated and “independent” student groups. Sumi noted, “in Coochbehar, I heard student activists from the SFI (the student wing of the CPI(M)) say, why would anyone do sex work? There are so many professions, why choose to do that?” In Kolkata, Raina narrated a similar conversation with two independent leftist activists: “they saw sex workers only as victims … they asked me, why don’t they want to do any other work? … what will happen to them in their old age, they’ll have no recourse but to beg!”

41 Thus, any form of willing sexualized labor is rendered illegible. Women engaged in this type of labor are understood either as victims duped into sacrificing their selfhood, or as perverse agents who make unintelligible choices and lack “self-respect.” Here, disciplinary and regulatory forms of power, as seen above in the attempt to censure

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“anti-India” slogans, give way to a governmental technology that works through the evocation of a sense of sovereignty and freedom proper to the self, seeking to produce free agents rather than docile bodies (Joseph 2012:35; Foucault 2007:353). Proper feminine conduct must be achieved by cultivating a proper sense of agency and self- regard resistant to social conditioning that transforms it into commoditized femininity. The consequent reduction of sex workers to either victims or perverse agents means that they cannot be fully envisaged as revolutionaries and equal participants in movements.

42 In this context, community members belonging to the trans collective Samabhabona, who performed sex work among other professions, felt uncomfortable with a blanket anti-commoditization rhetoric. Raina said, “when I saw posters against women’s commoditization, many questions began to occur to me … wasn’t there commodification in other trades? … when they would say anti-sex work stuff, I would feel afraid, because I have done sex work myself.”

43 However, Raina’s discomfort with critiques of commoditization did not crystallize into a binary opposition between governmental forms of leftist/feminist activism and trans sex workers. Stances against commoditization are complicated by internal ambiguities within leftist student discourses around questions of feminine self-expression. The freedom to dress and express oneself as one pleases exists in tension with the idea of loss of selfhood through commoditization. Slogans like “fix your mentality before you ask me to fix my clothes” had become popular during the anti-rape protests of 2012–13, in which Ardhek Akash members also participated. Samabhabona members took advantage of these ideological openings to advance a dialogue on sex work. In a meeting at Jadavpur in June 2013, Raina said, “we live within a capitalist society where all kinds of labor are commoditized … not just women’s bodies but even men’s bodies are commoditized in ads … a woman could button down her shirt just because she is feeling warm … but even then, we tend to think her cleavage is being displayed.”

44 Significantly, Raina’s argument drew upon two discursive elements from leftist- feminist student activism—firstly, the general Marxist critique of commoditization as endemic to all forms of labor under capitalism, and secondly, the right to self- expression in opposition to dehumanizing forms of objectification. Indeed, her statement closely echoed the Ardhek Akash poster, “if you see a woman’s cleavage or curves, do not think of her as an object for consumption!” Combining these two elements, she questioned the exceptional status of sex work and positioned it as just another form of commoditized labor. She explained this exceptionalism by referencing how women are reduced to their embodiment in a way that men—even those who perform sexualized labor—are not. In subsequent conversations with Ardhek Akash members, Raina attempted to redefine sex work as a particular “kind of service” rather than a sacrifice of selfhood. She tried to relocate the problem in the objectifying way in which women’s sexual labor was reduced to the loss of selfhood in its entirety, rather than perceived as a specific embodied service like other forms of commoditized labor.

45 Raina’s critiques encountered a mixed reception: “the younger women listened empathetically … during protests, they also mixed freely with kothi sex workers, and heard them talk and joke about their work.” However, some of the senior male activists had more fixed ideological stances: for instance, the idea that sex work only existed under capitalism and would disappear under . Raina countered that even under socialism, sex could be provided by professionals as a non-transactional service.

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In response, “they provided more theories,” and no consensus was reached. Thus, there was again a tension between recalcitrant leftist ideological positions and an internal discursive flexibility that allowed Raina to redeploy student activist rhetoric to create a more complex negotiation with sex work.

In conclusion: scale versus sustainability

46 Given these uneven interactions with the “independent” left, replete with both tensions and solidarities, trans collectives have strategically streamlined collaborations with non-LGBT leftist student groups, often preferring to work with younger women activists from collectives like Ardhek Akash, especially those from working class or Dalit backgrounds.19 In such cases, achieving perfect ideological alignment may be less important than building upon broader forms of affective and tactical solidarity. For example, though student activists may not explicitly support trans sex workers’ rights, Raina noted that they were often the first to mobilize against cases of violence against poor or Dalit trans persons, including sex workers: “they mobilize much more quickly than LGBT organizations in some cases!” Indeed, non-funded trans-kothi-hijra community organizations outside Kolkata, like Nadia Ranaghat Sampriti Society, have relied on Ardhek Akash members to respond rapidly to instances of violence in the absence of funded infrastructure or resources.

47 While such refigured alliances show how collaborations with student activist spaces have sustained themselves despite hurdles, the very need to strategize alliances also means that the liberatory promise of mass movement building, which seemed apparent in the heady initial days of collaboration, becomes qualified and limited. As alliances deepen, fragmentations and hierarchies become more apparent; these may be overcome at smaller scales, but not to the extent of a wholesale structural transformation of leftist spaces that would be necessary to reinvigorate their revolutionary promise. Transformative alliances among non-LGBT leftists and trans- kothi-hijra activists become more localized, based on individual friendships and solidarities. Such alliances may “scale up” to reach a critical mass around specific issues such as IPC 377 (Indian Penal Code 1860) or specific cases of sexual assault, but mass solidarity remains issue-based rather than a long-term process. LGBT issues drift in and out of the left focus in a shifting terrain of political expediency. Thus, there seems to be a tension between the scale and sustainability of collaborations—we see either sustained micro-level alliances or scaled-up coalitions in the short term, but we do not find a long-term macro-level solidarity between student and trans/queer groups, and this limits the transformative potential of these solidarities.

48 To conclude, the conjunctures between trans-kothi-hijra and student collectives raise uncertain and unexpected political possibilities. By creating a bridge between students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds and working class and Dalit trans, kothi and hijra communities, these collaborations disrupt the leadership of metropolitan elites within both LGBT and left movements. These alliances evidence a non-linear trajectory of political tendencies that challenges a teleological idea of progress. Student collectives like Ardhek Akash veer between quasi-moralistic critiques of sex work and the defense of gender and sexual self-determination. Independent left spaces nurture Dalit women working intersectionally on trans issues, and yet retain male leaders with some degree of hegemonic control. The discursive terrain divagates towards radical

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feminism, Marxism, patriotism, liberal rights-based frameworks and intersectional critique—and all of these tendencies co-exist and feed off each other. This is an assemblage that illustrates the impossibility of adopting a purist stance on political praxis, and the irreducibility of transformative politics to any form of single-axis identitarian mobilization, while reiterating the significance of the social location of the participants in processes of political organizing.

“End persecution and discrimination based on gender, sexuality, behavior and expression” and “We want to live with human rights”: Multilingual banners at a street protest against violence against trans persons, organized by Ardhek Akash and Samabhabona, Kolkata, January 2015. All pictures were taken by Aniruddha Dutta in West Bengal, India, between 2015 and 2016.

“No more judging gender by the body, consider the gender of the mind”: An activist associated with Ardhek Akash makes a poster at Shantipur, West Bengal, January 2016. All pictures were taken by Aniruddha Dutta in West Bengal, India, between 2015 and 2016.

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NOTES

1. My translation from the original Bengali. As this article cites both Bengali and English textual material, I use endnotes to specify which textual excerpts are translated. All translations are from Bengali. 2. Given the complex spectrum of subject positions encompassed by these communities, I treat kothi, hijra, transgender and queer as broadly overlapping categories for the purposes of this article; in practice, these terms may be more distinct or continuous depending on context. 3. For example, the JU Queer Collective of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, was established in 2018. 4. I have used their real names with permission, given that they are public activist figures. 5. All direct quotes are taken from field notes and translated from the original Bengali. 6. These posters are collated from several separate events to offer an overall sense of their political repertoire; all translations mine. 7. My translation. 8. Cited from Ardhek Akash’s Facebook group. Retrieved November 12, 2017 (https:// www.facebook.com/groups/116881118346714/). 9. Cited from Ardhek Akash’s Facebook group. Retrieved November 12, 2017 (https:// www.facebook.com/groups/116881118346714/). 10. My translation. 11. On the contentious relation between leftist and Dalit politics in West Bengal, see Bargi (2014). 12. Translated from an untitled public post on Facebook. Retrieved November 12, 2017 (https:// www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1056460214378046&set=a. 163297573694319.37186.100000422336698&type=3&permPage=1). 13. My translation. 14. Translated from an untitled public post on Facebook. Retrieved on November 12, 2017 (https://www.facebook.com/aritra.majumder.96/posts/741336752669061?pnref=story). 15. My translation. 16. Cited from an untitled private post on Facebook; name and hyperlink withheld to protect confidentiality. 17. Translated from an untitled public post on Facebook. Retrieved November 12, 2017 (https:// www.facebook.com/agnichakra/posts/547697435392441?pnref=story). 18. Translated from an untitled private post on Facebook; names and hyperlink withheld to protect confidentiality. 19. Although this issue lies beyond the purview of this article, the emergence of LGBT student groups in West Bengal, like the JU Queer Collective (established in 2018), might forge new coalitions between student and non-student activists but also potentially make them more narrowly LGBT-specific.

ABSTRACTS

This article charts emergent solidarities and tensions between transgender activism and leftist and feminist students’ collectives in and around the city of Kolkata in West Bengal, India. The article examines how these alliances disrupt hegemonic forms of leftist and LGBT activism, challenging both the primacy of class in leftist political organizing and single-axis identity politics based solely on gender or sexuality. The article further argues that these coalitional

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formations manifest a tension between the subversion of established political structures and the persistent reinscription of gender/class/caste hierarchies within activist spaces, corresponding to governmental forms of activism that seek to delimit proper conduct for participants. However, these tendencies cannot prevent unpredictable deployments of political discourses and strategies that disrupt hierarchies and enable convergences or collaborations across ideological or organizational divides. Thus, these unstable coalitions raise uncertain and unexpected possibilities that disrupt linear or teleological trajectories of political mobilization.

INDEX

Keywords: student politics, leftist movements, India, transgender, kothi, LGBT

AUTHOR

ANIRUDDHA DUTTA GWSS, University of Iowa

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Translucent Citizenship: Khwaja Sira Activism and Alternatives to Dissent in Pakistan

Faris A. Khan

1 In recent years, the term “khwaja sira” has been appropriated and promoted by non- normatively gendered Pakistanis as a respectable alternative to the general public’s pejorative use of the term “hijra.” These attempts to empower and change the public image of gender-ambiguous subjects both coincided with and was spurred on by the Pakistani Supreme Court’s decision to grant rights and privileges to khwaja siras in a series of rulings passed between 2009 and 2012.1 While community activists were primarily engaged in public advocacy, the state sought to regulate and “mainstream” khwaja siras through legal and policy developments, and to this end, the judiciary aimed to devise a system to manage this segment of the population.

2 In this paper, I draw on and develop James Scott’s theorizing on indigenous resistance to examine the practices of khwaja sira activists who sidestepped the trappings of anti- nationalism and dissent by anticipating potential pitfalls and avoiding any possibility of being accused of anti-establishment and anti-Islamic activities. Instead, they employed forms of identification and refusal that not only impeded potential allegations of anti- nationalism but also complicated notions of dissent through engagement in modes of participation and resistance that privileged ambiguity over certitude. Second, I argue that underpinning such a politics is the khwaja sira desire for partial incorporation into the state’s ambit, as citizens that are at once legally and culturally recognized and accepted, and also relatively self-governing and only partially intelligible to the state and society. It is this condition of translucency that offered khwaja siras the ability to maintain a degree of autonomy from state control and to evade certain forms of social and political persecution.

3 Drawing on the ethnographic research I conducted among both activist and non- activist khwaja siras in Karachi between 2011 and 2013, I suggest that many khwaja siras practiced and desired what I refer to as a form of translucent citizenship—a mode of belonging which involves not only demands for equal rights from the state but also the

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right to remain hazy to broader publics. This condition of ambiguity allows newly recognized constituents to remain somewhat elusive, and thereby retain partial sovereignty of the kind that was enjoyed prior to state appropriation and attempts at social and economic assimilation. It can also serve as an escape from a range of oppressive structures and relations, including potential allegations of immorality and political and religious dissent. The translucent citizen views the state with skepticism, on the one hand regarding it as a paternalistic guardian and a gracious rights-granting benefactor, but on the other hand approaching it with trepidation as an overbearing and coercive authoritarian entity. Accordingly, these peripheral groups aspire to occupy a space that is neither located squarely within the state and society’s core nor outside of it. Put differently, translucent citizenship combines the best of both worlds; it aims to reach empowerment through political participation, state recognition and cultural acceptance, while seeking to sustain the many freedoms encapsulated within indigenous patterns of identification and organization, through modes of resistance to fully being “seen” by the state and society.

4 To clarify, the key question underlying this article relates to khwaja sira activism and its implications for khwaja siras’ intended positioning vis-à-vis the society and the nation. Specifically, what forms of deliberate and discursive practices did khwaja sira leaders engage in and what do their strategies reveal about the kind of relationship activists desired and enacted as citizens of the state and society? My use of “citizen” throughout this article should not be understood exclusively in state and juridical terms merely to reference an individual with a collection of rights and obligations. Rather, drawing from Bryan Turner (1993), I view citizenship “as a set of [characteristics and] practices (juridical, political, economic and cultural)” (p. 2) that define people as recognized members of a community and that have consequences for the flow of resources to them. Citizenship then broadly references diverse modes of recognition, membership, and belonging within a variety of collectives, which may include, but are not limited to, national, religious and sociocultural formations.

5 My argument in this essay builds upon the scant scholarship on gender non-conformity in Pakistan to further an understanding of contemporary khwaja sira politics and the forms of inclusion for which many aspire within state/society space. Much of the existing literature draws on Gayatri Reddy’s (2005) ethnographic work on hijras in Hyderabad, India, in which the anthropologist disturbs conceptions of alternative genders as fixed categories by examining the many axes of identity and demonstrating their multiplicity. While Reddy explains the plurality and mutability of gender identity as experienced and performed by hijras, scholars studying the situation in Pakistan have focused on the diversity and contradictions in the colonial and postcolonial state’s interpretation of gender non-normativity. Jeffrey Redding (2015), for instance, provides a legal analysis of the events surrounding the 2009 Supreme Court case to demonstrate that conceptions of gender and identity are “fluid and in flux in contemporary Pakistan” (p. 258–59). Similarly, Shahnaz Khan has argued that the colonial-era disagreements pertaining to the regulation of sex/gender variance (2016b:27) and the conflation of distinct categories of sex/gender non-normative people (2016a:226) produced contradictions that not only are alive and well in present-day Pakistan but also enable “trans* individuals to creatively negotiate and expand the spaces they inhabit” (2016b:11). Both authors’ arguments parallel my claim that dominant understandings regarding khwaja siras (and gender non-conforming people more broadly) are multiple and lacking in clarity. Advancing this line of thought, I argue that

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this state of indeterminacy is partly responsible for producing khwaja siras as translucent subjects, nebulous and indistinct to the wider society and the state, a condition that prominent khwaja sira activists wished to preserve even as they demanded rights and recognition. This condition of in-betweenness is echoed in Claire Pamment’s (2010) discussion on the exclusion of Pakistani hijras, who according to the author, are not completely sequestered from the social order despite being peripheral subjects, partly because they challenge their social and legal marginalization by performatively subverting “normative sociopolitical codes” (p. 31–32). While the hijras in Pamment’s text appear as liminal figures striving to carve out a “third space” for themselves through both political engagement and a critique of the hegemonic power structure, I view khwaja siras as subjects, betwixt and between state/society space who not only demand citizenship rights—including the right to political participation—but also indicate a desire for privacy and obscurity.

Partial and ambiguous

6 In Pakistan’s deeply hierarchical cultural context, social, economic and political marginalization are produced through numerous vectors of difference, including, but not limited to, class, religion and sect, gender and sexuality, and caste and ethnicity. Despite the enduring debate about its proper role in national and civic domains, Islam is a pervasive presence in the everyday life of the country’s Muslim majority population. Within this religious context, it is not unusual for non-Muslims (e.g., Christians and Hindus), those declared non-Muslim by the state (i.e., Ahmedis), and those who diverge from dominant Islam (i.e., non-Sunni Muslim communities and gender and sexual minorities) to be stigmatized, disenfranchised and subjected to violence. Cases of blasphemy, for instance, have taken center stage in recent years with celebrities and ordinary folk alike being accused of and punished for blasphemous speech by both the society and state.2 Further, Pakistan’s male-dominated, patriarchal social structure is largely characterized by gender segregation, patrilineality and the centrality of the institution of marriage. Commonplace within this gender framework is the control of women, the devaluation of feminine traits, and prejudice and violence against those who deviate from the cultural norms of morality. For instance, there are numerous reported cases of women being physically assaulted, marred with acid, or raped as retribution for individual or familial transgressions (Jamal 2006; Khan 2012; Toor 2007). Persecution also occurs along communal lines between members of ethnically and linguistically distinct communities, many of whom either experienced violent secession during partition or have been left scarred by the division of territory since the time of Pakistan’s independence (Das 2001). Some of these groups continue to air grievances on account of the unfair allocation of state resources (Rahman 1996). These inequities have routinely sparked not only anti-Pakistan sentiment but also a number of separatist movements among the Pashtuns, Balochis, Bengalis, Muhajirs, and Sindhis among others (Rahman 1996).3

7 In harsh sociocultural and political environments, where symbolic and material resources are unequally distributed and minorities are routinely victimized, the oppressed are not likely to silently spectate and succumb to their fate. Instead, they are known to exercise agency with the aim of developing strategies that either directly confront oppression and seek liberation, or indirectly combat injustices, in order to

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derive a degree of power as a means of coping and surviving. The anthropological and sociological studies that describe the significance of self-protection, survival and strategic practice for vulnerable groups of people (Gal 1991; Gaudio 2009; Goffman 1963, 1969; Levine 1988; Scott 1990) are of particular relevance to an understanding of how the disenfranchised interact with power holders under repressive conditions. Donald Levine (1988), for instance, states that non-elite speakers use ambiguous expressions to conceal esoteric knowledge for the sake of privacy or as a defensive strategy against intrusive encroachments and exploitation (p. 32–33). The stakes are raised even higher for deeply stigmatized marginalized populations that subsist in religiously and culturally conservative societies. In his study of the “yan daudu” (men who act like women) in northern Nigeria, Rudolf Gaudio (2009) demonstrates that his research collaborators navigated the dangers of everyday life by employing linguistic and bodily performances (e.g., innuendo and indirect speech) in order to hide meanings and promote secrecy regarding taboo subjects in an environment of growing religious intolerance.

8 Building upon these studies, this article integrates two distinct yet interrelated strands of James Scott’s theorizing on indigenous resistance. The first strand of theorizing that is relevant to my analysis of khwaja sira activism is Scott’s concept of infrapolitics or the disguised forms of everyday defiance and dissent in which subordinate groups participate.4 Scott (1990) argues that oppressed groups engage in a range of opaque acts such as rumor, linguistic tricks, euphemisms, and anonymity, because “their vulnerability has rarely permitted them the luxury of direct confrontation” (p. 136–37). Likewise, in the prevailing sociopolitical atmosphere in Pakistan, where even the most unlikely acts can be framed as unruly, dissident or sacrilegious, engaging in subtle and ambiguous acts of dissent is always important for marginalized populations. In this light, khwaja sira activist practices can be likened to the not so easily discernable acts of resistance that serve as weapons for the weak in the daily struggle against injustices. The examples that I draw upon in this paper illuminate how community activists engaged in practices of ambiguity whereby they concealed knowledge and evaded disclosure of culturally and religiously sensitive issues, particularly on the topic of khwaja sira sexuality and corporality. 5 In so doing, they managed to maintain uncertainties about khwaja siras and resist being fully known, narrowly classified, and further suppressed by the society and state. This praxis also enabled khwaja siras to avoid potential allegations of involvement in anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam activities, thereby functioning as a crucial medium of individual and communal self-preservation.

