Gayatri Reddy
A few years ago, the first organisation offering medical services for ‘men who have sex with men (MSM) and kothis’ was established in the south Indian city of Hyderabad. On hearing about the organisation, members of the hijra community (the socalled third sex or indigenous transgendered category) asked me, the itinerant anthropologist, to find out more about this much needed clinic – ‘our kothi clinic’ – as they referred to it, invoking the category and social formation loosely translated in anthropological and public health literature as an effeminate man who is most often the recipient in male same-sex encounters. ‘Last month, one of my “customers” from Saudi [Arabia] told me about it. I believe this clinic is only for us – kothis here and in the Garden [a popular same-sex cruising area in the city]’, Shanti, a hijra sex worker, explained, including in her lexical label both her fellow hijras and the kothis in the Garden. Later that same week, when speaking to self-identified kothis in the Garden, I was reassured that the clinic was indeed going to be established and that it was for ‘all MSM and kothis … but please tell hijras to come only on Sundays’. On further inquiry, I was told that this request was on account of the hijras’ stigma and its potential contagion: ‘If hijras come during the week, what will people think? Everyone will know this is a “homosex” clinic then, and our izzat (respect) will go. You can understand how this will look … So you tell them’, Rakesh told me.
In Rakesh’s statement, hijras are clearly included as a recognisable MSM subjectivity/community, even as they are simultaneously excluded on the basis of respect (izzat) and the shame (sharm) of visibility. For hijras, this incorporation into the MSM or ‘men who have sex with men’ rubric, while a welcome avenue through which to access their ‘right’ to healthcare, is nevertheless an awkward habitation; in most contexts, they see themselves neither as ‘men’ nor as necessarily ‘sexual’, invoking instead their ‘traditional’ perception as divinely blessed asexual figures. Further, even as hijras articulate themselves within a kothi framework – a category and social formation widely acknowledged to have originally derived from hijra discourse/practice (Cohen 2006) – they do not necessarily accept the moral logics dictating their insertion into this social landscape and the economies of care outlined by Rakesh in the earlier vignette.
Drawing on such differential constructions of sexuality, stigma, respect and the need for care, this chapter explores the fraught deployments of the signifiers ‘MSM’, ‘kothi’ and ‘hijra’ in Hyderabad, and their increasingly complex and fluid circulations within the semantic fields of AIDS and sexual rights discourses. In the altered landscape of post-AIDS enterprise India – what Lawrence Cohen refers to in a recent article as ‘AIDS Cosmopolitanism’, i.e. ‘an imagined formation of dislocated agents using the economically fortified enterprise of AIDS prevention to support its own covert agendas’ (2006: 271) – it is these kinds of friction between and among such frameworks that reveal their complex genealogies and the moral logics of self and other making in the contemporary sexual terrain of India. Reflecting on these kinds of tension, Cohen ends his article with an interesting question: ‘What kind of ethics and what kind of care are possible and likely under contingent instances of particular global conjunctures?’ (2006: 301).
In this chapter, I engage this question/issue – the ethics and politics of care – addressing how these play out in the lives of hijras, deeply implicated and simultaneously marginalised as they are in the terrain of AIDS cosmopolitanism. Specifically, I refract this question through the plural and particular logics at play between the cosmopolitanisms of hijras and their public health interlocutors in Hyderabad. I argue that the seeming ineffectiveness of existing health programmes, translated in hijras’ understanding to a lack of care, needs to be understood through several dialectical tensions – between emerging definitions of hijras as rights-bearing sexual minorities and their continued representations as stigmatised social figures, between local moral economies of izzat (respect) and sharm (shame), and between representations of self and other in terms of sexual and asexual difference.
In much of the early literature, hijras have been represented as social pariahs, stigmatised and set apart on the basis of their transgressive gender identification and their location beyond the domain of procreative sexuality (Vyas and Shingala 1987, among others). Stemming in part from their bodily disfigurement (an ideal but not always realised genital excision) and from their ambiguous gender identification, hijras are often constructed in the popular imaginary as ‘dirty’, socially marginal outcasts who ‘do not have any sharm [shame]’ in the words of my next-door neighbours (see also Sharma 1989). Hijras in turn contribute to this construction by explicitly engaging in practices that subvert norms of middle-class morality, such as threatening to expose their lack of genitalia if their demands are not met. From the perspective of mainstream, middle-class society, hijras, defined as they are by and through their lack of a normal procreative body and their subsequent lack of potential for shame, are among the most recognisably marginalised figures in Indian society, indelibly located on the margin, as physically, socially and morally stigmatised bodies.
