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For India’s ‘third intercourse,’ acceptance is slowed by colonialism’s legacy

(RNS) — The Hindu epic Mahabharata tells the story of a warrior, born as a feminine named Shikhandini, who seeks to avenge a dishonor in her previous life. To take action, she transforms right into a male, taking the identify Shikhandin. Shikhandin causes the autumn of the nice warrior Bhishma, who had taken oath to not battle a girl or one who had been a girl.

Shikhandin shouldn’t be the one transgender hero of the Mahabharata. Arjuna, a key warrior, takes on the looks of a ravishing girl with the intention to stay incognito in exile. 

Indian philosophy, mentioned Lavanya Vemsani, a scholar specializing in Indian historical past and religions, has lengthy thought-about the soul past gender identification. The supreme being from whom the universe emerged, Brahman, seems within the historical sacred writings referred to as the Vedas, with out gender. Innumerable mythological tales affirm that an individual can select to embrace the male or feminine kind, relying on the circumstances.

When the nation’s Supreme Courtroom handed down its landmark 2014 ruling recognizing transgender Indians as a 3rd gender separate from men and women, declaring that each one individuals have the constitutional proper to self-identify their gender, the judges had been in a way affirming concepts about gender that had circulated in India for 1000’s of years.


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The court docket’s rulings had been aimed primarily at hijras, a broad demographic that features transgender, transsexual and intersex communities, who had been as soon as broadly accepted, as gender fluidity was all through South Asia. 

However public attitudes towards transgender individuals have been sluggish to alter, nonetheless hewing to European concepts about sexuality launched by Nineteenth-century British colonial rulers. This overseas elite dramatically altered the prevailing cultural understanding of gender, attaching appreciable stigma and discrimination to the transgender group that continues at the moment. 

It took 4 years after its 2014 ruling for the excessive court docket to scrap a colonial-era regulation that criminalized homosexual intercourse. A 12 months after that, India’s Parliament handed a regulation defending transgender rights. However hijras are nonetheless India’s most socially excluded group.

The hijras’ fortunes started to fall within the 1830s, based on analysis by Jessica Hinchy, a historian at Nanyang Technological College in Singapore. Earlier than then, hijras had acquired patronage from the Mughals, Muslim rulers who managed massive components of South Asia for greater than 300 years, and from the Marathas — Hindu kings who dominated a lot of central India.

Khushi Mir, left, a transgender Kashmiri, relaxes with associates after a gathering of group members within the outskirts of Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir, on June 4, 2021. Mir and 4 others created a volunteer group to distribute meals. They supplied ration kits for a whole bunch of individuals, lots of them make-up artists, singers and matchmakers who’ve misplaced their livelihoods throughout the pandemic. (AP Picture/Dar Yasin)

Within the 18th century, in northern India, hijras could be invited to carry out for noble and royal ladies. One other transgender group, the Khwaja sara, who stay primarily in at the moment’s Pakistan, had been employed as guards, army commanders, high-ranking state officers and even as spies or tax collectors. “Hijras had been usually of humble standing however deserving of the patronage of state and efficiency culturally valued,” mentioned Hinchy.

From the 1830s onward, as Hinchy present in her analysis, in some areas of British India hijras started to be seen as “ungovernable and a risk,” she mentioned. Public nuisance legal guidelines enacted within the 1850s allowed policing of transgender and different marginalized individuals in “respectable areas.” Extra concerted campaigns, which had the help of elite Indians, known as for “extinction or for hijras to die out,” Hinchy mentioned.

Part 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the regulation undone in 2018, was launched in 1861. Reflecting Victorian morality, it designated homosexual intercourse as “unnatural offences” and “carnal intercourse towards the order of nature,” mentioned Anjali Gopalan, government director of the Naz Basis Belief, a nonprofit that first challenged the regulation in court docket in 2001.

These oppressive legal guidelines and customs have left an enduring impression. Hijras at the moment principally stay on the fringes of society, incomes their livelihood by way of intercourse work or by performing blessings at weddings and the start of a kid. Extra broadly, all transgender communities undergo stigma and discrimination. Suicide is disproportionately widespread amongst transgender Indians and youngsters who’re trans typically drop out of faculty resulting from bullying. Typically households are the primary ones to shun their very own transgender members. “Simply because legal guidelines change doesn’t imply attitudes will change,” mentioned Gopalan. 

COVID-19 lockdowns additional worsened the state of affairs of transgender individuals, particularly intercourse employees, as lots of them misplaced their livelihoods. Falling again on their households was not an choice for a lot of. Aruvi, a transgender individual in Hyderabad, began a “transkitchen” with the assistance of three associates from the queer group, who cooked meals and delivered it to the hijra group and different marginalized teams. “Starvation was a giant killer,” mentioned Aruvi, “as there weren’t many sources for affordable and free meals.”

Regardless of Hinduism’s quite a few accounts of gods with female and male attributes, Vemsani mentioned, the conservative values held by many Hindus at the moment “have little or no to do with India’s historical custom.”

It’s not that the tales of the gods’ gender fluidity are suppressed. In one in every of his types, the distinguished god Shiva is joined together with his consort, Parvati, and depicted because the half-male and half-female Ardhnarishwara. Within the Hindu custom of Vaishnava, the deity Lakshminarayan is a composite type of Vishnu and his feminine consort, Lakshmi.

The deity Ayyappa, worshipped principally in southern India, is believed to be the results of the union between Shiva and Vishnu that happened when Vishnu took on the type of an enchantress, Mohini, to avoid wasting the world from a demon.


RELATED: Transgender women are finding some respect in India, but a traditional gender-nonconforming group — hijras — remains stigmatized


These tales stay facet by facet with the legacy of European sexual morality. “Colonization left an enormous harm psychologically, morally and emotionally,” mentioned Jeffery D. Lengthy, a professor of faith and Asian research at Elizabethtown School in Pennsylvania. “A lot data has been erased or distorted. It might be time to rediscover and perceive the misplaced previous.”

Right this moment’s Hindus want look no additional than the saint Basavanna, a legendary devotee of Shiva, who rejected the constraints of gender in a devotional poem written within the twelfth century: “Look right here, pricey fellow, I put on these males’s garments just for you,” it reads. “Generally I’m man, generally I’m girl.”

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