9 The second perspective relevant to my analysis of the khwaja sira-state/society relationship is the Scottian (2009) analysis of the “encounter between expansionary states and self-governing peoples” (p. 3). Scott describes how historically, modern states attempted to incorporate non-state peoples, and how many of these peripheral groups deliberately chose to live in regions outside the state’s reach, working persistently to thwart its assimilationist tendencies (p. 4–8). Further, Scott suggests that key elements of the cultural beliefs and practices of stateless peoples (e.g., their itinerant lifestyle, “their flexible social structure, their religious heterodoxy … and even their nonliterate, oral cultures” [p. 9]) have enabled them to evade state capture. Although Scott’s historiography focuses on the Zomia of the uplands of Southeast Asia and largely examines relations with the state, it provides a useful framework to understand the encounters between the khwaja sira and both the Pakistani state and mainstream society. Until recently, khwaja siras had been largely ignored by the federal

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and provincial governments, and it was not until the Supreme Court (SC) proceedings of 2009, that the state finally showed a more sustained interest in the lives of this marginalized population.6 Recent attempts to incorporate khwaja siras into the ambit of the society and the state have been met with varying degrees of both enthusiasm and reluctance from khwaja sira communities. While I do not view khwaja siras as non-state peoples given their expressed desire for integration into national and social spheres, I see many commonalities between them and Scott’s Zomia, particularly the impulse to avoid state and societal control. Moreover, not unlike the Zomia, khwaja sira subject positions and sociality are characterized by hybrid identities, structural malleability and geographic mobility, crucial cultural features that have accorded them a modicum of independence from the clutches of the state and its citizens. I suggest that khwaja siras may be thought of as occupying intermediate zones that function as discursive domains of cultural refuge within national territory. Although these semi-autonomous islands fall within the state’s jurisdiction and are not impervious to normative sociocultural influences, they are guided by their own internal structure and logic, one that engages with but also resists complete cultural and political integration. From there khwaja siras strive to attain legal rights and privileges while remaining somewhat obscure for the body politic and also partially out of reach of the state’s regulatory apparatus. This particular penchant for evasion—or what I have termed translucent citizenship—is not shared equally by all khwaja siras, and is less prevalent among a newer generation of middle-class, English-speaking activists who prefer to identify as “trans” or “transgender.” But even many of these younger activists tread carefully, often taking a lead from more experienced khwaja sira leaders in their increasingly risky but creative attempts to test the limits of society and the law.

10 Grounded in the techniques of ambiguity and evasion, the concept of translucent citizenship refers to a citizen-state/society relationship that is intended to generate incertitude regarding certain aspects of the lives of khwaja siras (e.g., their corporeal traits, sexual practices, economic activities), which in turn provides them with some semblance of autonomy. Along with safeguarding their freedoms, it is meant to offer some protection against repressive sociopolitical institutions and relations, such as the prospect of being framed as anti-national and anti-religious. In sum, translucent citizenship operates as a mechanism for sustaining partial sovereignty for peripheral peoples from complete state appropriation and social assimilation. This type of national and cultural belonging not only queers the understanding and performance of dissent but also acts as a shield against the threat of sociopolitical intimidation and violence.

11 While Scott’s perspectives shed light on the resistance dimension of khwaja sira activism, social movement theory elucidates modes of participation and recognition. Together, the two facets provide a more comprehensive understanding, a fuller picture, as it were, of the concept of translucent citizenship. The notion of translucency intersects with and further develops perspectives on identity deployment, relating in particular to Mary Bernstein (2005) and Charles Tilly’s (2002) theorizing on the distinction between externally projected identities that are strategically appropriated, and internally experienced ones, invoked in everyday practice. Researchers are advised not to take at face value the public claims about identity made by social movements even if they reflect a coherent social location that is understandable to intended audiences (Stephen 2001:54). While such claims may be a means to achieve movement objectives (Bernstein 1997), they may not be representative of everyday life (Bernstein

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2005:67). Likewise, the adoption of the category “khwaja sira” may be viewed as the strategic mobilization of a cognitive, symbolic and organizational resource that—in projecting sameness to outsiders—rendered movement constituents translucent by effacing the diversity and fluidity of the subject positions within khwaja sira communities. Activists deployed this culturally rooted term to achieve movement goals (e.g., attaining state-sponsored rights and protections, gaining cultural legitimacy and social respect) without intending to promote a coherent understanding of some of the critical identifying characteristics of target beneficiaries. Hence, what Bernstein refers to as “detached identities” (ibid.) may serve not merely as representational tools for gaining recognition from and inclusion into governmental and social institutions, but also as a mechanism to remain partially unknown and therefore, semi-autonomous from the same rights- and membership-granting bodies. A translucent citizen enacts a citizenship model that strikes a balance between wanting right of access to state/social institutions/services and maintaining a cautious distance from the oppressive state/ society gaze. Through this lens, translucency is not merely a form of identity politics that involves representing social movement constituents to mainstream publics, but rather a performance of citizenship that combines the desire for specific forms of political recognition and social acceptance with that of misrecognition and refusal.

12 To summarize, translucency is a way of “being” and of “being seen” partially, inaccurately and/or in a manner that evokes uncertainties and promotes invisibility with respect to certain bodily and behavioral characteristics. It is a way of projecting oneself and of being understood publicly as a minority in a majoritarian world, one that is structured according to dominant religious, legal and cultural perspectives, particularly those regarding corporeality, sexuality and morality. Hence, as a concept, translucency is both a discursive condition and a deliberate strategy. Whether viewed as a state or a performance, however, translucency is closely associated with and produced by diverse forms of ambiguity, be it vague and unclear language (e.g., the use of multivalent identity terms such as “khwaja sira”), or actions that are furtively aimed at maintaining the myths and obscurities linked with a particular group (e.g., the uncertainties linked with the bodies and sexualities of gender non-conforming people). The aforementioned examples will be closely examined and analyzed in the succeeding sections of this article.

Research methods

13 The data and analysis presented in this article are based on the ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2011 and 2013 on the culture and activism of khwaja siras in my former hometown, Karachi. Over a period of 15 months, I examined several khwaja sira households, participated in the resident’s everyday activities and special events (e.g., rituals of celebration and mourning), and conducted interviews with khwaja siras spread across the city’s slums. In addition, I conducted participant observation at the Gender Solidarity Society or GSS (pseudonym), a community-based khwaja sira activist organization consisting of a core group of 9 members.7 I also spent 3 months in Lahore where I studied a khwaja sira organization made up of 11 core members. 8 I observed both organizations’ media advocacy, attended and helped in organizing protests and meetings, travelled to different parts of the country with my activist friends, and met with prominent community leaders from several Pakistani cities.9 Although my

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fieldwork was based in large metropolises, such as Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, it incorporates the perspectives of khwaja siras from rural areas. A large number of my research participants were either seasonal rural-urban migrants or long-term city residents who had maintained strong ties with their natal villages. The ethnographic material discussed in this article, however, reflects events that occurred in urban settings despite involving individuals who—like the Zomia—were periodically on the move.

14 In the sections that follow, I provide a brief history of medieval and contemporary khwaja siras, highlighting—where relevant—traits that reflect their location within state/society space. This is followed by an ethnographic account of how my activist friends framed their constituents in vague terms, and how their elusive representation sheltered khwaja siras from the threat of sociopolitical repression and violence. In the final section, I recount an encounter between community activists and the state in which khwaja siras perpetuated illegibility regarding their sex/gender through subtle acts of refusal that further exemplify their orientation as translucent citizens.

A brief history of khwaja sira

15 The term khwaja sira (or khwajasarai) is rooted in medieval north India where it was used as an appellation for castrated slaves who served as attendants in the zenana (female quarters) of elite homes (Hinchy 2014:277–78, 2015:381–85). Khwaja siras were also appointed as harem guards, courtiers, administrators and military generals in the Mughal Empire and in regional Indian states (Manucci 1906:350; Lal 2005:195–96; Chatterjee 2000:64–96). Khwaja siras appear in the writings of Indian intelligentsia (e.g., Faiz Bakhsh 1889; Khan 1870) and European travelers until their value began to wane under the collapse of Mughal rule (Hambly 1974:130; Kidwai 1985:93). What became of them thereafter is uncertain, though K. S. Lal (1994) has claimed that many turned into bhands (traditional folk entertainers) and hijras, a category of South Asian sex, gender and sexual minorities, variously described as third gender, neither male nor female, intersex, “eunuchs,” etc.10

16 Literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicates that khwaja siras were the contemporaries of hijras (Hinchy 2014:278). The two groups both overlapped with and diverged from one another in important ways. For instance, khwaja siras had a social role distinct from that of hijras in that they were male-identified and had a considerably higher social status despite being slaves (Hinchy 2014:278). Moreover, khwaja siras had largely been forcibly castrated as children (Hinchy 2015) while hijras engaged in the voluntary practice of ritualized genital excision during adolescence or adulthood. The fact that not all hijras engaged in physical emasculation (Hinchy 2014 275) is what makes the dissimilarity between the two groups even more stark. Despite these differences, however, both were self-organized around the guru-chela (master-disciple) social order, an adoptive kinship system through which they formed alliances with one another (Hinchy 2014:278).

17 The term “khwaja sira” regained currency in the first decade of the twenty-first century when certain groups of gender variant and sexually non-normative Pakistanis began to appropriate and promote it, primarily as a corrective to the public’s pejorative use of the term hijra. At the time of my fieldwork, a growing number of hijras had begun to identify as “khwaja sira” in interactions with the general public and wished to be

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addressed as such by the masses. Although “hijra” remained widely in use in everyday parlance both within the social networks of my informants and society at large, “khwaja sira” quickly rose to prominence in public, activist, and state spheres, as well as in everyday speech among hijras in Karachi. The reemergence of “khwaja sira” coalesced around a series of historic rulings that were passed by the Pakistani SC between 2009 and 2012, in which third sex/gender citizens were granted a range of legal privileges and protections.11 Hence, community activists’ engagement in public advocacy was in tandem with the state’s endeavor to regulate and “mainstream” khwaja siras through judicial and policy developments.

18 Not unlike the differences between the khwaja siras and hijras of medieval times, the gender and sexual minorities who celebrated these rulings diverged from popular understandings of “khwaja sira,” particularly with respect to sex, gender and sexuality (I discuss this gap between public perception and the realities on the ground in the following section). However, despite these differences, the adoption of the royal epithet “khwaja sira” by contemporary hijras remained, by and large, unexamined and unquestioned. Perhaps a public discussion on this topic was in part deliberately evaded by all involved parties because it would have brought to the surface uncomfortable truths regarding slavery and forced child castration in Mughal India. The silence surrounding these obsolete practices reproduced a collective amnesia among Pakistanis, including present-day khwaja siras, who remained blissfully unaware of the hard-to-digest details about the lives of royal khwaja siras. This general ignorance, in turn, enabled the somewhat easy appropriation of the term “khwaja sira” by sex/gender and sexual minorities in present day Pakistan.

Contemporary khwaja siras

19 Although there was no firm consensus, “khwaja sira” was used by many of my informants as an umbrella category that comprised of a range of subject positions and corporeal states, including three main subcategories, namely, khunsa, zennana and hijra. Khunsa refers to intersex individuals or those born with a mixture of both male and female hormonal/chromosomal and/or genital features. However, intersex khwaja siras are few in number and they rarely join khwaja sira social networks. Zennanas are akva (the state of having male sexual organs), effeminate, and situationally switch between masculine and feminine sartorial comportment in order to manage the split between their biological and chosen families. In contrast, hijras are either akva or nirbaan (the state of having excised one’s male genitals), and while many tend to assume a somewhat permanent feminine appearance, their performances situationally alternate between the masculine and the feminine. Common to both zennanas and hijras is their defining characteristic, a ruh (soul) that is believed to engender femininity in terms of embodiment and performance while shaping their culturally ideal sexual preference for masculine men. Although they engage in a variety of sexual and romantic relationships with men, many khwaja siras marry women and have children. In sum, khwaja sira subject positions are heterogeneous, marked not by stability but by fluidity, fuzziness, and multiple border-crossings that are not easily apprehended by the state and society.

20 Contemporary khwaja siras are among Pakistan’s most marginalized citizens, and significant numbers of them come from lower class households, receive little or no

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formal education, and eke out a living primarily through begging, singing and dancing, blessing, and sex work.12 Hijras and zennanas have an ancient system of social organization premised on the guru-chela (master-disciple) relationship through which they ritually forge kinship alliances with one another. Informants reported joining these networks voluntarily between the ages of nine and eighteen, thereby enjoying membership benefits, such as cultural training, emotional and material support, and income earning opportunities.

21 Their social structure, corporeal and sexual practices, and economic activities make khwaja siras liminal figures, positioned precariously betwixt and between state/society and non-state/society space. Culturally and legally, their alternative system of social stratification is neither recognized nor fully understood, their body modification and sexual behaviors remain shrouded in silence and speculation, and the majority of their income generation activities (e.g., sex work, begging, dancing) are either illegal or borderline illegal in addition to being socially stigmatized. Many of these fears, uncertainties and myths surfaced during the 2009–2012 SC litigation.13 Combined, their flexible identities and embodiment and their relatively nebulous parallel system of organizing and earning, situate khwaja siras within intermediate or semi-autonomous zones within state/society spheres.

22 Societal perceptions about khwaja siras both diverge from and overlap with the lived realities of hijras and zennanas.14 The public’s diverse and conflicting understandings are interlayered either by a sense of uncertainty or complete ignorance about the corporeality and sexuality of gender-variant people. One of the most widely held cultural assumptions is that khwaja siras are intersex, which is considered religiously acceptable on account of being God-given. An oft-made claim is that those with functioning male genitals are achay khasay mard (normal men) or khwaja sira impersonators who don women’s clothing merely to make a living through begging and sex-work. For some Pakistanis, the notion that a khwaja sira can possess a feminine soul or experience gender dysphoria is either beyond the pale of imagination or a psychological impossibility. This is not to say that everyone is necessarily unaware or disapproving of non-intersex khwaja siras—and indeed, many people from a cross- section of society see them as “naturally” feminine and sexually non-normative. These varied perceptions and attitudes, often shaped by differences in class, ethnicity, religious belief, and personal experience, not only lead the Pakistani public to variously accept, condone or condemn khwaja siras, but also contribute to the curiosity, anxiety and confusion that surrounds them.15 Moreover, the discrepancies between how khwaja siras see themselves versus how they are perceived by mainstream society, allow this marginal population to remain somewhat mysterious and out of the state and society’s reach.

Naming and framing

23 As mentioned earlier, in the late-00s, hijra and zennana leaders began to revitalize the term “khwaja sira” for mainstream use. Over tea one evening at Shabnam’s single-room house in Akther Colony, three members of the Gender Solidarity Society (GSS)—a Karachi based organization run by and for khwaja siras where I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork—described the strategic significance of the term “khwaja sira.” Cigarette in hand, Payal, the GSS’s president, was seated comfortably across from me on a sofa

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chair, while her chela (disciple), Shabnam, exhausted after a long day of begging the streets, sat cross legged on a large area rug on the floor. Shazia had just dropped in for a quick visit on her way home from Cantonment Board Clifton where she supervised a group of government-appointed khwaja sira tax collectors. 16 All three wore women’s shalwar kameez (loose, pleated trousers worn over a long-shirt) and light makeup, with Shabnam’s face revealing a hint of stubble through her sweat-smeared foundation. I listened intently as they explained why the GSS had appropriated “khwaja sira” as an organizing category for activism. Their explanation below offers evidence of activists’ purposeful generation of ambiguity through a strategic identification practice. Shabnam: There are so many terms we could have chosen, but we chose “khwaja sira.” Payal: This is what we wanted people to call us. People would always use the word “hijra” for us, which I didn’t like... Shabnam: It’s not respectful. Payal: But khwaja sira is a word of respect. We use all kinds of words when we’re amongst ourselves. But when we’re being respectful or when we talk to television channels, then we only call ourselves “khwaja sira.” Shazia: Another reason for using “khwaja sira” is that it’s an word. “Hijra” is used in India, but in Pakistan, Muslims should say “khwaja sira.” Shabnam: In olden times, they used to keep khwaja siras to guard the palace. Payal: And we also have the special blessings of Khwaja Gharib-un-Nawaz of Ajmer. 17 This exchange illustrates that the “khwaja sira” identity category was meant to territorialize and nationalize its appropriators. As an ancient title, “khwaja sira” locates hijras and zennanas in national and cultural history, giving them a sedimented identity and an air of respectability. Such identities are typically primordial, employing “histories which go back well before the birth of those being identified” (Unnithan and Thin 1989:22). The adoption of “khwaja sira” was an act of medieval South Asian history along with the cultural assumptions associated with Mughal khwaja siras. As a regal epithet, “khwaja sira” conjures images of a glorious Muslim past, in which those who earned the title had important social functions. Appropriating this title of honor was an “atavistic response” (Nash 2005:15) or a form of “recovery work” (Puar 1998:411) through which activists have attempted to recast into the present the reverence accorded to their imperial namesakes. Further, “khwaja sira” was favored as a term of address because it denotes respect and is devoid of the derogatory connotations tethered to hijra in many contexts. Importantly, as Shazia suggests, it provides religious and cultural authentication by grounding non-normatively gendered people in the South Asian Muslim past, one they envision as distinct from Hindu traditions. Through this politics of insertion and respectability, the members of GSS claimed cultural and national belonging as Muslims and Pakistani citizens, and that a revered Sufi Saint (i.e., Khwaja Gharib-un-Nawaz) blessed them served as further validation of their favored status in Islam.

24 Moreover, “khwaja sira” is a strategically useful term precisely because, at the time of my research, it was vague and unclear both to members of the general public and to many khwaja siras themselves. 18 Despite its ties to an Islamic past, many people I encountered during fieldwork had either never heard it or knew little about it and its historical origins. Still others held an array of preconceived notions about its meaning, which created the opportunity for organizations, such as GSS, to educate audiences through public advocacy. As indicated earlier, one of the term’s dominant public

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understandings implicitly framed male-born gender variant individuals as intersex, that is, as those whose biological condition was determined by no fault or agency of their own. This cultural assumption benefited activist leaders who realized that arguments in favor of khwaja sira rights were more compelling when gender non- normativity was understood as a natural precondition rather than a choice. Hence, the title served to occlude somatic variations among male-born gender variant people (i.e., their akva/non-emasculated and nirbaan/emasculated states) and to perpetuate myths and ambiguities about them in mainstream society.19

25 In effect, the growing use of the moniker amounted to a collective strategic appropriation and maneuvering of language and history through which this marginalized segment of the population perpetuated uncertainties about khwaja siras, while simultaneously claiming respect, cultural and religious legitimacy, and social and national inclusion. The ambiguity ensconced within “khwaja sira” served to distort understandings of khwaja sira corporeality, and amplified the general public’s confusion associated with non-normative bodies. This suggests that promoting a clear understanding of a movement’s target beneficiaries is not always the goal of activist politics, particularly in sociopolitical environments where personal and communal security is paramount. In fact, as Donald Levine (1988) has argued, the very drive toward disambiguation—be it the desire to promote a clearer understanding of gender and sexuality or some other phenomena—through the utilization of rational and scientific processes, is an attribute of modernity. Khwaja sira politics then can be conceived of as an indigenous praxis that responds to the demands of modernity by invoking the fluidity that was characteristic of pre-modern times. Importantly, this nod to the past adapts to the present-day context, particularly to the regulatory needs of the state, to citizens’ desire for civil rights and national inclusion, and to the general loss of the ability to deal productively with ambiguity. What emerges then through such a politics is a translucent citizen-subject who is at once recognizable but not fully apprehended in public and legal arenas. In effect, this is a population that is presumed to be known even though in reality it is only partially and imprecisely understood.

Translucency and security

26 By selecting “khwaja sira,” a historically and culturally rooted term, as a means to become identifiable to the state and the national public, hijra and zennana activists managed to impede potential allegations of political and religious dissent. This became evident in the summer of 2011 when the US Embassy in hosted a pride event and subsequently issued a press release expressing its support for LGBT rights in Pakistan. I was in Karachi conducting fieldwork when the public announcement of the pride celebration, an “incitement to discourse” as Joseph Massad (2002:374) would call it, sparked anti-US and anti-gay rallies in several Pakistani cities.20 At the forefront of these protests where religious political parties, such as the Jamaat-e-Islami, who took to the streets to condemn the event as a form of “cultural terrorism” and “an assault on Pakistan’s Islamic culture” by the US (Express Tribune 2011). In the weeks following the protests, a religious organization by the name of “Muslim Youth Forum” (MYF) launched a campaign against homosexuality by displaying anti-gay signage in Lahore. A banner hung at a busy city intersection stated that, “There is no place for Gay and Lesbian in Islam.” Another poster recalling the US Embassy pride event demanded the

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immediate dismissal of the representatives of “Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies” (GLIFAA) and “Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network” (GLSEN) from Pakistan. In speaking to the press, a representative of MYF claimed that the two groups were actively recruiting individuals to join their organizations by offering them large sums of money (Kashif 2012). The fervor created by the pride celebration continued for several months before gradually dissipating, and what became of the reactionary campaigns thereafter is unclear.

27 The strategic significance and utility of “khwaja sira” as a safety measure for staving off prospective charges of dissent is evident in the differential way in which the US embassy’s actions affected various gender and sexual minority groups in the country. Fearing that this incident would spark violence and jeopardize the safety of queer people, members of local gay and lesbian groups organized a covert Skype meet-up to deliberate over how to respond to the controversy. The conference, which I was permitted to attend, brought together activists from three major cities, who—after careful consideration—decided in favor of laying low instead of engaging in the heated mass-mediated debates surrounding the events. In contrast, khwaja siras were either unaware of or unfazed by this entire controversy, and even the protesting groups did not seem to view the khwaja sira as a part of “LGBT.” This is not entirely surprising since, at the time of my research, “khwaja sira” did not always translate into “transgender” in mainstream discourse. Further, unlike LGBT, khwaja sira was not perceived as a foreign import but as an indigenous category with deep roots in South Asian Muslim history. The language used to identify minority groups has consequences for how they are perceived, and in appropriating khwaja sira, hijra and zennana activists unknowingly also managed to establish distance from the negative effects of politically charged English terms, such as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender. These terms were both understood in the popular imaginary and framed for the sake of political expediency as being solely associated with Euro-American queer subjectivities and rights activism. Unlike khwaja siras, the gender and sexual minorities who identified with globalized queer categories, risked their well-being and were condemned for colluding with imperialist forces believed to be working against Pakistani and Islamic interests.