Given this marginalised location, their election, as hijras, to political office in north India a few years ago is arguably a very significant event in their recent history (Bearak 2001). Apparently, it was precisely their gendered and sexual difference as asexual ‘neutralists’ that provided their transcendent morality in the political sphere. Explicitly projecting themselves as individuals without the encumbrances of family, gender and caste affiliations, and thereby ‘freed’ from greed and nepotism, hijras successfully declared themselves as perfect antidotes to the rampant corruption and immorality of Indian politics. As one hijra candidate’s slogan stated, ‘you don’t need genitals for politics; you need brains and integrity’. In fact, it is expressly the lack of genitals and any expression of gendered, sexed and kinship-mediated ties that apparently makes (or made) hijras ideal political leaders.
But what does this emphasis on their difference, their location beyond the social categories of gender, procreative sexuality and kinship mean for hijra marginality? As I argue elsewhere (Reddy 2003), invocations of marginality on the basis of sexuality and kinship, far from remaking normative institutions, appear to reinscribe their hegemonic importance, thereby undercutting hijras’ subversive potential. Such mobilisations tie into popular negative constructions of hijras and often increase their stigma and suffering, as evinced by recent studies that document the violence directed at this community (PUCL 2003; Narrain 2004).
In recent years, one manifestation of hijras’ stigma and suffering has been the devastation of the community by AIDS. With little access to healthcare, seroprevalence rates have skyrocketed, crossing 68 per cent in at least one early study (Kumta et al. 2002). This study, conducted in a municipal hospital in Mumbai, was the first to collect data specific to hijras – or in public health discourse, the transgendered (TG) community, and it is only since 2004 that the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) has begun to disaggregate MSM and TG data. Of the various high-risk groups in recent NACO sentinel surveillance data – female sex workers, injecting drug users, migrants, MSM and TG – it is only the last two groups that record an increase in HIV prevalence rates from data pertaining to the same city, Mumbai. And while the increase in these figures between 2006 and 2007 surveillance data is less than 1 per cent in the MSM category/group (from 7.6 per cent to 8.4 per cent), it is over 12 per cent in the TG group, with HIV prevalence rates rising to 42.2 per cent in 2007, from 29.6 per cent in 2006 (NACO 2008; see also Setia et al. 2006).
While sentinel surveillance data are more scarce for Hyderabad, my personal experience with hijras in the city warrants similar conclusions. Within the last decade, of the approximately 32 sex workers I knew well, 11 have died, most if not all from AIDS-related causes. Four are currently infected with HIV and have left Hyderabad to throw themselves at the mercy of the families they had been forced out of a decade earlier. Three others live together in a small town a few hours’ distance from the city. The rest are scattered across the city and state, eking out their existence as best they can with their limited (and rapidly shrinking) resources. Given this scenario and growing rates of seroprevalence, perhaps the most urgent questions we need to ask are why there have been few public health efforts directed at this community, and why the few that exist have been so ineffective, despite efforts to attend to so-called ‘indigenous’ communities at risk through the fundingsaturated AIDS enterprise.
One potential answer, I argue, lies in the ways that stigma and ‘othered’ difference get refracted along the faultlines of sexuality, gender and class, and play themselves out along individualised pathways mediated by behavioural public health models of ‘subjects/groups at high risk’, with devastating consequences for hijras, among others. As the opening vignette of this chapter illustrated, anxieties about visible signs of (homo)sexual stigma reveal the social and political geographies of blame – from its initial attachment to western gay bodies to the supposedly indigenous transgendered (TG) body of the hijra. And it is through negotiations of value within the moral economies of izzat and sharm that such mappings acquire their ethical force, especially in the imagined terrain of AIDS cosmopolitanism.
Since the first detection of HIV in India in 1984, the numbers of HIV-positive individuals have increased at an alarming rate. In 2007 the official government estimate indicates 2.31 million people living with HIV/AIDS in India, with an estimated adult HIV prevalence of 0.34 per cent, with much higher estimates within high-risk groups, as noted earlier (NACO 2008).
With the help of the World Bank, other multilateral organisations and NGOs, the Indian government has in recent years actively begun to address this challenge. In this endeavour, it has been helped by a partial reconceptualisation of the epidemiological categories through which the public health community addresses the issue. In a bid to be more ‘culturally sensitive’, that is, partly in response to acknowledging the existing cross-cultural variation in constructions of sexual subjectivity, the CDC adopted the category of MSM or men who have sex with men to replace the earlier category ‘homosexual’. Within this new classification, communities such as hijras and kothis – who do not necessarily identify as homosexual – are now targeted as MSM.