28 Despite its limitations, “khwaja sira” emerged as a safe and respectable title that promoted the security of gender-ambiguous people by providing some protection against the harmful effects of social stigma and prospective accusations of dissent. Consequently, khwaja siras remained under the radar during this entire incident precisely due to their partial legibility, which enabled them to remain decoupled from LGBT. This was further aided by the longstanding presence and marginal acceptance of hijras in the public landscape—especially on the streets of small towns and urban metropolises—along with their nascent appearances in mainstream media since the late ‘00s. Khwaja siras then enjoyed a semi-autonomous space within state territory that afforded them a certain level of freedom and relief from oppressive structural forces.

29 Concurrently, “transgender” was mostly employed within activist contexts or in select forums (e.g., it was being used primarily for internal purposes within the GSS and sexual-health NGOs as the preferred English language equivalent for “khwaja sira” and “hijra”) rather than in public advocacy. In the years since my fieldwork, however, the terms “transgender” and “trans” have progressively become more salient identity categories that are now being used as synonymous to “khwaja sira” by a range of

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stakeholders who previously did not use the term, including an increasing number of hijras, zennanas, community activists and allies, state representatives, mainstream Urdu media, and members of the general public. “Transgender” received national attention and recognition with the tabling and eventual passing of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Acts in May 2018.

30 But if the acronym LGBT is so problematic in the Pakistani context, as I have argued, how then did “transgender”—the “T” in LGBT—gain salience and a positive valence in the country in recent years? Precisely how this change transpired merits a systematic, independent investigation of the activities that enabled community activists to detach “transgender” from “LGB” while simultaneously linking it with “khwaja sira” in the public imaginary.21 A sustained ethnographic examination of the mainstreaming of “transgender” is beyond the scope of this article given its focus on the specific period of my fieldwork (i.e., 2011–2013).22 However, my hypothesis is that the imbrication of “khwaja sira” with “transgender” is partly attributable to the vagueness and multiplicity in the meaning of “khwaja sira” as well as to the general sense of uncertainty associated with sex/gender non-normativity in Pakistan. Moreover, this transition is indicative of a shifting political economy of language that can be ascribed in large part to the ingenuity of younger, trans-identifying activists and allies who succeeded in gradually conflating the two terms, thereby moving “transgender” to the center of discussions around gender non-normativity in Pakistan. In the following section, I describe the activist interventions that influenced the judicial construction of “khwaja sira,” thereby enabling gender minorities to maintain a degree of autonomy in relation to the regulatory arms of the state. In addition, I draw preliminary connections between the activist-state encounter during the 2009–2012 SC litigation on “khwaja sira” and the 2017–2018 legislative measures on “transgender.”

Partially incorporated and semi-autonomous

31 In addition to employing forms of identification that circumvented potential charges of anti-nationalism, GSS activists foiled certain state-governance techniques through acts of resistance that complicate popular notions of dissent. The hallmark of modern statehood is the creation of a “legible people” (Scott 1998:65) who can be identified, recorded, and when necessary, scrutinized (Caplan and Torpey 2001:1). In the remainder of this paper, I describe how the Pakistani state attempted to conquer the ambiguity surrounding khwaja siras through mechanisms of governance and control, and how, in response, GSS activists strove to thwart the state’s efforts in order to preserve ambiguity and thereby resist complete incorporation into the state machinery. Their actions demonstrate that if legibility “is a condition of manipulation” (Scott 1998:183) spearheaded by the state, then illegibility may serve as a way of escaping political manipulation (Halberstam 2011:10).

32 When the judicial proceedings on khwaja sira rights commenced in early 2009, the SC instructed the provincial governments to perform a thorough census and registration of khwaja siras residing in each province. These initial orders, premised on an essentialist rubric of disability, reduced khwaja siras to persons with a “gender disorder in their bodies,” and required the government to adopt policies similar to those already in place for disabled persons. Then, in late 2009, the Court directed NADRA, the government’s citizen identification and registration wing, to regulate “this class of the

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society” by mandating “some medical tests based on hormones etc.” (Constitution Petition No. 43 2009). The purpose of this verification was to medically determine the eligibility of those registering for third sex/gender identification and to weed out potential imposters. The need to measure the hormone levels of registrants was seemingly posited on the notion that sex/gender non-normativity is induced by hormonal imbalances. These regulatory mechanisms were meant to lessen the ambiguity that surrounded khwaja siras, but importantly, they also highlight the state’s narrow understanding of its target beneficiaries.

33 The court’s order created turmoil within hijra and zennana networks, but eventually morphed into a robust reactionary measure. At first, activist leaders feared that an invasive medical examination would reveal stakeholders as “normal and emasculated males” and potentially result in the termination of the nascent rights and privileges being granted to them. Many others believed that the registration process would prompt punitive action against khwaja siras and force them into hiding. These concerns led khwaja sira groups to protest against the medical stipulation and to circumvent the measure under legal technicalities. In early 2010, the GSS held a protest outside the Karachi Press Club and submitted a petition to the Sindh High Court to express its rejection of the sex/gender verification test. When I met her a year later, the GSS’s president, Payal, informed me that her organization, in consultation with women’s rights activists, had argued that the medical requirement was discriminatory and flawed. Everyone knows who they are and what is inside them, but no human has the right to tell another human what he or she is. But [NADRA] … gave us unnecessary tension by saying that they’ll do a medical test. A doctor will tell us what we are? Really? Well, then they should also check men and women. Why only khwaja siras? As for checking hormones, there are so many women whose [male] hormone levels are higher. Will the government call those women men? This is wrong! GSS members resisted state surveillance by contending that hormone-level testing was a defective technique to gauge gender difference. Moreover, the GSS declared that the verdict was discriminatorily applied to khwaja siras alone instead of being extended to all Pakistani citizens. In the subsequent SC hearing, the Chief Justice repealed the sex/ gender verification statute in light of the arguments set forth by community activists. Thereafter, the government was ordered to issue ID cards without subjecting registrants to medical tests, meaning that simply claiming to be a khwaja sira was sufficient.

34 This instance of disputation between the state and community activists reveals not only the judiciary’s essentialist conception of khwaja siras, but also how the GSS’s resistance effectively disrupted the state’s intended means of verifying and delimiting the condition of being a khwaja sira. Their timely intervention helped to successfully skirt the regulation, and their calculated negotiations played a crucial role in reproducing the illegibility encasing khwaja siras. Their politics of ambiguity, then, offered a critical mode of resistance to the processes of governmentality that aimed to transform khwaja siras into knowable subjects of the state.

35 Here, GSS activists demonstrated an instance of refusal that circumvented and thwarted the state’s regulatory procedures for policing and narrowly defining sex/ gender non-normativity. In rejecting the medical requirement, the GSS neither clarified the sex/gender traits of khwaja siras nor did it reveal its genuine concerns regarding the exam. Instead, the organization attacked the discriminatory state

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policies that unfairly targeted khwaja siras as subjects of medical inspection, thereby revealing the state’s limited understanding of them as intersex and impotent. The GSS’s mediation allowed khwaja siras to escape the state’s gaze on their bodies, and enabled them to evade the judiciary’s intended means of bringing gender non-conforming people into the state’s ambit without engaging in direct and forthright acts of dissent. Although this instance of refusal utilized recognized channels of resistance, it did not question the state’s misconceptions regarding khwaja sira sexuality and corporeality. 23 Instead, it fostered the perpetuation of the uncertainties and myths associated with khwaja siras. In other words, this subtle act of defiance privileged illegibility over certitude as an effective activist strategy of dissent and self-preservation. Moreover, the GSS’s approach positioned khwaja siras as rights-demanding citizens who wished to be recognized and protected by the state, but in a manner that not only averted unsettling the status-quo but also evaded complete state appropriation. By remaining somewhat obscure to the state apparatus, these translucent subjects managed to preserve their intermediate spaces of refuge and partial sovereignty.

36 Importantly, despite their ideological differences, newer cohorts of English-speaking, middle-class activists have drawn inspiration from the strategies used by senior, non- English-speaking community leaders like Payal. This overlap in praxis was evident in the efforts of the stakeholders involved in the process of drafting legislation on the rights of transgender people between 2017–2018. While a detailed study of these developments is wanting, insights may be extrapolated from some of the known discussions and events surrounding the drafting of the 2017 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill and its introduction in both houses of the Parliament, as well as from a cursory analysis of the passed act. The little-known evidence indicates that community activists contended with a host of opponents—both internal and external to khwaja sira and trans communities in order to produce—“transgender” as a legal category that is at once encompassing and somewhat obscure.24 To what extent, then, does the praxis of this newer generation of activists align with the translucent citizenship of their predecessors? I would argue that what may appear, at first sight, to be a sharp break between the approach taken by recent activists and their elders, is really an accrual of past experience. These younger activists have drawn from indigenous knowledge and practice, forging new directions for gender non-normative Pakistanis by combining the participation-resistance model of their forerunners with their own contemporary sensibility and understanding of gender identity. As I have suggested, the recent legislative construction of “transgender” mirrors, in important ways, the earlier judicial production of “khwaja sira.” In so doing, it preserves an ample amount of translucency even as community activists cautiously move away from a performance of translucent citizenship in favor of greater transparency and inclusion.

Conclusion

37 The strategies of identification and resistance that I have described demonstrate that khwaja sira activists managed to achieve their objectives surreptitiously, entirely bypassing the politics of sedition and dissent. Hence, GSS activists queer popular understandings of dissent by engaging in forms of participation and refusal that are not only subtle but also privilege the perpetuation of ambiguity over certitude. While desiring social and political recognition and inclusion, this praxis relies on an

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“infrapolitics” of resistance rather than merely on candid forms of protest. Moreover, by remaining hazy to the state and society, this marginal population managed to escape moments of collective hysteria, such as charges of dissent, provocation and anti- establishment activities.

38 Further, the actions of the GSS and several other activist organizations performed what I have termed translucent citizenship, a form of national belonging that demanded the provision of rights and state recognition but precluded absolute sociopolitical integration of the kind where peripheral peoples are turned—in Foucault’s (1995) terms —into “docile and knowable” (p. 172) subjects. In short, khwaja siras desired limited incorporation, which they sought on their own terms and with reservations. For instance, they pursued cultural and economic integration in so far as desiring the state and society to expand the subsistence options available to khwaja siras. However, they did not intend to relinquish the existing income-generation activities available to them (e.g., blessing, begging, dancing, and sex work) since they offered many freedoms and pleasures. Likewise, they wished to be identified as full citizens but did not want to be fully determined by the society and state, especially with respect to their genital and sexual characteristics and even some of their clandestine ritual and socio-structural traits and activities. The disclosure of such sensitive information would render them vulnerable to further exploitation, oppression and control. The khwaja sira activist praxis discussed in this article reflects a form of citizenship where the subject insists on recognition and inclusion but strives to remain relatively vague to governing bodies and broader publics. As translucent citizens, khwaja siras resisted complete absorption into social and national structures and managed to function as semi-self-governing networks with space to enjoy the few freedoms, pleasures and powers that accompany being a nebulous minority.

39 The newer cohorts of activists build upon the legacy of their indigenous counterparts by continuing to operate within intermediate zones, those liminal interstices between clarity and obfuscation, unification and independence. However, they have also introduced their own unique and innovative blend of methods and begun to shift the national public debate on gender non-conformity in the direction of greater transparency. What this increase in candor means and what its affects will be for gender and sexually non-normative Pakistanis is as yet unclear, but it certainly poses potential risks along with the prospect of propelling minority rights activism in Pakistan in fruitful new directions.

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NOTES

1. The term that appears most frequently in the archive of the proceedings was not “khwaja sira” but “eunuch.” Given that the Supreme Court transcripts are in English, the term “khwaja sira” rarely appears in the text even though it had gained prominence in both activist and public discourse by the time the case had commenced. 2. Blasphemy against any recognized religion is prohibited under the Pakistan Penal Code, which stipulates penalties ranging from fines to death for those found guilty of speaking sacrilegiously. Many of the victims of blasphemy charges have been non-Muslim minorities, and a substantial number of the accused have been subjected to attacks, rioting and murder before their respective trials. 3. For instance, the Bengali language movement led to the Bangladesh Liberation War and the subsequent creation of Bangladesh in 1971, in the region that was once East Pakistan. Moreover, other regional movements, such as the Baloch Liberation Army, have been continually repressed through military operations, arrests, enforced disappearances and torture by security agencies. 4. I have offered ethnographic examples of the “infrapolitics” of khwaja siras elsewhere (see (Khan 2014a, 2014b, 2016). In addition, Shahnaz Khan (2016) has alluded to khwaja siras’ use of such practices. 5. Unlike the aforementioned examples, this paper focuses not so much on the deployment of ambiguous speech but on other ways in which a politics of ambiguity is evident in khwaja sira activism. The use of ambiguity in verbal communication is a key facet of khwaja sira politics of ambiguity, one that I have examined in greater detail elsewhere (Khan 2016). Nonetheless, the discussion below on activists’ use of the term “khwaja sira” arguably falls under the broader theme of language. 6. Prior to the 2009 SC case, gender non-normative people had had little interaction with the state with the exception of routine police harassment. Hijras were criminalized by the British colonial administration before the partition of the Indian subcontinent (Pamment 2010:34), and after independence, their activities were briefly banned by the state in the early 1960s in an effort to weed out fake hijras (Naqvi and Mujtaba 1997:266). The next notable encounter with the state occurred during the 1990 elections when a zennana was nominated by the people of Abbottabad to run for public office but did not win a seat (267). Then in 1997, Almas Bobby, a

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Rawalpindi based khwaja sira attempted to contest a seat in the national assembly but her application was rejected by the government (Pamment 2010:36). The 2009–2012 SC case and the subsequent Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2018 are products of the crucial interventions made by both khwaja sira and trans* activists and state representatives. 7. Founded by Payal (pseudonym), a khwaja sira in her late forties, the GSS was the first community-run organization in the Sindh province to be registered, and in 2011 it was among the few registered khwaja sira groups in the country. It had been in operation in Karachi since 2009, and it functioned primarily as an advocacy group which spoke on behalf of khwaja siras. I investigated the GSS’s activism and its daily activities, the social relationships among its members, and its ties with khwaja sira communities and allies (e.g., other sexual minority groups, NGOs, media outlets, etc.). By examining these relationships and accompanying the organization’s members to both activist and non-activist events, I learned how the culture of khwaja siras factored into their activism, and the extent to which it held back and facilitated their efforts. 8. Throughout this article, I have used pseudonyms for informants and organizations in order to protect their privacy and anonymity. 9. Although the khwaja sira are a heterogeneous population whose differences surfaced both in everyday life and in activism, my project did not yield any compelling insights about khwaja sira organizing varying according to urban settings. 10. Eunuch was a classification used by the British colonizers for both hijras and khwaja siras (Hinchy 2014:277). 11. I use “sex/gender” to indicate the pervasive absence of an analytical distinction between gender and the body (Rubin 1975) in the Pakistani context. 12. In the years since my fieldwork, growing numbers of middle-class gender non-conforming people have begun to variously self-identify as “khwaja sira,” “trans” and “transgender.” However, the ethnographic examples and analysis presented in this article reflect the practices of those hailing primarily from lower socioeconomic classes. 13. Court transcripts reveal the judiciary’s concern with and erroneous perceptions regarding the sex/gender of khwaja siras and the activities occurring within the parameters of the guru- chela system. For example, on the basis of an age-old myth, the court ordered the secretaries of the Provincial Social Welfare Departments to launch an investigation into the status of “she- male” children who are either voluntarily given away by the parents at the time of birth or taken forcefully by khwaja sira gurus (Constitution Petition #43 of 2009, 16/06/2009). The premise of this inquiry is predictable given the prominence of the aforementioned belief in mainstream society, but also laughable from the perspective of khwaja siras since gender non-conforming people voluntarily join the guru-chela system, typically in their teenage and young adult years. 14. My summarizing of the public’s understanding of khwaja siras is based on media analysis, personal conversations with normatively gendered Pakistanis, and the experiences of khwaja sira informants. 15. Ethnicity emerges as an indicator of potential differences in levels of tolerance for gender and sexual non-normativity between various regional and social groups. For example, in recent years, there has been a significant rise in the number of reported incidents of violence perpetrated against and murder of khwaja siras in parts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province in northwestern Pakistan, which has a majority Pashtun population. However, rather than being viewed as a sign of growing intolerance towards khwaja siras in KPK, this sudden surge in numbers should be seen as a result of an increase in the documentation and reporting of violence by local NGOs. Moreover, it would be spurious to essentialize a particular ethnic group as violent since khwaja siras also have many admirers and benefactors in KPK. Alternatively, not all categories of social differentiation serve as valuable measures of the degree of acceptance of khwaja siras since many people across the lines of class and religious affiliation believe—though

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perhaps with an uneven level of conviction—that khwaja siras possess the dual spiritual power to bless and curse, a belief that plays a pivotal role in instilling feelings of veneration and/or fear rather than outright hate and condemnation for zennanas and hijras. 16. A handful of community members were hired as tax recovery officers in Karachi in response to a SC order to the provincial governments to create jobs for khwaja siras. 17. Khwaja Moinuddin Hasan Chishty (1142–1236 A.D.), also known as, Khwaja Gharib Nawaz, was the founder of the Chishty Sufi Order in India. Today, hijras attend the annual death anniversary of Khwaja Garib Nawaz in larger numbers because it is believed that he gave hijras the power to bless. 18. Please refer to endnote #8 and the discussion in the last paragraph under “Contemporary Khwaja Siras” where I have clarified that my understanding of the uncertainty associated with “khwaja sira” is based on my research findings. 19. Despite its efficacy as a framing device, “khwaja sira” was a contested term within hijra and zennana communities—one that brought to the surface deep rifts that have historically existed among these groups long before the turn to political activism and state/social incorporation. This absence of internal cohesion can be attributed, among other things, to ethnic and corporeal differences within and between communities of gender-variant people. The conflicts resulting from these dissimilarities emerged both in everyday life and in activism. In fact, some of the most contentious disagreements between activist leaders were related to genital excision, which split the khwaja sira movement into two broad factions: those who viewed both akva and nirbaan as khwaja siras and those who only included the latter into the khwaja sira fold. Suffice it to say, the khwaja sira are not a monolithic population and should not be viewed as such, and even their activism and deployment of the “khwaja sira” term was not always uniform. 20. Massad (2002) has called attention to the ways in which Euro-American organizations have sought to “defend the rights of ‘gays and lesbians’ all over the world” (p. 361) and how, in advocating on their behalf, this liberation project has increased risks and the persecution of sexual minorities on the ground (p. 384–85). 21. For the present discussion, I am able to offer some general observations regarding this change, which—to a significant degree—has resulted from a confluence of several intersecting factors: the continued significance of foreign donor-funded sexual health intervention programs that privilege the use of Euro-American identity terms; the mushrooming of a network of LGBT- led sexual health NGOs and CBOs where middle-class English-speaking gender and sexual minorities have found gainful employment; the rise in the public activism of a younger generation of “trans”- and “transgender”-identifying activists who are predominantly affiliated with sexual-health organizations; and an increase in creative, awareness-raising advocacy campaigns, many of which are products of collaborations with young entrepreneurs and social change-makers who have harnessed the power of new media beyond utilizing traditional print and television (e.g., modelling for designer labels, acting in mainstream and independent films, singing and dancing in popular music videos, staged play performances, participating in a plethora of documentaries). 22. My research encapsulates an earlier moment of activist and judicial activity, one that followed on the heels of the SC rulings of 2009–2012, and that predates the more recent developments surrounding the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act. 23. Confronting the state’s misapprehensions and uncertainties regarding khwaja sira sex and sexuality (i.e., the dominant understanding of khwaja siras as intersex and/or impotent) would have required challenging section 377 of the Pakistan Penal Code, the British colonial-era injunction that criminalizes sodomy, and possibly even the Zina Ordinance, which outlaws fornication between a man and woman who are not married to each other. In so doing, khwaja siras would have risked affiliation with the morally and legally condemned figure of the homosexual, a category with which they both communally and publicly disidentify.

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24. The Act broadly defines a “transgender person” as an individual who is: “(i) intersex (khusra) with mixture of male and female genital features or congenital ambiguities; or (ii) eunuch assigned male at birth, but undergoes genital excision or castration; or (iii) a transgender man, transgender woman, Khawaja Sira or any person whose gender identity or gender expression differs from the social norms and cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at the time of their birth” (National Assembly of Pakistan 2018). This three-part definition is simultaneously revealing, inclusive and ambiguous. Although it mentions genital excision, it does so in a manner that is confusing; the phrasing, “eunuch assigned male at birth,” begs the question of what is meant by “eunuch” and how one could be a eunuch at birth. This portion of the definition could well be construed as a reference to someone with congenital ambiguities who then undergoes genital alterations through surgery. The third part of the definition employs the terms “gender identity” and “sex … assigned at … birth” to indicate the difference between the two concepts, but without defining sex and gender as distinct categories. Such a definition is likely to be confusing within a cultural context where both sex and gender are viewed in essentialist terms and are used interchangeably as one and the same. Likewise, the idea of sex being assigned at birth is likely to be unclear to most lay people, and not just in the Pakistani context, since sex is almost exclusively understood to be biologically determined and in no way socioculturally constructed. The assignment of sex at birth then may be misunderstood as the act of assigning the wrong sex to an infant on the basis of genital ambiguities.

ABSTRACTS

Between 2009 and 2012, the Pakistani Supreme Court granted a range of rights to gender- nonconforming people, sometimes known as the khwaja sira, in a series of historic rulings. While the judiciary sought to regulate this population through legal and policy developments, community activists aimed to change the public image of gender non-normative people through public advocacy. In this paper, I draw on James Scott’s theorizing on indigenous resistance to examine the practices of khwaja sira activists who sidestepped the trappings of dissent by anticipating potential pitfalls and avoiding any possibility of being accused of anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam activities. Instead, they employed forms of identification and refusal that not only impeded potential allegations of anti-nationalism but also complicated notions of dissent through engagement in modes of participation and resistance. I argue that underpinning this praxis is the khwaja sira desire for partial incorporation into the state, as citizens that are at once legally and culturally recognized and accepted, but also relatively self-governing and only partially intelligible within social and state spheres.

INDEX

Keywords: khwaja sira, hijra, transgender, autonomy, state, resistance, ambiguity

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AUTHOR

FARIS A. KHAN Anthropology, State University of New York, Potsdam

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Caste, Queerness, Migration and the Erotics of Activism An Interview with Filmmaker Moses Tulasi

Kareem Khubchandani

1 Fall 2008. Moses typed “Indian,” into the search box of Craigslist-Chicago’s Men Seeking Men page. Maybe he would find another Indian man to have sex with. Maybe someone had listed “Indian” as a preferred category for a sexual partner—rare, but not impossible. Since the recent end to his arranged marriage, he had the privacy and mobility to freely engage in casual sex with men. Moses’ divorce, and his coming out to his family in Hyderabad, also heralded the end of a nine-year relationship with his college sweetheart Dev.1 Dev too had moved from Hyderabad to the Midwest, but preferred that Moses stayed married and closeted, like himself. Moses’ Craigslist search yielded an advertisement for an LGBT South Asian potluck, hosted by the very new organization, Trikone-Chicago. The founder of Trikone-Chicago, a young suburban desi, had a stroke of risky brilliance, and posted the potluck details on Craigslist personals.2 Moses arrived alone at the potluck in Evanston. After he introduced himself as “an IT guy” and “a project manager,” I quickly decided that he was uninteresting. He, on the other hand, had designs on me, and was disappointed that I left early; he had hoped to pick me up that night. He told me this in a research interview several years later. We were best friends by then.

2 Moses arrives at this nascent organization, and discovers a queer South Asian community, through his search for sex. Who could have predicted that this search for sex might set in motion a variety of experiences that culminated with his arrest on the University of Hyderabad campus in March 2016, accused of anti-Indian activity while he filmed activism and protests in the wake of Rohith Vemula’s death? This essay, based on early conversations and fieldwork with Moses between 2010 and 2014, as well as a 2017 interview transcript documenting his experiences at the UoH, offers anecdotes and theorizations about how queerness, migration, and caste matter to each other. These “entanglements,” material imbrications and discursive confluences,3 offer new facets to the study of sedition in India by centering an unlikely and even accidental protagonist: a diasporic, queer, Dalit-OBC (other backward caste) filmmaker.4 And yet, I

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contend that it is no accident that he finds himself part of various minoritarian movements, given the imbrication of erotics and activism that creates productive and messy overlaps across sociopolitical positions. This “accidental protagonist,” briefly jailed for his trespasses against the nation, helps us see that sedition inhabits the everydayness of being a minoritarian subject, as much as it manifests as explicit forms of political dissent.

3 Activism develops and is sustained by erotics and intimacy. The intensities of being in collective space with others—laughter, flirtations, and silent sadness evidence how politics land on/impact the body, and how bodies shape and make themselves in relation to political structures (Gould 2009; Howe 2013). Queer activism in India is simultaneously “critique, invention, and creative practice”: “Acts of same-sex love are not acts of resistance—they are experienced as acts of social and cultural invention.” (Dave 2012:14). Moses comes to know himself as an activist and artist through “the erotic,” the conjoining of sensuality and activism (Lorde 2007; Gill 2014). His candid approach to sex is a valuable reminder of the erotic possibilities of South Asian LGBTQ community and activist spaces, possibilities that have been effaced in order to present more respectable visions of gayness, driving to the margins casual sex cultures, drag queens and trans people, working class queers, and non-English speaking folks (Gopinath 2005; Rudrappa 2004; Shahani 2008). While I focus on a single person who has emerged as an important queer ally in the anti-caste movement in Hyderabad (Tellis 2016), Moses’ narrative helps us think through the productivity of erotics within activism, while also drawing our attention to multiple systems of global and state surveillance he, and those around him, must navigate to find sex and share joy.

4 Moses and I grew close as we co-organized a queer Bollywood party together, a fundraiser for Trikone. He simultaneously started a business in India, outsourcing some of his US company’s labor to his own family and friends there. As he hired his best friend, family members, and eventually his boyfriend, to run this BPO (Business Process Outsourcing company), even his workplace became a site of “intimate” entanglements (Wilson 2004). While setting up this business in India, he entered Hyderabad’s gay subcultures: Saturday club nights, house parties filled with mujras [dance performances], public cruising, and casual sex facilitated by online media. In these worlds, he met Jay5 who became his boyfriend, manager of the Hyderabad office, and partner for five years. Moses and Jay have hosted parties for Trikone in their Chicago home, and birthday parties in Hyderabad for their queer friends. These spaces erupted in performance: improvised mujras featuring melancholy Aishwariyas, mustached Madhuris, and skinny Salmans. Where middle- and upper-class gay men in India and the USA show a preference for nightlife in commercial venues (Khubchandani 2018), this couple, with their access to private residential space, cultivated the opportunity for intimate performances, amenable to gender transgressions, class-mixing, and sexual liaisons.

5 Moses easily moved back and forth between Hyderabad and Chicago with his creation of a subsidiary company, but he had to be more creative in acquiring work visas for Jay in order to get him to the USA, and eventually secure his Green Card.6 While Jay’s initial visit was meant to be a short one, it became urgent that he stay longer. Not even a month after he arrived in America, Hyderabad’s TV9 aired the notorious exposé that outed men looking for sex with other men online and at clubs, repeatedly broadcasting Jay’s profile picture, taken from an online social networking website (Singh 2018).7

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Long before Moses envisioned a film about queer activism in India, he found himself in regular contact with Indian activists because of this scandal.

6 Moses has long had a passion for films and filmmaking, taking classes in camerawork, direction, and editing while in Chicago. Participating in and organizing diasporic LGBTQ events such as parties, film festivals, and parades informed his decision to document pride celebrations in Hyderabad in 2015.8 Working alongside the organizers of the Hyderabad event, Moses conducted interviews during and after the Swabhimana Yatra [walk of self-respect], and collected footage and photographs of the walk. This march, it turns out, was the first Pride March in the new state of Telangana, and the film contemplates social and national politics of queer life in India, focusing particularly on regional, caste, transgender, and indigenous investments in staging a queer public. The centralization of Dalit/bahujan identities at this march set in motion “a deluge of assertion of Dalit identities in queer spaces across the country” (Jyoti 2017). As Moses worked on the film, pre-screening various cuts and, in essence, allowing the community to edit this documentary with him, he acquired a newfound language to talk about privilege and equity. His film also made him accountable to trans, Dalit, and queer activists in Hyderabad. Moses’ arrival in spaces of activism does not only begin with sexual desire, but it is moved along and fostered by it.

7 In March 2016, Moses brought his camera to the University of Hyderabad grounds to document protests against the campus administration and politicians who refused to take responsibility for the disenfranchisement of Dalit students and the death of graduate student Rohith Vemula. In January 2016, Vemula took his life after the UoH ended his graduate fellowship because of his agitation—on behalf of the Ambedkar Students Association—against Brahmanical and Islamophobic administrators and student groups. Vemula’s death came in the wake of ten other suicides by Dalit and tribal students at the UoH and sparked months of protest by students, activists, and community members (Sukumar 2016). The university and police surveillance of protests on campus was intensified by eruptions on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus following the arrest of the Students’ Union president on charges of sedition in February 2016. Unlike news journalists on the UoH campus who had enough warning to leave the premises or move to the periphery of the arrests, Moses did not. He was arrested along with 24 students, and two faculty members, and incarcerated for a week on charges of vandalism. During his arrest, he was accused of throwing stones at the police and being a “propaganda maker”; implicit here is that this “propaganda” is anti- government, anti-Indian, and anti-police, all premises under which the charge of sedition has been applied (Narrain 2011).

8 Moses’ filming and arrest incorporate him into the recent narrative of “seditious” activism. He arrives here via diasporic visions of sexual liberation, via familial pressures of heteronormativity, via Craigslist, nightclubs, and house parties, mujras and drag shows, marches and films, news stings and hook ups. While Moses rode in a car from the jail to his home just after being released on bail, Jay in Chicago dialed me into a three-way call with Moses. His response to “How are you feeling?” was met with an explanation of how hot and smart the other men arrested with him were, how turned on he was by the intense conversations they had about liberation, and the kind of sex that could have been had if there was access to private space in jail. Far from dismissing the political urgencies and trauma of his arrest, Moses’ playful comments draw our attention to the creative and bodily labor of surviving incarceration. His comments

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about the time he spent in jail turn us back to the erotics of sedition, the pleasures we might take in being the bad subject in the face of the state’s normativity, and the sensual, embodied, and co-present nature of engaging in the work of social change.

9 So far, I have looked at the ways in which erotics invite Moses into new realms of sociality that transform him from what he calls a “robo-engineer” into a filmmaker and activist. The multiplicity of erotic encounters in his narratives—nightclubs, jails, and Eid festivals—offer a less polished version of India Shining’s transnational IT worker. The interview that follows focuses on relationships between caste and queerness, tracing Moses’ growing awareness of caste inequity as he moves across national borders, most recently settling back in Hyderabad to make films and produce a web series created by transgender and hijra activists. He expands on the ways that caste becomes a necessary lens of analysis as he thinks about family, religion, desire, and politics.

10 Conjoining activism, migration, sexuality, and caste, Moses offers us a small contribution to the limited theorizations on relationships between caste and queerness. A small body of scholars, novelists, and public intellectuals discuss caste biases in queer Indian activism (Kang 2017a), the sexual fetishization of subordinate castes (Rao 2003, Kang 2017b), and the co-constitutive nature of caste and queerness in law and culture (Jyoti 2018; Baud 2017; Surya 2016). Moses’ anecdotes intertwine queer and caste critique as he describes how migrant heteronormativity reproduces caste, and how queer men perform their caste on social media. He is a charming storyteller, drawing our attention to the eroticism of Eid and incarceration, the trauma of arrest and expulsion, and the heteronormativity of suburban American life and caste eradication. The interview relies on our own intimate relationship, as we lay on the guest bed in my parents’ house in Bangalore, drinking whisky and talking, our first meeting since his arrest.

Interview with Moses, August 20179

KK: Growing up in India, what was your exposure to social politics: queer, feminist, and class issues? MT: My family was a little different from pretty much every other family. What made them different was inter-religious and inter-caste marriage. Also the dynamic where my mom was older to my dad and was more educated, and came from a slightly higher class. However, what I would later realize was that she did come from a lower caste. My grandfather’s side used education, especially girls’ education, as a weapon to navigate the caste-class ladder. So Mom’s from a Dalit background. Mom’s dad was Dalit. Mom’s mom was OBC. Dad’s side is OBC.

KK: What were their religions? MT: My mom’s a Christian, my dad was a Hindu. He converted to Christianity before the wedding. My dad was never really a religious person but there is that cultural pull, his mom wanted us, the kids, to be Hindu. Dad’s side didn’t really approve of the marriage; we ended up spending more time with Mom’s side. People convert to Christianity not because Jesus saves, but to get away from the ugly caste system of this country, something I realized later. So growing up with these two religious communities, I learnt how to navigate them, navigating friendships.

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KK: What do you mean by “navigating?” MT: So my friends would be really anxious to know if we celebrated vinkayaka chathurthi with the same fervor that we celebrated Christmas. “By the book you’re supposed to be Hindu.” Nobody said this to my face, but being identified as a Christian was sort of rebellious in that way, taking your mom’s identity. When I realized I was different, in terms of my sexuality, it didn’t seem like a big deal to me because: OK yes, I’m considered wrong in all of these things (laughing) I might as well be different in my sexuality. I might as well go and fuck two more guys. We grew up in a locality that had a fair number of Muslims in the community and there was so much peace and harmony between the Muslims, Hindus and Christians, this was in Warangal. And, you know, my friend Sohail, his mom used to buy salwar kameez for me on Eid. I would spend the whole day of Eid gorging on all that food. For Bakr Eid they would sacrifice a goat. It would be a spectacle for all us kids. I mean it was kind of sad to see the goat slaughtered (laughs) in front of your own eyes. I would always turn away at the exact moment when the butcher used to make the cut (hand motion). While the butchering was happening I would be feeling Sohail [up]. (I make a surprised face). None of these things happened in this vacuum, in this very English- speaking Bangalore MG Road type of setting. They all happened when Sohail’s mother was cooking biryani in the other room, and we were fucking in secrecy, and we could smell the biryani in the room next door. And you know, my grandmother, when she was visiting us, and me and a boy went into my room and locked the door, she knew exactly what was going on. She would come and knock on the door 100 times, she wanted to interrupt. This is the paternal grandmother who is a feminist but also a casteist. She would like—I would only realize later—she would interview all my friends to know their full names. You know why? To learn their [caste].

KK: When did you come to the USA; what brought you? MT: Ninety-eight. To be honest, I never aspired to. It was a thing I was doing because we all were. My friend Srinivas, he took it upon himself to figure out the US for all of us. He was like, “You like computer science? I’ll apply for that for you!” I still remember he pretty much folded my letter and put it in the envelope. My relationship with Dev continued; I think in our relationship we reached around eight years and then a point came in his life, “Now what? Now we both are settled.” He came from a very modest background where the mom was the only working person in the family, his dad was a drunkard. His mom used to work two or three jobs to raise the kids. He wanted to give his mom all the happiness he could, so he couldn’t afford coming out, he couldn’t afford our relationship any more. I didn’t want to stand in the way. That was very heartbreaking. So we broke up. He moved on. He got married.

KK: When you think about this move from India to the U.S., what changed in terms of heteronormativity, class, caste, gender? Did things shift with migration or were you reproducing some of the same, you and your friends? MT: I was living in the closet at that time [in Detroit and Chicago]. Pretty much all evenings were social evenings. We all lived close to each other. You would have to make excuses if you wanted to go to a bar, or go cruising, or you had a hook up over. And I had to live alone, which made my friends very curious because everybody else had roommates; they were living with each other. “Why are you living on your own?” And then the arranged marriages started to happen, in a very heteronormative way.10

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They would not have any qualms sharing, “Today I got this proposal, and this is the girl,” and they’re showing her to all of us. It was pretty obvious that all the matches that were coming were from the same caste. I had a music band; I used to sing at marriages in Michigan, for a Reddy from some organization, TANA: Telangana Association of North America. And all the leadership was Reddy and Chaudhry, entirely Brahmin and dominant castes. They were the representatives of our culture, they would tell us what to do. [And with these marriages] the competition is: “Which would be the most sanskari bahu for our family?” So then they started marrying and bringing their wives to the US. I started noticing [that] all my friends were kind of reproducing the same model as their parents, right? Here you are in the US, which is supposed to be a land of opportunities, supposed to be an egalitarian [society], this is the notion that we had when [we arrived]. But then we looked at all these educated women who are engineers, who are degree holders, who are accountants, across the spectrum, who all come on a dependent visa, so the dependent visa doesn’t allow them to work.11 Look at the connection between immigration and patriarchy here: they’re supposed to stay at home and cook and clean, it was perfect model for all of these men, and for the in-laws. And then, by the time these people would get green cards, guess what? They would have kids! By the times the first kid is three years old, there goes a decade of your life.12 Talking about gender and the Indian context, and propagated patriarchy, I think immigrating to the US for these men is perfect. It’s a perfect patriarchy… they don’t lose anything at all. Even after I came out to them, one of them called me and he put it point blank, “You would lose out on all your patriarchal benefits if you do this.”

KK: When you started coming to Trikone, meeting other queer desis, how did you measure them against what you’d already known? MT: More than anything else it was liberating to meet other desi queer people. By that time I had experienced racism at the hands of White people in Detroit. Being in the closet you make this grand plan of going to a bar, hours and hours of planning. And you get yourself there and all you have is disappointment. All these fancy stories you see in your mind, you’re pre-imagining you’ll pick up a hot guy. But none of that happened.13 I met a couple of friends. Sure, I had a couple of hook-ups. But when it came to taking it beyond a hook-up, the racism became pretty blatant. This whole dream was not working out. That was the point where I met other queer brown people. And then, when I met you, that was my introduction to the arts in my life. I come from a science background. I’m an engineer right? Although I have a very keen ear for music, an eye for film, but still I was a robo-engineer, and you know, built by those bricks. So it took me a while to sort of shake myself up, and bring out the artistic leanings inside me. That’s when I decided I’m going to do something about it, took creative writing, took filmmaking in Chicago.

KK: And after such a rich life in Chicago, what made you think about settling down back in Hyderabad? MT: The continued, the uh, the continued failures in terms of trying to date somebody local in the US. I mean maybe [no devastating failures], but let’s say five failed flings put together they have some effect on you. You like Jack in this bar, you invested some time, you exchanged numbers, you were expecting a second date; that never happened. I [also] really missed the way I was able to get into a relationship in India with the comfort I had with Indian men. It’s very difficult for me to be with this

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typical American man’s “personal space.” The only art that I have is to invade personal space. So I was a no-go when it came to the standard American dating template. I needed a change of scene. I was missing Mom a lot. And I’d finished my filmmaking course so I wanted to make films. I very quickly realized that independent cinema in the US was also completely dominated by White men. And at the same time, Telangana happened. The state of Telangana happened. So [first] the political revolution happened. The arts and culture revolution is happening now.

KK: When we met, I don’t remember you really having an investment in the state of Telangana… MT: I didn’t have any opinion at that time. I used to talk to my dad. He and his brother, they went to jail back in the days. They lost one academic year fighting for Telangana. When Telangana happened, it was like, “This actually happened! I need to know more about this. States don’t just form.” So this Swabhimana Yatra group [documented in Walking the Walk] helped me get a perspective on activism. From there, it was a journey to learn about the Indian Left, Ambedkarites versus the Indian left, versus the right. It was very organic from there. The friendships I made, the travels. I travelled all over India. That film really helped me gain a perspective on the sociocultural scene and how queerness fits into that. And that’s when the Rohith Vemula movement started. Rohith had died in January of 2016. The anti-caste movement, there was a sudden uprising across universities: JNU, HCU, NIFT, IIT- Madras, the Film Institute in Pune. I was really intrigued. What drew me was the brilliantly crafted sloganizing. Slogans like: “Tum kitne Rohith maro gay? Har ghar se Rohith niklega.” Look at the rhythm, the recitation of it, the lyrics. Whoever wrote it was brilliant. I want to make a movie on just the slogans. I was drawn through the slogans. It was this force that pulled me in. I went and introduced myself. And of course B14 was at the university. So seeing queer activists actually stand up for an injustice that happened in a non-queer [cause], it was a first for me. B, and a professor, and all these women! “I think I’m in the right place. This feels so liberating. Just the atmosphere. OK, I’m going to roll my camera.” I started filming. Every day there would be a protest: Kashmiri movement rights, missing people at the campus. And the campus was beautiful, a free space. One would walk in, there’s reporters, intellectuals, writers, all having chai. And I find myself amidst them, talking to people, and rolling my camera, and talking to whoever is comfortable. You go to the canteen area, “shop-com,” short for shopping complex, which became the velivada— Dalit ghetto outside of every village. When Rohith and his four colleagues [were refused housing], they set up a tent, a makeshift tent, and they called it velivada, in the shop- com. It’s like a courtyard, so all these canteen shops are in a semicircle and there are places to sit. Then I started reading Ambedkar, “I can’t do justice to this project if I don’t read Ambedkar.” The first thing in Ambedkar that caught my attention was: “I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu.” It made me take notice. Things started making sense. I knew that most Christians in India are Dalits. I’m going to jump the timeline: in the jail, there were seven Muslim guys, and once a day [they did] namaz. The entire cell, we would go quiet for their namaz time. There were eight Christians, eight. With the Christians, all of us, we had to secretly pray on Good Friday. There was this mass conversion to Christianity in the fifties and sixties when there was an [upsurge] in anti-caste [activism].15 The government intervened and said, “OK Dalits who are converting to Christianity, you will not get SC reservation, you will get 1% percent reservation as BC-C category.” Many Dalits

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now who profess the Christian faith, they cannot come out as Christian, otherwise they lose their caste reservations.16 So even in the jail, these students were afraid, if they actually prayed, if they actually communed as these eight Muslim boys were doing, they would be outed. Fuck! When I was being transferred to the jail, in the van I was so nervous my sexuality would be [outed]. Guess what? People subscribing to the Christian faith was a bigger issue there. People would come out to me in secrecy (laughing). And I’m a Christian and gay (laughing).