Corresponding to this discursive change, there has been an explosion of sexual health organisations in India. In Hyderabad alone, there are at least six NGOs working on sexual health, at least two of which are working explicitly on issues relating to male sexual health, wherein the primary objective is educating the community about its sexual rights in addition to safe sex practices and the transmission of HIV. This is particularly so in the wake of the recent police raids and arrests of HIV-prevention workers under Section 377 (anti-sodomy law) of the Indian Penal Code. Following one such incident in Lucknow, a supportive lawyer posted the World Association for Sexology declaration of sexual rights on one of India’s largest lesbian–gay list serves, adding the following: ‘Sexual rights are universal human rights. It is really important that all of us know what our sexual rights are so that we can all fight for our rights under the constitution’. As he stated in Pukaar, an English-language quarterly published by the NGO, Naz Foundation, the lawyer declared: ‘I speak for the concerns of all sexual minorities in India, be they lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, kothi, hijra or any other traditional name by which they choose to call themselves … [and I] call upon the Indian government to ensure that the human rights of all in India are respected, protected and promoted’ (Bondopadhyay 2002: 3).
Interestingly, it is perhaps for the first time in hijra history that they are now publically perceived as sexual (rather than asexual) figures, as metonymic figures of ‘sexual difference’ in compendia of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) studies, on the one hand, and as an integral part of the MSM or kothi sexual culture, on the other. While hijras might have thought themselves a part of this wider kothi universe and engaged in male same-sex behaviour for some time, it appears to be only recently that their sexual practices have become commodified and that they are now primarily perceived as ‘sex workers’ or victims of HIV/ADS.2 In the popular Indian imaginary, rather than sexual subjects, hijras have traditionally been viewed as either asexual, auspicious, religious figures – blessed by a Hindu goddess through whose power they get their power to confer fertility – or, more often, as objects of ridicule because of their asexuality and lack of any one gendered, religious or caste affiliation. It is largely with the emergence of the HIV/ AIDS epidemic that hijras have been reconceptualised as ‘MSM’ and are now actively targeted by public health interventions. Given the public health imperative to identify target communities of those ‘at risk’, this discursive elaboration of a MSM category – and the inclusion of hijras under this rubric – is to a large extent a consequence of mobilising around the HIV/AIDS epidemic, rather than a prior commitment to any sexual identity.
With respect to HIV and AIDS, on the one hand, the hijra community is, no doubt, being devastated by this epidemic, partly due to the stigma directed at their visibly flamboyant sexual and gender transgressions. On the other hand, following the onset and rapid spread of the epidemic, an egalitarian ethic of equal rights for all, irrespective of sex, gender, caste or religion is being simultaneously posited. The recognition of such sexual rights appears to have become particularly salient for hijras in recent years. As a spokesperson declared at the 2004 Hijra Festival in Bangalore: ‘Hijras are a part of the wider community of sexual minorities. It is important for us to assert our rights as sexual minorities and get what we want from the government’.
As noted earlier, in their recent election campaigns, hijras have begun to position themselves as authentic cultural signifiers beyond the factional and corruptible politics of gender, sexuality and caste. At the same time, they are also asserting this citizen construction as a collective identity and are developing a public political consciousness (Altman 1997). This invocation of a hijra community and its group rights culminated a few years ago in a movement to declare a ‘World Eunuch Day’, and in the proposal by the recently elected hijras to launch a national political party for hijras. More recently, hijras moved the Chennai High Court to grant them not merely voting rights and the right to education, employment, marriage and child adoption, but also legal recognition as a third gender (see www.newsonweb.com/chennaionline).
As authors such as Dennis Altman (1997, 2001) have argued, there is a growing consciousness of belonging to a single, ‘global’ gay (or sexual) community of people with apparently similar desires and practices. However, the incorporation of such highly diverse groups into ‘the movement’ is not entirely seamless. For instance, sexual health clinics and support groups might have been established for gay men to help make the difficult transition from MSM to a self-identified gay man, as a report on the first annual ‘gay’ conference stated (Yaarian 1999). Non-hijra kothis I spoke to valued the clinics for more pragmatic reasons – it was a means to ‘treat STDs and get condoms’. For the hijras, however, the objective was to ‘ask doctors how we can get a chathi [breasts] of course’, as Sathi told me patiently, in answer to what was, in her mind, obviously a stupid question. While it made absolute sense for hijras to avail their ‘right’ to access the services offered to ‘homosexuals’ or gay men, their desires and manifest agendas in accessing this global discourse were not necessarily similar to those of other members in this sexual landscape. While hijras are no doubt entering the public domain and doing so through the invocation of ‘rights’, the ways in which this translates into political action is perhaps a little more fractured than is implied by an ethic of equal rights. And often, these fractures and fissures play themselves out in terms of greater marginalisation of hijras owing to their visible difference along axes of gender, sexuality, kinship and class.