KK: Were you out? MT: So the newspapers outed me. There was an article [that mentioned] “queer filmmaker.” One of them, an associate professor of mathematics, also arrested, after five days he said, “Moses, I need to ask, are you gay? I had to know. OK, now let’s continue playing carom.” These fuckers, these amazing activists, I round them all up and I say, “OK, I’m going to give you LGBT 101 gyan (knowledge).” Five or six of them. Two and a half hours. Questions and questions and questions. It was amazing. There was this cutie, this guard. I mean he was a prisoner but he was given a job of… so the cute boys get good jobs, they have capital, they get biscuits, sweets, attention from men. So cute, Deepak. He was arrested for selling illegal weapons. He had this habit of, he would do this (scratches his crotch gently) and I think he knew; I was like, “Fuck!” I would check him out top to bottom. Every opportunity I got. I was talking to him, having chai, we go in the bathroom and I sort of called him into the bathroom, and he was like, ‘There’s no door anna, there’s no door, so…” So even in the jail, I mean, I didn’t have to shut out my sexuality. OK I didn’t have sex with him; [but] that [flirtation] was enough. He’s beautiful. Deepak was beautiful. That whole thing was beautiful.

KK: You make your time in jail sound romantic and optimistic. Were you worried? Was there trauma? MT: Ya ya. So uh, I know I make it sound very cool. I was afraid for the longest time. I was afraid of getting beaten. All the horrible things you see on TV and in the movies. I was like, “Fuck. I know I’m in deep shit. And then this policeman, beating the shit out of students. I’m next. OK, we’re going to get beaten. Prepare for it. Deep breath. They can beat your body but not your soul. Let them beat you.” They slapped me twice, we (Moses and the professor) were slapped twice. But the kids were brutally [beaten], with their elbows. These police were called in, they had no nametags. You could see that their nametags, just before they got into the van, their tags were ripped off so that no one could [identify them]. One of the boys, he had very thick glasses, and if you hit him anywhere near [his eyes], it could affect his nerves. And they bent him over and, “We will hit this area!” [the boy’s lower back]. They would use their boots and elbows to hit that area. The Muslims—first of all they would ask for your name. Muslims would be called, “Beef eaters! Pakistanis! Go back to Pakistan! ISIS agents.” All kinds of shit. It was traumatic. It was traumatic not being able to do anything for these kids; I’m older than them. Just imagine the professor’s plight. He was taken in just because he asked: “Why are you beating my students?” and they said, “You come with us,” and they slapped him. They said, “You’re teaching anti-national ideas to your kids. It’s because of professors like you that these kids are becoming anti national.” We were eighteen of us in our van.

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KK: Did it matter you were not a student? You were a wild card in some way. MT: A little bit. I tried to tell him [police officer], “I just want to clarify, I’m not a student guys.” I wanted to get out, get back that video that I took, which they seized. The only card that I had was from the Telangana Producers Association; they said, “This is not a media card.” I said, “I’m making a documentary.” “I know you, you were siding with the students, you didn’t interview us, you only interviewed them.” The CI (Chief Inspector) of the police station: “It is because of you guys, you propaganda-makers that the students end up like this. I’m going to make sure you have the same fate as the students.” I just shut up. They filed cases against us. They wrote we were throwing stones at them that’s why they had arrested us. There was a good view on [footage on] the Internet where I was seen with my camera; blatant lies in their report. It was a very traumatic time. These emotions, the family also is shattered, running around police stations, lawyers, the jail to visit, and there’s only two hours to visit. I got out on the morning of the seventh day, the students got out in the evening. Everybody had written eighteen pages of complaints and the news comes that when we are being released maybe the CI will check all our bags. So we had to dispose of everything—the shit hole— we crammed all the papers [into it] and it got blocked and the entire (he gestures to the overflow and I make a face).

KK: So how has this led to where you are now? MT: I was on the journey of finding the meaning of intersectionality from the Swabhimana Yatra. I was on a slow path. Then I read up on Ambedkar: “We need to represent ourselves in a dignified manner. Gone are the days where I need to follow Gandhi’s charade of poverty.” My family was a working model of what Ambedkar taught, they followed the path of education, they embraced Christianity, got rid of the day-to-day caste system, and it gave them access to health care and education.

KK: If one strategy is respectability politics—let’s dress well, educate ourselves, that uplifts us—and the other is inter-caste marriage that is heteronormative, what is a queer project in the anti-caste movement? What are the queer ways of practicing a different kind of caste politics? MT: You can go up and down your class, you can change your religion, you can become an atheist, but you can never eradicate caste [yourself]. There’s no process of up- casteing yourself or washing away caste [through choice or work]. Although inter-caste marriage is a heteronormative practice, that’s how kids are born. I still think inter- caste marriage is a great step. It’s a great step. Caste is something very much tied to procreation. I don’t see any other way in the near future.

KK: So then, what do inter-caste interactions look like in LGBT organizing? MT: I’m not going to talk about this LGBT movement as being one big happy family. Gay men, there’s blatant casteism on display. There are Grindr profiles with “Reddy” as the name.17 “Chaudhry” as the name. Reddy! I sort of lead him on. And then on my twentieth comment, “Hey what do you actually intend by saying you’re a Reddy?” “I’m a Reddy, I’m an upper caste, I’m more desirable than anybody else.” Or, “I am a Chaudhry,” meaning “I’m a great fucker, because we are all great fuckers.” Same thing as Jatt. “I’m a Jatt top,” rather than… anything else top. Right. Then what I do? Of course if he’s cute I invite him over and I say, “Is this how much you can fuck? I thought you were a real man? It was only 15 minutes.” “No no no, second time.” “You need ten minutes [rest]? OK let’s get fucking. This time you need to fuck for thirty minutes. I’m going to time you.” I humiliate the fuckers, leaving them ashamed of

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their impotence, not being able to satisfy a woman or a bottom. This has become my Grindr game. Any time I see a Reddy or a Chaudhry or a Jatt top on Grindr I do this to them.

KK: It sounds like many of these men are not necessarily part of the queer community and are only looking for sex online. What about casteism in the queer community, amongst activists etc. MT: Look at Hyderabad. All the leadership is upper caste. More than half of the queer leaders in Hyderabad are upper caste. So anywhere I go, I cannot escape caste. Whether it’s my queer politics, whether it’s my social standing, whether it’s my feminist politics. Most feminist activists in Hyderabad are upper caste.

Conclusion

11 Through his interview, Moses tracks how caste hierarchy and heteronormativity are complicit projects that render marginal and suspicious those who pursue their pleasures, joy, and dignity. Sedition then is not only located in the realm of rhetorical dissent, but that of the cultures, desires, and the everydays of minoritarian subjects, always bound to politics. The many confluences in Moses’s life, set in motion and sustained by erotics, allow us to see how caste, religion, queerness, and migration manifest a dissenting and vulnerable subject.

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NOTES

1. Name changed. 2. It is worth noting that in 2018, Craigslist removed its personals section in compliance with the FOSTA/SESTA anti-trafficking bill. While the personals website was not used only by sex workers, the company could not risk its other services being compromised by the increasing anti-sex work surveillance of the Trump administration. This not only removes sex from the public sphere, but prevents the kinds of serendipitous acts of public intimacy that enabled Moses’s entrance into the queer South Asian community. 3. I borrow “entanglements” from Joshua Chambers-Letson (2018) who uses the term to think both about embodied intimacies between minoritarian subjects, as well as historical and discursive overlaps of different socio-cultural constituencies. 4. Bandana Purkayastha (2013) argues that it is necessary to consider how Indian American identity is also constituted by the marginalization of various people within the ethnic category, including Dalits, guest workers, and queer folk. My essay is an opportunity to think further about how the queer, OBC, guest worker’s marginality comes to matter both in India and the USA. 5. Name changed. 6. Routes of migration, including labor migration, and the makings of diaspora are engendered by queer intimacy (Cantú 2009). 7. This TV9 scandal was far from exceptional; Indian news media regularly colludes in right wing Hindu, heteronormative, casteist moral-policing (PUCL-K 2012) 8. As Monisha Das Gupta (2006) argues, transnational circuits of displacement and migration have played a central role in formations of queer South Asian activism. 9. This interview has been edited for clarity; footnotes have also been added. 10. In 2018, Equality Labs released a report, Caste in the United States, detailing how the Indian caste system travels and is reproduced in the diaspora, and also describing the extraordinary discrimination and violence that members of subordinate castes experience.

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11. Madhavi Mallapragada’s (2014) study of women on spousal visas, many of them wives of engineers and IT professionals, reiterates the ways that gender subordination is made systemic through immigration policy. 12. In a parallel context, Lalaie Ameeriar’s (2017) study of Pakistani migrant women in Canada shows how the expectation to have and raise children, alongside acquiring new labor certification and residential paperwork leads to the “deskilling” of labor. 13. Moses’ comments here reflect the work of public intellectual Sandip Roy (1998), who similarly contemplates how desire, expressed by White men especially, works to affirm one’s arrival and welcome as an immigrant. 14. Name changed. 15. In 1956, following Babasaheb Ambedkar’s example, there were mass conversions of Dalits to Buddhism. While Christian conversions are not documented at the same magnitude, there are ongoing conversions, though they do not always guarantee freedom from caste prejudice. 16. Dalit Christians and Muslims are denied reservations allotted to scheduled castes. Reservations are meant to secure university admission and aid for historically marginalized groups; however Dalit reservations are available only to Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist Dalits. Many Dalits converted, and continue to convert, to Christianity in order to escape the trappings of the Vedic-based (and state sanctioned) hierarchy. However, religious conversion does not guarantee social or economic mobility and so Dalits have appealed to the Supreme Court to review the reservation system. See Sabrang Staff (2017), PTI (2016). 17. Geographer Dhiren Borisa articulates similar findings in his research on caste and queerness, further offering “instances of people who were denied admission to gay social networking sites such as Grindr and Planet Romeo, for declaring that they belonged to a lower caste,” (Majumder 2016).

ABSTRACTS

This hybrid essay-interview draws on the experiences of diasporic, queer, Dalit-OBC filmmaker Moses Tulasi to explore the mutually constitutive roles of sexuality, caste, migration, art, and activism. In March 2016, Tulasi was arrested on the University of Hyderabad grounds, amidst protests elicited by the death of Dalit graduate student Rohith Vemula; only eight years prior Tulasi was a married, closeted, apolitical “IT guy” living in Chicago’s suburbs. The essay traces key moments in Tulasi’s life to demonstrate how queer desires and pleasures lead him into radical community, activism, and dissent. These moments include an online search for partners on Craigslist, queer nightlife in Chicago and Hyderabad, and the outing of his partner on national television. Following Moses from his entrance into queer community through to his release from jail, the essay develops erotics as a useful analytic in the study of activism. The accompanying interview with Tulasi centers his own theorizations on these questions. He builds on the above themes, detailing how caste is imbricated in family structures, migration patterns, queer activism, sexual desire, and everyday life. Throughout, Tulasi draws attention to the sensual and erotic textures of living within caste hierarchy, engaging in protest, and espousing dissent. Together, the essay and interview demonstrate that sedition is not only rhetorical dissent, but the everyday condition of being a minoritarian subject in a Brahminical and heteronormative state.

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INDEX

Keywords: caste, creativity, migration, diaspora, erotics, desire, pleasure, queer

AUTHOR

KAREEM KHUBCHANDANI Theater, Dance and Performance Studies, Tufts University

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State-industrial Entanglements in Women’s Reproductive Capacity and Labor in Sri Lanka

Mythri Jegathesan

Introduction

1 In 2013, the issued the Family Background Report (FBR), a policy requiring prospective women migrant domestic workers to document their reproductive and family history when applying to work overseas. In 2015, the FBR was revised to include the following clause targeting prospective overseas women domestic workers residing on Sri Lanka’s tea and rubber estates: “In the plantation sector, the residence and civil status of women living on estates should be endorsed by the Superintendent of the relevant estate. If the Superintendent is not agreeable to such endorsement, the relevant women should not be recommended” (Withanage 2015:3). The inclusion of the plantation clause raised questions about the state’s intentions to regulate the reproductive capacity of women and restrict—and implicitly designate— which women should be working within and outside Sri Lanka, and where they would be allowed to work. It squarely placed endorsement of a woman’s residence and civil status in the hands of a plantation superintendent—an employee of a private company supported by Government subsidies for economic and social development, and a person with no legal authority to determine or regulate the labor and household choices of civilian women. In April 2015, Sanath, a researcher at a local civil society forum based in Colombo remarked, “the regulations regarding women [on the] plantation is [a] throwback to the colonial period when estate workers needed permission from the Superintendent to work outside the estate.”1

2 How can a plantation superintendent extra-legally verify the civil status and state residence of a woman plantation worker? How did this constricting language—included for the purpose of excluding women residents from plantations—come into the fold of state policy on women’s labor in Sri Lanka? The state’s recursive and exclusionary

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move in 2015 is the impetus for this paper’s focus on Sri Lanka’s longer history of state- industrial entanglement in the lives of minority Hill Country Tamil women, most of whom live on, or claim to have their origins in, Sri Lanka’s tea plantations. When the FBR first emerged in 2013, feminist scholars and activists critiqued the circular as an exceptionally restrictive policy that directly contravened women’s international and national labor and human rights. However, a closer examination of the plantation sector’s colonial and postcolonial labor policies and reproductive practices suggests that the FBR is exceptional in the history of state intervention in industrial labor. In this paper, I explore discursive, archival and ethnographic evidence of this continuation to contextualize this clause within the larger legacy of state and industrial intervention in women workers’ productive and reproductive lives.

3 This paper argues that the 2015 FBR represents a continuation of the Sri Lankan state’s entanglements in the productive and reproductive lives of women workers. In the context of this history, the plantation clause signals the persistence of such strategic entanglements between state and industrial policies around the potential of women workers. Entanglement, as practiced in the plantation industry, can be a useful analytic through which to think more broadly about gendered labor policies in Sri Lanka. Drawing from discourse analysis and archival and ethnographic research that I conducted in Sri Lanka between 2008 and 2018, I examine key colonial and postcolonial investments in women’s labor and reproductive health that aim to sustain capitalist projects of profit accumulation and industrial security. I explore various social and economic features of these state entanglements in Sri Lanka’s plantation industry, given that it was the focus of the 2015 FBR exclusionary clause, introduced at a time when the plantation industry, once a resilient model of profit accumulation, was experiencing a severe financial crisis. To contextualize the financial crisis, I examine a more recent case of the tea industry’s desire to keep women working on plantations in an effort to lift the sector out of the economic crisis and restore a positive perception of the Sri Lankan nation through tourism initiatives that promote an image of industrial sustainability.

4 I then analyze the rationale of, and responses to, the FBR and how its three iterations, between 2013 and 2017, expose the limits of human rights praxis in assuring women workers’ labor choices and reproductive rights and, more specifically, the mobility and freedom of minority women workers living on plantations. By focusing on the FBR as an indicator of the continuation, rather than an exceptional act, in the Sri Lankan state’s approach to women’s labor, my assessment reveals how intersections of economic investment, rights-based discourse, and industrial sustainability impact women’s labor and reproductive experiences and inform the persistence of the state’s regulation of women workers’ lives in Sri Lanka.

(Dis)locating women’s labor

5 In this paper, I draw upon anthropological and feminist frameworks of labor, capital accumulation and potentiality to understand how this persisting tension operates and plays out in the context of state intervention in women workers’ lives in Sri Lanka. Women play an integral role in maintaining household economies and their actions involve biological reproduction, household income generation, unpaid domestic labor activities, and fulfilling reproductive expectations such as fertility and childcare. This

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paper focuses on how state policies targeting women’s lives and labor make visible the tension between women’s productive and reproductive lives. This can be broken down into three categories: (1) the valuation of what women produce through the labor they perform; (2) the valuation of their capacity to create and sustain life and the experiences that such projects of potentiality engender; and (3) the dialectical relationship between the valuation of women’s labor and the management of their reproductive experiences. This paper foregrounds this dialectical relationship to investigate the conditions through which the plantation clause came to be integrated into the affective and immaterial hierarchies of labor economies on Sri Lanka’s plantations.

6 I ground my understanding of women’s labor in the Gens manifesto, written by Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Tsing and Sylvia Yanagisako, which calls to reinsert “kinship, personhood, the household and social reproduction” into anthropological investigations of labor valuation and gender (Bear et al. 2015).2 This move is attentive not only to the financialization of women’s labor (the conversion of labor performed into a wage assessed and earned, and the subsequent surplus value of that labor) but also to the more contradictory valuations of women’s labor—the immaterial, affective, and invisible dimensions that often go undocumented. Following Penny Harvey and Christian Krohn-Hansen (2018), I argue that the fixing of minority Hill Country Tamil women workers on the plantations and in the plantation sector in Sri Lanka is integral to the survival of the Ceylon tea industry and the nation’s global market brand. Paying attention to the location and dislocation of these women’s labor is critical to an understanding of the state’s interest in maintaining ethnic and gendered divisions. For Harvey and Krohn-Hansen, dislocation opens the field of labor to an evaluation, not only of uneven transformations in places that laboring bodies inhabit and in which they invest their capital, but also of “the structures of feeling and the affective forces that colour contemporary experiences of labour” (Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018:12). Placing these features of women’s labor in conversation with one another reveals how and why the state unevenly intervenes in women’s lives across caste, class, and ethnic difference, and how it embeds itself in minority women’s households, social relations and communities.

7 Such entanglements also echo Laura Bear’s call (2015) to build and expand upon Marilyn Strathern’s (1985) internal separation, or partitioning of gender and kinship relations from the economy when they seemingly collapse into “indistinguishable” relations (p. 191). For Bear, separating gender and kinship from the economic realm is not possible given the way in which labor is performed and valued, and the “persistent conjoining of nature, culture, objects, society, and economy” (Bear 2015).3 Parsing these conjoining flows of significance, more recently anthropologists have found it useful to examine how “reproductive and productive labor add value to one another” even when work conditions are stigmatized or lacking dignity (Griffith, Preibisch, and Contreras 2018:224). In this light, the state’s entanglement in women workers’ lives is hard to locate and appears in the relational and immaterial features of labor performed, the dynamics of coexisting and competing labor markets, and the reality that women workers—like the capital they produce—are mobile and not confined to a single place, home, or sector.

8 The pivot of the dialectical relationship between productive and reproductive life is women’s potentiality or capacity. Karen Sue Taussig, Klaus Hoeyer and Stefan

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Helmreich write: “potentiality becomes a term with which one articulates worries and not just hopeful prospects, and … becomes linked to political action and deliberation rather than the immanent mechanisms of nature.” (Taussig et al. 2013:S8). Reinserting political action is key to analyzing state and civil discourse around the FBR and state intervention in women’s reproductive lives and their actual biological, embodied experiences. This paper demonstrates how the state articulates its concerns and hopes through the potential bodily acts of women—intimate and bodily labor, reproductive choices, and mothering—and it explores why it is politically useful for the state to intervene in women’s labor and lives.

9 Studies dealing with the Sri Lankan state’s interest in women’s work and location in labor markets have largely focused on the experiences of women belonging to Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist majority, and ethno-nationalist strategies to dictate social norms of morality, class politics and respectability. Malathi de Alwis describes how “respectability, enshrined in the ‘home’ and embodied in ‘woman’ through the confluence of patriarchal, capitalist, religious, and nationalist relations of power, continues to be reproduced and to hold hegemonic sway over [Sri Lankan] society” (de Alwis 1995:150). Michele Gamburd studies how rural Sinhala women working in the Middle East negotiate “long-distance mothering” and how money and material goods transform perceptions of motherhood (Gamburd 2000:198, 208). Likewise, Caitrin Lynch (2007) and Sandya Hewamanne (2008) examine how the Sri Lankan state invests in the production of gendered moralities and respectabilities through garment factory labor in rural and urban settings respectively. More recently, scholars have studied the centrality of capital and labor to the post-conflict politics of negotiating reconciliation and reform (Neubert 2016, Ruwanpura 2016). With the exception of Neubert (2016), this scholarship focuses on Sri Lanka’s Sinhala majority, which comprises roughly 75 percent of Sri Lanka’s current population (Central Bank of Sri Lanka 2017). But in the country’s estate sector, nearly 1 million minority Hill Country Tamils live on company- owned plantations, and only sixteen percent are registered to work full-time on the estates (Rajadurai 2016).

10 Central to the above studies is the state’s attempt to insert a gendered politics of location into the regulation of value created by women’s work. As women’s work is critical to suturing a majoritarian sense of the Sri Lankan nation, where does this leave the value of ethnic minority women’s work in the narrative of Sri Lanka’s nation- building? I argue that this gendered politics of location unevenly engages minority Tamil women in the estate sector. A deeper excavation of the entanglements on the plantations, which have largely been sustained by lower-caste minority Hill Country Tamil women workers’ agricultural and domestic labor, reveals how this form of politics operates, and which communities it attempts to include or exclude in the policing of women’s work.

Research methods

11 This paper is based on archival and ethnographic research I have been conducting since 2008 with Hill Country Tamils living on Sri Lanka’s South-Central tea plantations. In my long-term research, I trace the labor and reproductive histories of Hill Country Tamil women living on Sri Lanka’s tea estates, specifically in Central Province outside Kandy and in Nuwara Eliya. I study the value that women and their kin attribute to labor

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performed in and outside the home, the transformation of households and social relations on the estates through labor remittances and migrant labor networks, the functioning of prestige and shame in kinship relations and political anxieties over the rights and dignity of minority Hill Country Tamils in the postwar context. Alongside recording and observing women’s perceptions and community dynamics, I also trace colonial and postcolonial governance and industrial representations of Hill Country Tamils. In this manner I think through potential disruptions to former understandings of wage labor, caste and class stigma attributed to manual and intimate labor, and the persistence of, and challenges to, these representations amidst industrial and political reform.

12 For this paper, I analyzed the discourse presented in documents, including government-issued circulars in Tamil and English, and media and press releases from key government, human rights, and industrial stakeholders between 2015 and 2018. I also draw from archival research on the representation and treatment of “coolies” between 1900 and 1943 that I conducted in 2016, and ethnographic research (informal interviews, oral histories and participant observation) that I conducted between 2008 and 2017. The document-based and media discourse that I track here is reinforced by the concerns that Hill Country Tamil women workers and industrial stakeholders shared with me during my larger ethnographic project, and by observations that I made during the time I spent on the plantations.

Colonial care and bodily “operations”

13 In the early 1800s, Tamil-speaking low caste communities began migrating to British Ceylon from South India as laborers (Moldrich 1989; Peebles 2001). The community was largely referred to in the archive as Tamil “coolies” or waged laborers, and they were documented as working in agricultural, informal, and casual labor economies known for their poor forms of compensation and working conditions, and as settled on Ceylon’s tea and rubber plantations (Peebles 2001; Nithiyanandan 2014). Today’s Hill Country Tamils are the descendants of this former “coolie” labor force. Beginning in 1948, their disenfranchisement and prolonged statelessness provided the basis for Sri Lankan Tamil calls for a separate Tamil state and an eventual civil war on the grounds of linguistic and ethnic discrimination (Daniel 1996). Today, Hill Country Tamils comprise approximately 4.1 percent of Sri Lanka’s population of 20.36 million (Central Bank of Sri Lanka 2017). As an ethnic minority, they are largely excluded today from Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist platforms for social and political reform, and they continue to experience landlessness and uneven access to higher education, healthcare, and government services (Gunetilleke, Kuruppu, and Goonasekera 2008; Balasunderam 2009).

14 Historically, the plantations have long been entangled in juridical and industrial forms of bodily and civil governance designed to serve the economic needs of a central colonial, then postcolonial, state. Imperial tactics of governmentality thrived in the form of colonial labor, wage ordinances and industrial directives, which all sought to extract accumulated profit from regional and global circuits of coolie labor (Tinker 1974; Kelly 1992; Breman and Daniel 1992; Nithiyanandan 2014). Labor regulations, designed to maintain the strength of the British Crown, became the backbone of emerging and contemporary state-based directives, designed to build Sri

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Lanka’s economic strength as a dynamic player in the global economy. The logic and trajectory of this labor heritage can be traced through a brief history of Sri Lanka’s plantation sector in the context of two key shifts in industrial policies that affect the reproductive and productive lives of women estate workers. For each shift, I present archival and ethnographic evidence of the state’s resilience in the plantation sector and its persistent desire to reproduce a productive labor force of women.

15 In the first phase (1880 to 1972), the Government of Ceylon was officially responsible for the healthcare of Tamil “coolies.” But unofficially, the private plantation companies provided this service as their industrial health and generation of capital were contingent upon the health and productive capacity of “coolie” labor. Acting upon concerns and demands from colonial agents to account for ill and dying coolies on the estates, the Government of Ceylon enacted the Medical Aid Ordinance No 14 of 1872, requiring planters to provide their workers with medical aid; however, the planters largely ignored this ordinance, and in 1880 Ordinance No 17 provided that all plantation workers were to receive medical care from the Government of Ceylon (Peebles 2001:142). Between January and October 1914, the Government of Ceylon became directly embroiled in the welfare of “coolie” laborers when workers in South- Central Ratnapura sought protection from starvation and ill treatment by the local police (Meyer 1998:13–14). This led to a province-wide commission inquiry known as the Sabaragamuwa Commission (1916). The Commission, made up of colonial agents, investigated the treatment of “coolies,” allegations of abuse and the circumstances surrounding the flight of coolies from resident estates. It ultimately concluded that the coolies were not being maltreated (Meyer 1998:22). Nonetheless, the report’s investigative summaries provide an insight into the colonial government’s desire to intervene in the productive and reproductive lives of women workers. In a section of the report entitled, “Treatment accorded to Women during and after Confinement and the care of Infants” the authors relay that estate superintendents were required by law to give a child-bearing woman workers “medical treatment and sufficient food for one month, and not to send her to work till the expiration of the month, unless the medical officer otherwise directs” (Colonial Record 2693 1916: xiv). The report further describes what kinds of food ought to be provided for the mother and child after the birth, and why employing trained midwives and building crèches or nursery care facilities on the estates would reduce infant mortality (Colonial Record 2693 1916: xiv). While couched in the context of mortality prevention and caring for women’s health and lives, these recommendations are ultimately justified in the language of optimal industrial production: if the system of inspections and bonuses … for the encouragement of infant life were more universally adopted, there would be less tendency on the part of mothers to neglect their offspring … in our opinion, any well-directed expense or trouble taken in the prevention of preventable disease, improvement in the environment and surroundings of the laborers, would not only be more than repaid by increasing the efficiency and working capabilities of the adults, but would indirectly benefit their offspring—the future labour force of the estates. (Colonial Record 2693 1916: xv) The government assessment recommends that plantation superintendents invest in the reproductive lives of women workers but also that they ought to encourage women workers to bear biological life for the future benefit of profit accumulation. “Well- intended expense or trouble” amounts to, or is valued as, ensured “efficiency,” enhanced “working capabilities” and a “future [biological] labour force.” With Tamil

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plantation workers’ wellbeing largely determined by the plantation companies’ own monetary and infrastructural obligations to the British Crown, women workers’ reproductive lives remained embedded in industrial relations, including the government’s judicial and police presence through various commissions and policy recommendations. After independence, the discrepancy between the lived reality of workers’ care and implemented policies became the foundation upon which plantation healthcare would operate.

16 In the second phase (1972 to 1991) the Government nationalized the plantations, and plantation healthcare, housing, and educational facilities became the state’s responsibility (Loganathan 1990; Hollup 1998, Periyasamy 2015). During this phase, the Government began to encourage female sterilization as a monetarily incentivized form of contraception, in an effort to curtail population growth and boost Sri Lanka above the global poverty indicators (Bass 2008, Balasundaram 2009). Hill Country Tamil leaders, unionists and human rights organizations documented their anxieties around the implementation of these family planning initiatives. Specifically, the use of financial incentives to encourage tubal ligations was rumored to be one of the outcomes of state-led efforts to reduce the population and political power of Hill Country Tamils in the context of the ethnically driven civil war (Bass 2008:275–56). Statistically, persistently high percentages of tubal ligations in the estate sector were striking. In the 2006–2007 Demographic and Health Survey, the sector had the highest percentage of female sterilizations, at 39.9 percent, while the urban and rural sectors stood at 13 and 15.5 percent respectively (Annual Health Statistics 2006:57). In 2016, female sterilization in the estate sector dropped to 27.4 percent, but still remained well above the rural and urban sectors, at 13.9 and 11.2 respectively (Annual Health Statistics 2016:64).

17 Balasunderam (2009:61) shows a correlation between these higher instances of sterilization and higher degrees of structural violence among Hill Country Tamils. In my own ethnographic work with women who had undergone tubal ligations in the 1980s, I found that perceptions and ideas about tubal ligations had come to be embodied and inherited by reproductively viable women through kinship investments. For instance, Banu Mary, a retired 63 year-old worker told me the following in Tamil when I asked about her “operation” in 2009: I had my first child in 1961 and had eight more children after[wards] until my last, my daughter, who was born in 1982. Two of the children have died, and seven years ago my husband either drank some bad kasippu (“home-brewed moonshine”) or committed suicide on Deepavali—It was never clear. After giving birth to my daughter in 1982, I had the operation. The doctor at the hospital told me to get it. At first, when he told me, I was scared at having such a big operation [pulls back her sari and pulls down her bottom half to show me the cross-like scar on her bottom abdomen]. I was made to wear a gown and lay down on a table. They gave me an injection to take away my consciousness but it did not work so they had to give me another one. Afterwards, I ate carefully—no tomatoes, but foods like māṭṭu iraicci (“beef”) and keerai (“greens”) to give my blood strength. I was in the hospital for five days. Now my daughter is three months pregnant with her second child. She became pregnant with her first baby before marriage and had a registration only with the father. They separated after the baby was born but now they are okay again. He will go to Colombo and work now that they will have two children. After this child, she will have the operation. Banu Mary’s account demonstrates how reproductive and family planning policies promoted by the Sri Lankan state do not surface directly in women workers’ memories,

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but rather through mediating authority figures and state-sponsored spaces. From recounting the context of their operations and reproductive histories, they intimately know the outcomes of these state-led initiatives. Amidst the circulation of rumors and evidence of statistics, such policies impact their decisions and actions, and what they inherited and took on through their bodily acts and care. The accounts also reveal how women workers come to accept and justify their reproductive experiences through the valuation of their labor and household contributions. In conversations, conducted between 2008 and 2017, with married, reproductively viable women above 25 years of age, most opted to have tubal ligations as a form of contraception after their third child, due to their estate work schedules and the impracticality of other contraception methods. Options such as birth control pills were unfeasible due to their working hours, the bodily side effects of the Depo-Provera injection were discouraging, and the culturally gendered stigma associated with condom use were difficult to overcome. When read alongside the longitudinal statistical evidence of preferences for female sterilization in the estate sector, their stories suggest that state entanglement in women workers’ lives is not limited to single acts or historical moments; rather, it persists and lives on as kin-based knowledge about reproductive choices. These gendered labor commitments are inherited and transmitted through women workers’ social relations, and exist as ways of evaluating productive life by means of reproductive experience.

Moral panic, women’s rights, and care as curtailment

18 Using reproductive capacity and discourses of care, the Sri Lankan state and the state- subsidized plantation sector locates Hill Country Tamil women workers in the plantation labor force, knowing full well the evidence of the industry’s economic shortcomings and lack of appeal for women workers and their families. With children of workers refusing to work on the plantation and pursuing off-plantation employment opportunities, overseas work, already a common pursuit among Sinhala communities in Sri Lanka, has become an attractive employment option for Hill Country Tamil men and women seeking more economically secure futures (Gunetilleke et al. 2008:29–30). Social scientists have well documented the experiences of overseas women domestic workers with respect to foreign migrant remittances, household income management, and shifting gendered expectations in transnational labor contexts (Gamburd 2000 and 2008; Kottegoda 2004 and 2006; Kottegoda et al. 2013). Between 1994 and 2005, the number of overseas domestic workers or “housemaids” rose from 36,104 to 125,493— representing 82.45 to 91.34 percent of the total number of women overseas workers respectively (Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment 2008). In 2012, 119,052 of 282,331 overseas workers—roughly 42 percent of the total migrant labor force—were women domestic workers (Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment 2012).

19 While a desirable form of employment, women’s overseas domestic work is not without the risk of bodily violence and labor precarity. Between 2009 and 2012, an estimated average of 1,601 women workers filed complaints of physical and sexual harassment annually (Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment 2012b). Beyond these numbers, one particular case became a token of the state’s concern for housemaids’ safety. In May 2005, seventeen year-old Rizana Nafeek migrated, using forged identification papers and application documents, to be a housemaid. She was arrested for the murder of an

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infant under her care shortly after she arrived. On June 16, 2007, Nafeek was convicted as a minor and sentenced to death by execution. The act was in direct contravention of Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of a Child (CRC)4 and ten days later, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) began a legal fund and appeals campaign with Amnesty International, A Safe World for Women, and other organizations followed its lead (BBC Sinhala 2007; Fernando 2011). One month after Nafeek was sentenced, the case was raised in the British Parliament and the Government of Sri Lanka began assessing its own overseas worker policies (UK Parliament 2007).

20 In August 2006, the Ministry of Labour Relations and Foreign Employment unveiled the National Policy for Decent Work in Sri Lanka under the International Labour Organization (ILO) directives. The policy, implemented within the National Action Plan (2006–2016), was an offshoot of then President Mahinda Rajapaska’s 2005 election manifesto (Rajapaska 2005). Then, in coordination with the ILO and industry and human rights actors, the Ministry of Foreign Employment Promotion and Welfare (MFEPW) launched the National Labour Migration Policy in October 2008. This document outlined institutional, legislative, and regulatory frameworks for foreign migrant employment and focused on objectives of good governance, worker empowerment, and economic growth (Ministry for Foreign Employment Promotion and Welfare 2008:v-vi). As in 2006, the National Labour Migration Policy of 2008 employs the language of human rights, but also features clauses that promote nationalist aims and objectives. Sri Lanka’s women workers were ensured “productive employment in conditions of freedom, equity, security and human dignity” (p. iv) but the labor assurances were enmeshed in national development and economic growth objectives.

21 Between Nafeek’s arrest in 2005 and the drafting of the National Labour Migration Policy of 2008, the above policies did not positively impact her case (Najab and Munas 2014). From 2008 to 2009, the end and aftermath of the civil war dominated Sri Lanka’s political landscape. In October 2010, eight months after his re-election, President Rajapaska, made two unsuccessful appeals to the King of Saudi Arabia to grant Nafeek clemency (BBC News 2010). Between 2010 and 2012, the Sri Lankan Government and Foreign Employment Bureau (SLBFE) engaged in diplomatic negotiations to have Nafeek exonerated and released. But they were unsuccessful, and on January 9 2013, Saudi officials beheaded Nafeek, despite condemnation by the Sri Lankan Government, the European Union, the UN, and the international human rights community.

22 Sri Lanka’s rights-based policy interventions did not save Nafeek and her bodily rights as a child, worker, and detainee remained unprotected. Her death, and the failure of state negotiations, exposed the limitations of the state’s international human rights praxis in terms of valuing women’s overseas domestic work. Revisiting Nafeek’s case, alongside the British colonial Government in Sri Lanka’s justification of providing “coolie” women maternity and childcare benefits on the estates, reveals the implications of the state’s continuing execution and failure of rights praxis. Like the Commission’s discursive linking of reproductive healthcare benefits to future productive labor forces on the plantations, the state’s response to Nafeek’s case was to regulate and generate more economic growth using the language of good governance and empowerment through rights. In this move, the state employed the discourse of

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care and rights but actively entangled itself in the project of assessing women workers’ worth for profit accumulation.

23 Nafeek’s death and the increase of human rights violations documented by the SLBFE also provoked further curtailments of women’s roles in labor economies outside the home and nation. On June 7, 2013, the Ministry for Foreign Employment (MFE) issued the FBR also known as circular No. 13/2013 (Ministry of Foreign Employment Promotion and Welfare 2013). The government directive, effective on January 14, 2014, outlined four age-related clearance certifications that prospective overseas domestic workers were obliged to provide. First, it made migration for domestic work of any woman with children under the age of five years illegal. Second, it required women with children over the age of five years of age to provide written guarantees that their children would be cared for in their absence.5 Third, it raised the age limit for migration for women from 18 years to various minimum ages ranging between 21 and 25 years, and fourth, a maximum age of 55 years was set for all labor-receiving countries.

24 The FBR gravely concerned policymakers, intellectuals, activists, and human rights’ practitioners. In September 2015, a citizen challenged the circular for violating women’s constitutional rights to employment; but the Supreme Court determined that the circular was not in violation of the citizen’s fundamental rights (United Nations Sri Lanka 2015:29). On January 28, 2014, the Office of the Chairperson-Rapporteur of the Working Group on the Issue of Discrimination against Women in Law and in Practice, and the Office of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, sent a joint allegation letter to the Permanent Representative of the Sri Lankan Permanent Mission to the UN. In the letter, the Offices allege, “Circular 13/2013 of June 7, 2013 issued by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment discriminates against women and restricts their rights to freedom of movement and work” (UNHCR 2014). The letter further cautions that the FBR reinforces gender stereotypes of women as the sole caregivers of children and that the policy’s enactment would enable “irregular migration practices” that might make women more susceptible to “exploitation, including becoming victims of trafficking and abuse” (UNHCR 2014). In May 2014, following a visit to Sri Lanka, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, called the FBR discriminatory and cited the Sri Lanka- ratified International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in his justification (UNHCR 2014a).

25 On May 27, 2014, the Government responded to the Joint Allegation Letter and Rapporteur’s call to repeal the FBR. The response outlined the centrality of the family unit as the “fundamental unit of society” (MFEPW 2014:10) and used the language of rights to justify its policy. First, the Government countered the Rapporteur’s deployment of the ICCPR by citing Article 19, Section 2 of the CRC, which states that the government should provide social programs and judicial mechanisms in order to support the wellbeing of, and preventive care for the child and the child’s caregivers (MFEPW 2014:5). Second, the Government response referenced Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)6 calling the FBR a form of social work designed to maintain the country’s “spirit of brotherhood.” Third, the response referenced Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950),7 which calls on states to protect the social connections of the family unit (MFEPW 2014:8).

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26 But more interesting was the Government’s discussion of the detriments of a “rights- based approach” to justify its denial of the rights violation argument and its persistent attachment to interfering with the social relations of the Sri Lankan woman workers’ family unit: the rights based approach does not provide an escape route from the complexities of life and transport a person into an abstract state of freedom … Rights without relationships are as illusory as relationships with rights … freedoms, rights, duties and powers are not rational and static concepts but inherently dynamic, human, and emotionally shaped forms of action. They do acquire a more concrete shape and form within the formal, legal, and institutional sphere. However all of life is not determined by formal rights. The further we move away from the legal, formal, and institutional realms into the social realm it is relationships that define the content of rights—not the other way about … an approach to human rights that treats human beings as discrete entities with equally discrete and separate rights flies in the face of multiple identities and relations that individuals possess. (MFEPW 2014:8)

27 The state’s response outlines a unilinear balancing stick, upon which the “content” and actualization of women workers’ rights sit. On one end, formal, more “concrete” forms of rights exist as unchanging, “abstract,” “rational,” and “illusory.” What grounds and ultimately defines these abstract rights are individuals’ social relationships, which are multiplex, “dynamic,” “emotional,” and “human.” The state contends that it is not possible to move away from one’s social relations and the emotional investments they entail, but only away from the formal and abstract sphere of formal rights. In this way, it claims that human rights alienate and challenge women workers’ socially complex sense of self and the FBR is a less alienating, more appealing alternative to human rights discourse because it recognizes the fullness of women’s lives. Yet, the state uses international human rights frameworks and mechanisms to justify the FBR’s continuation alongside their reservations.

28 Feminist intellectuals and activists in Sri Lanka expressed strong reservations about the policy’s reach and scope and the Government’s approach. Abeyesekera and Jayasundere (2015) contended that “a moral panic about the ‘disintegration of the Sri Lankan family’” produced a state response to “disregard the principle of enshrined in the Constitution as well as the National Labour Migration Policy (2008) and introduce a policy that discriminates against women, especially poor women migrating overseas for domestic labour” (pp. 20–21). Gamburd (2016) speculated that the timing of the policy’s implementation may have been politically motivated and he linked its emergence to the SLFP () pre-election drive to obtain male votes directly ahead of the 2015 Presidential Elections. Alongside scholarly critiques, appeals to human rights frameworks questioning the FBR’s discriminatory nature continued after its implementation in 2014. In August 2016, twenty civil society organizations in Sri Lanka submitted a shadow report to the UN Committee on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (CMW). The report focused on evidence of Sri Lanka’s progress on specific implemented provisions of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICRMW), Sri Lanka’s National Labour Migration Policy, and the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment Act No. 21 of 1985 (“Shadow Report–Sri Lanka” 2016:15). Framing the arguments within the context of international human rights law and at the intersection of gender and class, the shadow report referred to Article 65 of the ICRMW, which states, “State Parties shall maintain

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appropriate services to deal with questions concerning international migration of workers and members of their families” (United Nations 1990). In October 2016, the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) argued that while the FBR was “successful in restricting females migrating for domestic work, [it] promotes migration outside the institutional framework of Sri Lanka and thereby increases their vulnerability at destination” (Weeraratne 2016:59).

29 As seen above, the range of the responses reveals two features of the Sri Lankan state’s interest in controlling women’s reproductive capacities and labor. First, it highlights the narrowing space within which civil society organizations, policymakers, intellectuals and human rights practitioners have to consider the role and reach of the state within international human rights frameworks. On the one hand, the woman worker is burdened with “dual allegiance” (Ishay 2004) to the Sri Lankan state and to a universal notion of human rights and, on the other hand, she experiences the impact of what Cecilia Santos (2007) has called the “dual role of the State as both promoter and violator of human rights” (p. 33). Second, the FBR’s protectionist language and usage of human rights to justify both its deployment and discontinuation, reveals that women’s labor and reproductive labor are more entangled within capitalist forms of accumulation and social inequality. Keeping the woman worker conjoined to her reproductive capacity as a mother and household caregiver, and to her productive capacity as an income generator for the household and state, becomes a state investment in the national economy. But it also represents the failure of human rights praxis to remedy the class, gender, and reproductive capacity-based inequalities that the woman worker experiences.

The plantation clause and fixing labor

30 Under these conditions, the 2015 FBR plantation clause represented the state’s continued and subtle project of sustaining intersectional inequalities in interlocked labor sectors. Apart from minor and seemingly arbitrary changes to certain age restrictions, the inclusion of the clause was the only significant change in the 2015 version of the circular, and drew sharp criticism from activists and human rights circles upon its publication. In April 2015, I consulted lawyers and intellectuals in Colombo and the Hill Country to discuss local approaches to challenging the FBR and its plantation clause. Emergency meetings brought together labor activists, feminist scholars, plantation organization representatives and journalists to address the human rights violations posed by the FBR, and to propose a fundamental rights case through legal channels. But despite these moves, the FBR and the plantation clause remained intact through 2016.

31 Two potential reasons for the state’s inclusion of the plantation clause reveal the relationship between national political shifts and their impacts on gendered labor and social practices across state-sponsored industries. The first is the estate sector’s own economic crisis. In the Government’s Ministry of Plantation Industries 2014 Progress Report, the need to increase labor productivity and address labor shortages in the plantation sector was specifically mentioned alongside the vision for the tea sector: “To ensure the future of the tea industry and promote Ceylon Tea to be the main partner in the global beverage market through strengthening the tea small holding sector and the corporate sector for sustainable development” (Ministry of Plantation Industries

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2014:13). In the same year, the Sri Lanka Export Development Board (EDB) released its “Industry Capability Report” for the tea sector in June 2014 and cited “Skilled and Effective Labour” as one of the sector’s strengths and “Labour Issues (Less Pluckers)” as one of its weaknesses (Perera 2014:10). Lastly, in March 2015, the Planters Association of Ceylon (PAC) reported that 19 of the 23 RPCs had “made a massive loss of nearly Rs. 2,750 million” in 2014. The reasons cited were low labor productivity and the need to sustain the industry, as well as the need to provide employment for workers and their resident families: The plantation industry must thrive in order that we can give opportunities for earning and livelihood sustenance for over one million people that are resident and whose quality of life will depend on the relative fortunes of the plantation industry. If the industry collapses, where would all these people go for employment in order to sustain their livelihoods? (Planters Association of Ceylon 2015)

32 This question prompts a closer examination of where Hill Country Tamil women were actually finding employment, if not on the plantations. While women’s overseas domestic (or “housemaid”) work statistically declined from 67.96 percent of the total migrant labor force in 1996 to 27.8 percent in 2015 (Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment 2016:6), the plantation sector has shown signs of increased levels of overseas domestic work among women in recent years. In Nuwara Eliya district, for instance, the heart of the plantation sector and the district with the highest density of Hill Country Tamil residents in Sri Lanka, the percentage of overseas domestic workers increased from 2.67 percent of the country’s total domestic worker labor force in 2008 to 4.01 percent of country’s total overseas domestic worker labor force in 2012 (Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment 2012, 2012a). Recent anthropological research has demonstrated that overseas migration is a desired means of income generation on the estates, and has induced changes in estate household and kinship dynamics and residential landscapes (Gunetilleke 2008; Balasunderam, Chandrabose, and Sivapragasam 2009; Jegathesan 2011; Jegathesan 2018). Given the economic crisis and the state’s interest in sustaining the tea industry, the plantation clause’s timing and subtle inclusion compels due reflection.

33 The second reason was political. The 2015 FBR was released a month after the January 2015 Presidential Elections, coinciding with the immediate aftermath of the (UNP) coalition’s victory, but also with UN mandates urging the newly elected Government to move forward with the National Plan of Action (NPA) for plantation infrastructure development supported by technical assistance from the UNDP. The blueprint of the NPA 2016–2020 was taken from the 2006 National Plan of Action. In accordance with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it focused on enhancing the infrastructural improvements for the plantation community, including the provision of housing, electricity and water supply resources, as well as issues of environmental sustainability, preventive health, and education (Ministry of Hill Country New Villages 2016).

34 While the NPA 2016 made significant progress in fulfilling infrastructural needs on the estates, it did not mention women plantation residents’ desires to work abroad. Whether deliberate or not, the silence around women’s pursuit of off-plantation and overseas work, alongside the deliberate and explicit inclusion of the plantation clause, implicates the state’s intention to regulate the reproductive capacity of women workers on the estates. More disturbing was that in the 2017 FBR (“MFE/RAD/10/22”), the plantation clause was removed from the text of the circular, and further embedded

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in the prospective employee application created on the basis of this circular.8 In September 2017, I consulted with activists in Sri Lanka to see whether the FBR had been repealed. The response I received from a labor activist friend, in the form of an email, claimed that when the issue was raised with a representative of the SLBFE, it was confirmed as active and the representative “appeared nonplussed by its inclusion.”9

35 Beyond the FBR, the state pursued other trans-sector tactics to keep women workers on the estates. In June 2018, Jetwing Hotels, one of Sri Lanka’s oldest and largest tourism companies, advertised an “experience” called, “Meena Amma’s Line Room Experience” in South-Central Nuwara Eliya district (Jetwing Hotels N.d.). The “experience,” available to tourists describes how “Meena Amma” (“Meena Mother”) cultivates the ultimate experience of tea and the Hill Country for visitors keen to learn about the industry and the region: You have the opportunity to step into the lives of our tea pluckers with the hospitality of Meena Amma, our longtime caretaker. Once a tea plucker herself, Meena Amma grew up and worked in regional estates until she eventually joined us as a gardener at the Warwick Estate. Today, Meena Amma looks after you with an enchanting charm of upcountry hospitality as she hosts a series of local experiences designed around the life of our tea and its pluckers … at Meena Amma’s request … these experiences were crafted, for her to have you join her in the daily routine around the estate. (Jetwing Warwick Gardens N.d.) “Meena Amma’s Line Room Experience” was immediately met with backlash from Sri Lankan civil society given the lack of land and housing rights for all Hill Country Tamils on the estates (Jegathesan 2018) and the operative nostalgia for the days of the empire (Buthpitiya 2018). In response to the criticism, Hiran Cooray, the Chairman of Jetwing, issued the following statement: Meena has been a loyal employee of Jetwing for 12 years, a former tea plucker who we recognized as a talented individual and welcomed into the Jetwing family. She is the housekeeper at Jetwing Warwick Gardens and … wanted a property to manage in the style and life she knows best. I could not say no to her request, and thus Meena Amma’s Line Rooms were born. We do not seek to romanticize their lives, which have historically been very difficult … we are not foolish enough to ignore that yes, not every estate worker is as fortunate as the ones on the Warwick estate. We are a single company, and the most we can do is to at least look after the ones we can. (Jetwing Hotels 2018) Cooray’s response directly connects Meena Amma’s reproductive potential to her productive life by linking her entry into and future in the Jetwing family to her life- long commitment to estate labor. The company’s rhetoric of care recursively embodies colonial agents’ concern for “coolies” and works to fix Hill Country Tamil women on the plantations, with the help of the FBR’s protectionist policing and the plantation clause. While not a representative of the state, Jetwing supplies diverse forms of capital to Sri Lanka’s economy, and in turn, the state directly supports the industry through “government collective spending,” which increased from 31.1 billion rupees in 2012 to 46.4 billion rupees in 2017 (World Travel and Tourism Council 2018:12). Such state investments in the tea and tourism industry encourage us to pause and reflect, not only on the financial value of imperial nostalgia but also the subtle ways in which industries and the state entangle themselves in Hill Country Tamil women workers’ lives. In the plantation sector, the state actively values, produces, and reproduces Hill Country Tamil women’s lives and labor as fixed and central to Sri Lanka’s Hill Country’s landscapes and industrial “operations.”

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Conclusion

36 The entanglements of industry and state policies in women’s labor in Sri Lanka compel a closer examination of how the state vocalizes its desire to maximize profits created by working women, while restricting their choices. Reviewing evidence of the historical linkages between state-backed industries, and overseas domestic work, make clear how “protectionist” claims draw from the language of human rights but fail in their praxis of addressing the fullness of women’s labor aspirations. In this way, the FBR and the plantation clause represent a continuation and recursion of the trust and authority that the authors of the 1916 Sabaragamuwa Commission Report placed in the hands of plantation superintendents, and the knowledge and guidance transmitted to Hill Country Tamil women by government doctors and estate midwives in the 1970s and 1980s. Such a confluence of the Sri Lankan state’s economic investment, rights-based discourse, and drives for industrial sustainability are even clearer in the recent moves of the tourism industry to focus on the fixture of Hill Country Tamil women on the tea estates during the 150-year celebrations of Sri Lanka’s tea industry in 2017.

37 This paper highlights how attention to the continuity of state investments and entanglements in industry, and a closer examination of attempts to fix and locate women workers’ labor, reveal about how state interest in women’s work continues to operate, and the resilience of such strategies. In light of this evidence, the FBR’s 2015 plantation clause, and the embedding of the state and industry’s desire to regulate Hill Country Tamil women workers’ productive and reproductive lives, are in no way surprising. Just like the long heritage of industrial care, and emerging initiatives such as Meena Amma’s Line Room, these tactics will continue to unfold and find new forms of investment and investors. Focusing on the uneven playing field in which the politics of locating and dislocating minority women’s labor play out provides insight into women’s simultaneous inclusion and exclusion within state policies and the subtle projects of nation-building in Sri Lanka.

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NOTES

1. Personal Communication April 20, 2015. 2. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/652-gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism 3. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/659-beyond-economization-state-debt-and-labor 4. United Nations, Committee on the Rights of the Child, CRC/C/SAU/CO/2, 17 March 2006, Para 33 5. Jolly Somasundaram reported that Sri Lanka’s then Council of Ministers approved the FBR in 2007 but that the circular was not implemented until 2013 (Somasundaram 2016). 6. UDHR Article 1 states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (United Nations General Assembly 1948:1). 7. “There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others” (Council of Europe 1950:11). 8. In the 2017 FBR, the application section mentioning the estate superintendent requires the signature of either the Grama Niladhari or Estate Superintendent in order to be approved for applying to work abroad as a domestic worker. In the 2015 FBR, the signature line appears in Line 20 and also asks the same. 9. Personal Email Communication, September 11, 2017.

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ABSTRACTS

In 2013, the Sri Lankan Government issued the Family Background Report (FBR), a circular requiring women to obtain a medical certificate before migrating abroad for domestic work. In 2015, the FBR was revised to further restrict the labor choices of Hill Country Tamil women in the plantation sector. Feminist scholars and activists critique the FBR as an exceptionally restrictive policy that contradicts women’s rights. However, closer examination of the plantation sector’s labor policies and reproductive practices suggests that it is not entirely exceptional but a continuation of the restrictions imposed upon women in Sri Lanka. Drawing from discourse analysis and ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2017, I argue that in the context of the plantation sector the plantation clause signals the resilience of strategic entanglements between the state and industrial policies, and exposes the limits of human rights praxis in securing women’s labor and reproductive rights.

INDEX

Keywords: labor, gender, human rights, plantations, Sri Lanka

AUTHOR

MYTHRI JEGATHESAN Anthropology, Santa Clara University

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Sedition, Securitization, Sexuality: A Conversation between Rohit De and Inderpal Grewal

Inderpal Grewal and Rohit De

1 Rohit De is an Assistant Professor of History and Associate Research Scholar in Law at Yale University. He is interested in how law operates through everyday life, particularly what people—both experts and ordinary men and women—think the law is and how they use this knowledge to negotiate their daily lives. Professor De’s book A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (2018) explores how the Indian constitution, despite its elite authorship and alien antecedents, came alive in the popular imagination such that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, had recourse to it, and argued with it. Mapping the use and appropriation of constitutional language and procedure by diverse groups such as butchers and sex workers, street vendors and petty businessmen, journalists and women social workers, it offers a constitutional history from below. His current research, “Rights from the Left; Decolonization, Diasporas and the Global History of Rebellious Lawyering,” offers an alternate history of universal rights and civil liberties that arose out of Asia and Africa during the period of decolonization. The project follows the careers of lawyers who defended unpopular causes across space and time, to offer an alternate history of universal rights and civil liberties that arise out of Asia and Africa and is mediated through Indian, Chinese and Caribbean diasporas.

2 Inderpal Grewal is Professor and Chair in the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is also Professor in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, the South Asian Studies Council, and affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program. Throughout her career, Professor Grewal has been studying empire as it produces gendered subjects. Her first book, Home and Harem (1995) was about the British empire and what could be called the gendered cultures and subjects of empire. What were these subjects, how they emerged, and what sorts of ways did British and Indian women conceptualize themselves as women, as gendered subjects, against and within the empire? Professor Grewal’s second and third books have also

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been about American empire. The second, Transnational America (2005), focused on America in the world, on how America is perceived and inhabited by those who travel and come here, and on the ways in which imperial power created migrant subjects. Her recent book, Saving the Security State (2017) is very much about the waning of American empire, and how people work through and live and become subjects of this particular waning empire. In all of these books, Professor Grewal’s feminist approach has been to embrace feminism as a project, but also to be very critical, aware and reflexive regarding its inclinations towards modernity and empire, with all of the problems this encapsulates.

3 This conversation1 frames the project of modernity and the state in each of these two scholars’ work, and the ways in which questions of modernity intersect those of “national” and “anti-national” subjectivation. Here, they are interested in how modernity has been formulated in relation to nations, nationalism and commensurate reform movements, and how critiquing these relationships is so deeply informed by feminist scholarship on South Asia, by feminist scholarship on race and ethnicity in the US, the critique of empire in all of these bodies of work.

4 Inderpal: Rohit, perhaps we should begin with your research and the colonial/anti- colonial history of sedition law. Your research shows how anti-colonial lawyering addressed the ways that colonial legal systems created criminality as a threat to the colonial state. And one of the ways that it did so was through these sedition laws. So, sedition/anti-sedition lawyering must have been a big part of this history of lawyering?

5 Rohit: Yes, there are a number of interesting strategies in Indian anti-sedition lawyering.2 Among the earliest, seen in the cases of Tilak (Mukherjee 2017) or Annie Besant (Robb 1976) for instance, was to argue that the words of the accused were not sedition but legitimate criticism of the government, not demands to overthrow it. For instance, in the case of the British communist Philip Spratt (Noorani 2012), who had written a pamphlet calling for a China-like revolution in India, his lawyers argued that Spratt challenged “British imperialism” and not the “government of India.” The term oppressor was used not in a literal sense to the specific government in power, but in a popular sense of people subjected to a foreign rule. The second is a move that Gandhi makes, which is to assert that the impugned act is sedition, that he has committed it and that if the judge believes in the system he works for, he has to give him the maximum punishment possible. This flips the logic of the charge and puts the colonial state on trial before public opinion. After independence, the Allahabad High Court in Ram Nandan v. The State of Uttar Pradesh 1959, comes to the conclusion that there can be no room for sedition in an independent country or in a democracy and declares the provision unconstitutional. This exemplifies the idea that the colonial system of rule has a role in a postcolonial state. However, the Supreme Court brings the provision back, reflecting an underlying belief that colonial tools of governance can be used by a democratically legitimate government, but chooses to interpret the provision of sedition more narrowly. So, it’s kept on the books (Kedarnath v. State of Bihar 1962)

6 Inderpal: And how is it kept on the books?

7 Rohit: The argument of the Supreme Court in Kedarnath’s case is that sedition cannot be mere criticism or an attempt to overthrow the government but has to incite violence and create public disorder (Kedarnath v. State of Bihar 1962). The case had involved a communist politician who was charged for criticizing the Congress government as “a tyranny” and threatening to liquidate “Congress goondas” and “official dogs.” Despite

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violent language in an election meeting, the courts ruled that there was no actual threat of violence or public disorder. The logic being that in a democracy one can argue for a change in government but only through non-violent means. The appellate courts have read “incitement” narrowly, for instance in a case that came out of Punjab following the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi, two Sikh men were charged with sedition for standing in a crowd and shouting “Khalistan Zindabad” and saying they will drive Hindus out of Punjab (Balwant Singh v. State of Punjab 1995). Upon acquitting them, the court noted that nobody responded to their cries, they had no weapons or any ability to carry out the threatened violence when they made these statements, so their speech could not be called seditious. Sedition is only an offense which actively has an attendant element of force.

8 There was also an interesting argument made in the Indian National Army trials when Indian officers of the British army who had joined the INA were tried for waging war against the King. The INA Defense Committee led by Bhulabhai Desai made the argument that since the INA had declared Indian independence, and their government was recognized in international law by Germany, Italy, Ireland, etc.; the accused could be tried as prisoners of war (Desai et. al. 1947). They could be tried for waging war against the King because legally he was no longer their King subsequent to independence. This assertion of postcolonial sovereignty in the INA trial is interesting because it clearly forms the basis of Justice Radhabinob Pal’s dissent in the Tokyo trials (Pal [1948] 1999).

9 Inderpal: Your account of the various interpretations of sedition defines sedition in shifting ways: first, in the context of British colonial rule, it is speech intended to overthrow the government as opposed to “legitimate criticism,” though it is also embraced as a political gambit by Gandhi. Later, it becomes defined as something that is inciting violence, but only if it has some “force” behind it. This history reveals both a legal and a political instrumentality of the term. But I am wondering if more recent cases clarify if speech or acts count as sedition, and whether the target of such speech or acts matters? Or as with Gandhi, it now is only about political tactics? What is now happening in India seems to play out purely in the realm of public opinion, the media, and politics. There seems to be, you know, a lot of loose talk about sedition, a lot of government action and criminalizing, without—as far as one can see, and correct me if I’m wrong—any kind of legal cases and judgments clarifying or interpreting—at this moment in time—what sedition has come to mean. Is there anything that’s happening that changes the interpretations of sedition more recently?

10 Rohit: So, what has happened is like the Pakistani blasphemy case (Jamal 2013)

11 Inderpal: Oh, that case, yes… but that’s blasphemy…

12 Rohit: But it’s—there’s a similarity between sedition and blasphemy, right? So, in Pakistan, you can commit blasphemy against the religion of Islam. It’s—

13 Inderpal: But because it’s an Islamic state…

14 Rohit: The provision in its current form was brought in only in the 1980s but while convictions are rare and have been overturned on appeal, the violence is the process. Anybody can file a complaint, subjecting the accused to arrest, years of legal machinations and public violence, as several of the accused have been lynched before their cases are even investigated.3

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15 Inderpal: So, is it about identifying those critical of the government and sanctioning violence—though not in the court but in public opinion?

16 Rohit: Sedition actually mimics that very closely. What stands in—what Islam stands in for in Pakistan, the state or the government stands in for in India, and as you can see, most of the new sedition cases in the last decade are not brought by the government, but a private individual or organization has gone and demanded that someone be prosecuted for sedition and filed a complaint of sedition. It’s also the process that acts as the punishment in these cases, and there is almost a dispersal of sovereignty through it. It’s interesting that both sedition and blasphemy were brought in as amendments to the Indian Penal Code (India [1860] 2011) to manage the threat of unruly subjects. As Julia Stephens’ works show, sedition was incorporated into the Indian Penal Code (India [1860] 2011) out of fear of Wahhabi extremists in the late 19th century (Stephens 2013:22–52). This was framed as a threat to India. So, there is a sort of deep connection between religion and sedition.

17 Inderpal: There’s a deep religious connection or similarity between blasphemy and sedition, there’s a similar kind of fear in India which also seems to be elicited by religion, or Hindutva that wants to be a religious state, or Khalistan in the case you mentioned?

18 Rohit: The offense of sedition is defined in the Indian Penal Code (India [1860] 2011) as promoting disaffection against the state. So, in a way, the analogy is quite clear. The state compels you to love it and have affection towards it. It’s a kind of forced patriarchal love, maintenance of a filial bond with the threat of force.

19 Inderpal: But what’s so interesting is that these individual citizens are bringing these accusations and filing cases in the courts. Also, what does it then mean when it’s not the state that’s saying, “Love the state,” but it’s people or some citizen who is saying to another, “Love the state or else”? This is a moment in which a kind of Hindu nationalism has fulfilled its dream, right? That the Hindu citizen and the state have become one.

20 Rohit: But it also goes back to the problem of Indian nationalism. One critique of the colonial state was that it was a foreign state, and foreigners cannot govern Indians as they don’t have our interests in mind. By extension, the state form itself should be seen as an alien form. However, many strands of nationalism separate the state from its origin. Many nationalists in 1947 argued that the colonial mechanisms of government, including the police, army, and legal system could carry on because the government had changed in nature and become a representative one. There’s also a kind of political fantasy that Narendra Modi demonstrates when upon being elected as prime minister he says Indians are finally free after a thousand years of rule. There’s a sense that the imagined Hindu community now owns the state. So even though in the past the RSS and Jan Sangh had their civil liberties curbed, the aim remains to capture the state rather than expand the ambit of civil liberties.

21 Inderpal: There is also the lack of distinction between the nation and the state in a different way than in the post-independence liberal national period—now the nation- state is imagined as a product of a claimed majority identity. So, whoever is against this Hindutva state is guilty of sedition, and perhaps the standard of incitement is no longer relevant?

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22 Rohit: In both the liberal nationalist and the Hindu nationalist iterations, sedition is not a problem, because the people can vote in an election and change governmental forms. There is a legitimate path to political change—that did not exist under colonial rule—so sedition can continue to exist as an offense. After all, the state is “ours”; and only those who see themselves as separate from “us” will challenge the state.

23 Inderpal: Now the state is ours. And we are the state.

24 Rohit: We are the state.

25 Inderpal: But at the same time, “we are the state” is a gendered expression; it’s completely masculine through the way the logic of nationalist violence works, masculinizing the Hindutva subject and giving him greater power over others—even if there are women followers. But if Hindutva forces are trying to capture both the nation and the state, and both are presumed to have become completely one, this changes citizenship, changes the nature of being a minority in the state, and Indian democracy vis à vis its minorities. The charge of sedition has come up now, in a more intensive way, even if there have been insurgencies against the Indian state somewhere or the other since 1947. Now, as you are saying, particular citizens are accusing other citizens of sedition. What is also frightening is that the idea of who is Hindu, a citizen, a national is being expanded more and more and giving lots more people power over non-Hindus. Perhaps the person who charges someone with sedition shows himself to be a proper citizen of this Hindutva state, or can take advantage of having a Hindu identity to get someone they don’t like into trouble.

26 Rohit: I think that in 1947 we had a state that had aspirations of presenting itself as pluralist. And now it’s a state that is mono-cultural—homogeneous. I mean, the narrative of this new homogenous state is very much there in Modi’s language, so even the new GST tax that he started is framed as “one nation, one tax.” And it’s about bringing the states together through this new nationalism, despite the federal agreement at independence. There’s an argument that homogeneity is almost natural, all nations have to move towards homogeneity.

27 Inderpal: But that is such a strange idea, right? The idea of homogenous nations as the model of the nation-state?

28 Rohit: But wasn’t that the model of the nation-state?

29 Inderpal: Yes, it was, but that’s such a universalized and problematic notion of the normative nation-state, produced by the treaty of Westphalia that imagined the end of the European religious wars by boundaries that were seen to ensure peaceful, stable sovereign nations and co-existence—maybe between and within the nation too. Conflict with outsiders was the problem, but now we have countries producing large numbers of their population as outsiders from among their own citizenry and attacking pluralism as a problem. State legitimacy is no longer claimed through biopolitics or development or welfare (though those issues are not abandoned wholly in India) but rather through the process of constructing new nationalisms through securitization against new and old enemies. Those who are citizens can now be turned into enemies of the state. For instance, both US and British leaders—as well as others—say, multiculturalism is a problem, as if the notion of the nation as community was about sameness rather than about liberal equality even. Notions of racial and religious monocultures as natural to nation-states seem to be a prevailing idea.

30 Rohit: So that’s the framing.

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31 Inderpal: The production of India as a Hindu nation—as a monoculture that sees culture as a particular kind of sameness, particularly of religion is prevalent in so many places.

32 Rohit: There’s a deep sense of inferiority and insecurity that undergirds this imagination of nationalism, where it’s never independent of the West and it’s always in competition with the West. Hindu nationalism also imagines Islam as a former colonial power and constructs it similarly.

33 Inderpal: It seems that this kind of insecurity produces the powerful as the most injured. Nationalisms argued that it was the oppressed who were most injured but now this has shifted to the powerful. There is once again the postcolonial condition of using both an anti-colonial nationalism and a colonial form and law—recuperating injury and repression of a Hindu nation that really never existed in this form.

34 Rohit: Maybe that’s a good place to think about your argument about securitization, that what we see now are modes of power that are about sovereignty that is not just the power of the state. That sovereignty is now detached from the state and is diffused— given to some powerful citizens. I was wondering, one, if you could talk a little bit more about that, and secondly, why it is that individuals become willing subjects to carry this out.

35 Inderpal: There are some connections between what’s happening in India and what’s happening in the US, particularly the harnessing of “terrorism” as a threat to the nation (now the Hindu nation, unlike in the past) and emergent right-wing nationalisms. The projects of securitization—the use of the idea of a threat to national security that enables the militarizing of the population—is interesting to me because of how people who see themselves as citizens take on the task of national security. What you say about sedition being a charge brought by individuals against other individuals then fits what I see happening in other national contexts such as the US, where the exhortation after 9/11, was “if you see something, say something.” How then, one might ask, is this situation different from the ways in which people participated in nationalism in the past, in either postcolonial or anti-colonial contexts? I think what is remarkable is the emergence of a new nationalism based on a religious idea, Hindutva, that is much more a populist and authoritarian project than the democratic aspirations of the past. Liberal democracy is not a goal of this Indian government, which has rather different sorts of aspirations to power and authority.

36 Rohit: I was wondering about our own individual relationship with technologies and corporations: it’s quite clear our smartphones and our computers are watching us. Your book suggests there are ways in which the state’s desire to gather information causes harm to minorities, but it’s also frustrated because it allows for a process through which certain citizens carry out personal vendettas using state structures (Grewal 2017:1–33). Also, while people are suspicious of the state’s will, there’s a lack of suspicion with regard to private institutions, and people voluntarily hand over information to them.

37 Inderpal: The question of surveillance becomes powerful because of what you are suggesting—that lots of people use digital technology because it signals progress— economic, social and individual. It’s a source of fear and of pleasure. It can get people jobs in this tech sector, and it can also seem to be making life easier. Its seductions are many. But part of the problem is that many don’t see it as threatening because the tech

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section is a private industry for the most part, and it seems to be apart from the state. Because it is not the state, many don’t have the same concerns about it as the power of government surveillance. That is the way Aadhar was initially marketed, though now it’s become a gigantic surveillance mechanism of the state that is bent on enumerating citizens—once again, identifying some as citizens and some as noncitizens. What is also scary is that if the state is now captured by religious nationalism, the project of surveillance and of sorting is now granting even more power of a somewhat different sort. Not biopolitical, and not even pastoral, in the Foucauldian way—but a forging of identities that are both in and outside the state. The state is also a different kind of entity because it has been captured not just by a Hindutva project but by corporations and oligarchies who are also patriarchal. That means that who’s capturing the data and why is sometimes clear and sometimes not. Sedition—and not just sedition but horrendous acts such as lynchings—might be one way to charge those identified as protesting Hindutva and devolve sovereignty onto those who identify with this nationalism. At the same time, there are also upheavals and protests because all nationalisms are unstable and the residual aspects of liberal democracy mean we desire something from the state, while we fear the state and our demands from the state are not ceasing. Hence, we see also the narrative of corruption and concern over surveillance. With Modi and Hindutva, there are ideological ends which are also global- economic ones.

38 Rohit: I don’t think that the project can be completely explained in a kind of political economy perspective at all. It’s also trying to create a different kind of set of hierarchies, a new form of social order which places Muslims in a clear hierarchy below Hindus. And I think this hierarchy allows for several men—both Hindu women and Hindu men of lower castes to claim higher positions than they did historically. I was thinking recently, both in the US context and in the Indian context, with the kind of sort of debates about sexual harassment in the US and the controversies over marriage and conversion in India. So, the same week the Supreme Court intervened on behalf of Muslim women holding that triple talaq was invalid, 4 it also questioned in the Hadiya case the ability of adult women to consent to convert to Islam.5 Taken together, it might appear that the project was about taking away male privilege from Muslim men, that they can’t divorce at will but neither can they marry women from outside their community.

39 Inderpal: I agree that the project is not just about the neoliberal political economy, because the nation is not just an economic entity.

40 Rohit: I think there is—and maybe I’m reading too much into this—but these projects put people in a bind because the assertion of rights for marginalized men is framed against that of protecting women.

41 Inderpal: Perhaps you can do both—and feminists have done both. The feminist work on nationalism has spent a lot of time thinking about problematic nationalist that emerged after women supported nationalism. The intersectional and transnational feminist project has worked to reject the logic of protection of women through war or incarceration that often is punitive only towards poor and racial minorities. But I agree that this anti-Muslim animus is about more than capitalism because Islamophobia is not just that, though populist politics will use it to capture the state and capital as well. I agree that even the “triple talaq” ruling was about the imperial project of rescue of Muslim women from the Muslim men. It’s definitely that.

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42 Rohit: The state makes the case for either being unable to exercise consent.

43 Inderpal: But what’s also interesting about the Hadiya case is that the court allowed her to leave her father’s house but only to go to another carceral space, that of the dormitory, where she was under the custody of the warden (Shafin Jahan v. Ashokan K. N. 2018; Scroll Staff 2018). At the time this was written, she was still incarcerated and separated from her husband. This case and the targeting of Muslim males reveals that the state itself is Islamophobic, male and patriarchal. It imagines its goal as destroying the male opposition. However, there is some indication that young women and feminists are pushing against these masculine authorities in movements such as “pinjra tod,” for instance.6 Hadiya’s case is classic, I think, when a young woman says she has desires and pushes back against the patriarchy of her family. It also means that patriarchy is challenged too.

44 Rohit: It might be useful to turn to your discussion of the “security moms” in your book, where you talk about how women and some feminists embrace securitization and policing in the name of national security (Grewal 2017:118–43). Since the 1970s there has been a movement of conservative women in the US, but also in the Hindu nationalist movements; women were seen as foot soldiers rather than ideologues (Sen 2007). But over the last eight or nine years or so, we’ve seen the emergence of the young female, English-speaking, Hindutva supporters on the internet as well, who use vitriolic language against others, particularly other women. Is there a “security feminist” aspect there in India too? I mean, I don’t think we have security moms but there are certainly those who work for and support the Hindu nation-state.

45 Inderpal: In the US context, I defined “security feminism” as a feminism that is empowered by working on counter-insurgency and security projects. I don’t think we have the same thing in India because women have not been part of the security narrative in India in the same way or to the same extent. There are heroic policewomen —Kiran Bedi as a supercop comes to mind. She’s the closest to the security feminist model that I identify in the US, but it’s not a pervasive model of empowerment in India, despite the Hindutva women. Empowerment in India still remains confined within development regimes. Those Hindutva women have always been there and most women are not feminists either. I think the Hindutva women see themselves as patriots and Hindus and perhaps not as empowered by breaking a glass ceiling. Moreover, feminist movements in India have not addressed questions of the border or securitization so much, of the problematic of territoriality as related to nationalism, of counterinsurgencies so much, except of course for activists such as Arundhati Roy, or those who work in regions where the military is used to suppress people—Kashmir, for example. However, there are other sorts of securitizations women do engage in— protecting the patriarchal family against changing sexual cultures, for example, or against migrant and poor men, or maintaining caste boundaries. But this kind of securitization remains as a project that needs to be engaged in a feminist way because the Hindutva project is gaining ground on the back of the racist argument of the sexual predation of Muslim males, an anti-Pakistan narrative, and a kind of transnational Islamophobia generated by US geopolitics. Islamophobia reveals itself through talk of the predatory behavior of Muslim males—the fictitious “love jihad” stuff—but also through narratives that Muslim women produce too many children, the sort of narratives that are identified as signs of racism. So, I think that those aspects mean that there’s a renewed narrative of nationalism in terms of Islamophobia that has to be

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fought in all kinds of venues. Sedition charges are being brought not just against men but also against women, especially those who resist Hindutva.

46 Rohit: The one difference I find between how US and Indian forms operate is the capacity of the state. The US government is able to track most of its citizens with ease, in ways that the Indian state may fantasize about but does not have the capacity to achieve. To what extent is infrastructural power at the heart of this? The US state is interesting because it claims to be a minimalist state, one that does not guarantee its citizens the range of services that the Indian state and other states do. However, it’s able to extend its surveillance and track its citizens far more intrusively than other visibly interventionist states.

47 Inderpal: I agree that state capacity for surveillance in India may not be as total as in the US, though the biometric project like Aadhar does result in a surveillance state. State surveillance capability, however, can be more powerful in some regions than in others—Kashmir, Punjab, the Northeast? One of the interesting documents that I’ve been reading is the work of K. P. S Gill (1999), who talks about how he changed policing in Punjab during the 1980s and 90s. And one of the claims Gill makes is that before he was put in charge, the police stations were disorganized, without clear means to gather and share information. Police jurisdictions were compartmentalized. He says his work as security expert was to use police stations to gather information and share it in a systematic way. He states that the obstacle to this process was turf war between bureaucracies and politicians. He claims he eliminated these battles once the power of the police was accepted and acknowledged by the Central government. He relates that he took all village police stations and connected them and made them share their information, creating a very robust web of information. Whether or not he was able to achieve or use this information network to the extent that he claims, his security practices led to a number of deaths through “encounters” and charges of human rights abuses. The region was flooded by security personnel, many of whom did not seem to be accountable to anyone. What this example shows is the state’s aspirations towards a surveillance network, rather than its achievement of it.

48 Rohit: And also, I think certain kinds of bodies are more to experience surveillance than others. So, if you’re Muslim, you’re more likely to be securitized or surveilled?

49 Inderpal: Right, but at the same time, the state controls not by totalizing surveillance but by allowing police to randomly kill people—the “encounters” that happened during that period, including the harassment and violence through which police officers acted like vigilantes.

***

50 Inderpal: I guess we could turn back to sedition, right? Sedition charges as the securitization of citizenship, but also sedition as protest? Perhaps protest against this surveillance and security state? But what then do we make of the ways in which corporations and media companies are gathering and funneling and using information —and sharing it with the government? We don’t have that account in sedition at all.

51 Rohit: Yeah, and what makes the Indian case different in some ways is the story about piracy, media piracy and hacking. I am reminded of Aaron Schwartz’s suicide and how university campuses are heavily policed regarding questions of illegal downloads.7 But in India, texts are free, and the Delhi High Court for instance ruled in favor of mass

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photocopying of college textbooks.8 There is a repeated panic and media companies keep trying to educate people about property rights, but the kind of market discipline that has been achieved in the US has not been in India. Demonetization was ultimately an attempt to control and make visible market transactions. There’s a way in which the government creates fiscal emergencies to sort of control an unruly market, to use draconian laws to create an economic space.

52 Inderpal: One of the points to take away from conducting research on the US is that we imagine it is less unruly than it is. There is continual disharmony between the Federal Government and the states, and sharing of information between government agencies and offices is spotty in some ways and better in others. The struggles over race and class are critical to understanding the faultlines of liberal democracy, as is the violence of the police and military towards racial minorities. Moreover, regulatory actions are often unable (or perhaps deliberately unwilling) to control corporations, because then the government can get information from corporations that they could not themselves collect. Also, capital is wily, deterritorialized and will do anything to disrupt competitors. There is so much cheating and gaming done by capital, and the 2008 market crash was an example of this misbehavior by the banks and the state’s unwillingness and inability (or complicity) to control them. That economists are using emotion to study the market shows rather than explains through rationality (or the clear failure of “rational choice” arguments) that rumor and whim seem more useful for understanding market behavior (Akerlof and Schiller 2010). There is a lot of mystification of kind of difference between ungovernability and governability regarding the “West” and postcolonial states. I really wonder about that distinction because I think capital is ungovernable everywhere, even as authoritarian leaders and states try to capture and control it. For one thing, it’s too deterritorialized.

53 Rohit: That seems to unravel the basis of the modern 19th-century nation-state that tied the idea of a national economy to a territory. I was wondering how this would help us think of older territorial conflicts and the problem of sedition. For instance, to return to Punjab and the demand for Khalistan, where did cultural difference and the creation of Punjab as a keystone to the Indian economy frame both political movements and the state’s responses to it?

54 Inderpal: As with all nationalisms, the extent and power of that version of Sikh nationalism will be rethought by historians, given the complex caste and religious history of Punjab, as well as the participation of diasporic communities. That insurgent movement was made more powerful by the central government’s actions and then repressed by it. This Hindutva nationalism is much more powerful because charges of sedition are just one of the many ways that it claims legitimacy, though it’s not the only way that it uses violence for power. And the diaspora is also harnessed in the same way. But the larger point is that territory still seems to matter. Borders and walls remain as a spectacle of the nation-state, performing a claim to sovereignty that is not shared by all citizens, but which might still matter to them. For example, crowds of people still flock to the Wagah border with Pakistan to see the performance of nationalism and national distinction, which is sung and danced through Bollywood songs accompanied by a theatrical, almost parodic, military parade. The crowd is riled up to sing along with the music, and young women are invited from the stands to dance in the very space that will later be the parade route for the soldiers. There is a lot of love of the state

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generated by the performance, a love that allows amnesia about the violence performed by the state.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Gill, K. P. S. 1999. “Endgame in Punjab: 1988–1993.” Faultlines, May 1. South Asia Terrorism Portal. Retrieved March 8, 2019 (http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/publication/faultlines/volume1/ fault1-kpstext.htm).

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Robb, Peter. 1976. “The Government of India and Annie Besant.” Modern Asian Studies. 10(1):107– 30.

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NOTES

1. Our grateful thanks to Kelly Tran for transcribing our conversation. We could not have done this without her work. 2. Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code (1860) defines sedition as “Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, [***] the Government established by law in [India], [***] shall be punished with [imprisonment for life], to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to three years, to which fine may be added, or with fine” (India [1860] 2011). For an overview of the colonial history of sedition, see Arvind Ganachari (2009:95). For an account on current debates on Sedition, see Liang (2016), “Sedition and the Status of Subversive Speech in India” (https://thewire.in/law/ sedition-and-the-status-of-subversive-speech-in-india). 3. For an account of the Pakistani blasphemy laws see, Osama Siddique and Zahra Hayat’s (2008) “Unholy Speech and Holy Laws: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan—Controversial Origins, Design Defects, and Free Speech Implications.” 4. See Shayara Bano v. Union of India 2017. The judgment was the result of a number of Muslim women’s organizations successfully mounting a legal challenge to the practice of triple talaq (talaq-e-biddat) with the majority of the Supreme Court holding that the practice had no legal value (Shayara Bano v. Union of India and ORS, Supreme Court of India 2017). 5. The Kerala High Court annulled a marriage and conversion of an adult Hindu woman to a Muslim man on her father’s complaint that she had not done this of her own choice but was under malignant influence (a “love jihad” case). Instead of overturning the judgment immediately, the Supreme Court reheard the case, ordered the National Investigative Agency to make enquiries, placed her under protective custody and took seven months to uphold her autonomy to make decisions regarding her faith and her marriage. The court did ultimately find in favor of Hadiya and state the fairly obvious point that an adult woman can give her consent to marriage, but this was after several months of being under investigation from anti-terror agencies and being subject to separation from her husband and confinement. For an account, see DailyO, “Hadiya case: It took Supreme Court to rule that adult Indians can marry who they want” (Dailybite 2018). 6. The “Pinjra Tod” campaign was led by female college students to protest discriminatory curfew times for women that sought to confine them to their hostels by late evening in the interests of their security. See Srila Roy (2016), “Breaking the Cage.” 7. Aaron Schwartz was an internet activist committed to freedom of information and one of the main coders for Creative Commons. He was indicted by the US government for attempting to download and distribute thousands of academic articles from JSTOR. Facing multiple legal charges, he committed suicide at the age of 26 (Naughton 2015). 8. The Delhi High Court rejected a challenge brought by leading academic presses, including Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, against a photocopy shop in Delhi University for infringing copyright by producing course packs for students. It was ruled that large portions of the textbooks could be copied reproduced for imparting education, a constitutional right, to prevent it from becoming a commodity accessible only to the rich (The Chancellor and Masters of Colleges of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Services 2016).

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ABSTRACTS

In this article, Inderpal Grewal and Rohit De discuss the history of the application of India’s law against sedition in relation to questions of sexuality and gender. The conversation between them frames the project of modernity and the state in each of these two scholars’ work, and the ways in which questions of modernity intersect those of “national” and “anti-national” subjectivation. Here, they are interested in how modernity has been formulated in relation to nations, nationalism and commensurate reform movements, and how critiquing these relationships is so deeply informed by feminist scholarship on South Asia, by feminist scholarship on race and ethnicity in the US, and the critique of empire in all of these bodies of work.

INDEX

Keywords: sedition, securitization, sexuality, law, India, nationalism

AUTHORS

INDERPAL GREWAL Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies, Yale University

ROHIT DE History and Law, Yale University

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