This was made evident to me in 2005, when I visited one of the local Hyderabadi MSM organisations that hijras have begun to frequent at least a few afternoons a week – not because of a prescriptive affinity with the MSM community, but because it had an air cooler that helped to alleviate the unbearable heat of the Hyderabadi summer. I was witness to an exercise conducted by MSM field officers with three nirvan hijras (‘operated’ hijras) present. Asking one of the hijras (Saroja, the only hijra who could read and write Telugu) to draw a picture of herself – a picture that the field officer ended up finishing because she was not drawing quickly enough – the field officers then told her: ‘Next to this picture write down all your problems that stem from being a nirvan hijra. Being nirvan has greater difficulties, no? So write down those difficulties and problems’. Implicit in such a statement is the sense of opprobrium associated with becoming nirvan, a condition that is implicitly juxtaposed against a dominant, non-nirvan kothi status. And, according to the MSM fieldworkers in this organisation, it is, unequivocally, the former category that has ‘greater difficulties’; difficulties stemming explicitly from hijras’ greater visibility, their sartorial preferences and their apparently debilitating nirvan condition (and implicitly their class position), as one of these staff members noted on the sheet when Saroja hesitated during the exercise.
Importantly, as I note elsewhere (Reddy 2005), for hijras themselves, it is the value of izzat (rather than sharm) that is the central authenticating trope, especially for those hijras who are doubly marginalised – as hijras (in the social world), and as sex workers (in the hijra world).
Having joined the hijra community, an individual hijra’s izzat is dependent in some measure on the ability to be an asli (real) hijra, a position acquired through the performance of various embodied acts within the arenas of kinship, (a)sexuality, sartoriality and religion. In the eyes of hijras, these acts include the avowal of particular hijra kinship relations such as the guru-cela (master–disciple) relationship, the adoption of particular modes of self-presentation whether through dress or ‘ideal’ (Muslim) religious practice, the maintenance of asexuality or sexual renunciation and the excision of genitalia, a visible corporeal symbol that signals their irreversible and authentic occupation of this category.
In all these acts, hijras implicitly or explicitly define themselves in opposition to the overly licentious (in their constructions) and much disparaged MSM or gandus, as they more commonly and pejoratively refer to these individuals. According to hijras, gandus, as men who enjoy anal sex, are defined not only by the form of their sexual desire, but more importantly, by its excess. As such, gandus are disparaged by all hijras – both the supposedly asexual hijras as well as those who are sexually active. In reaction to senior ‘asexual’ hijra claims about their inauthenticity, hijra sex workers argue that they are passing through a ‘lifecycle’, progressing from sexual prostitution to asexual ritual practice. They also profess a dislike of indiscriminate and excessive sexuality. As my hijra interlocutor, Munira, told me disparagingly: ‘We don’t do like these gandus. We just go to the station for a few hours in the evening, make some money and come back here; not like these gandus who want to go with men all the time!’ Through all of these authenticating practices, hijras take pride in their very visible performance of sexual/gender transgression, and explicitly deride kothis for their invisible or secret (gupt) lives.
In this moral economy of desire and practice, izzat operates as a complex qualitative currency of moral worth, a means through which individual hijras strive to gain status; and it is by performing various ‘authentic’ hijra acts that this currency is traded. Izzat, in other words, operates as an (idealised) form of currency through which individual hijras can trade their respective position on the moral ladder of hijra value.
Given this brief sketch of the idioms and tensions animating hijra life, what do such refractions mean for hijra self-making, for constructions of ‘community’ and for a cosmopolitics and ethics of care? While I do not presume to have definitive answers to these questions, I want to end this chapter with a set of speculations on two fronts: the first, centred on the trope of izzat and sharm in the moral economy of care; and the second, related point, the mobilisation of sexual difference as a platform for recognition and action, and the implications of such mobilisation for conceptualisations of care in the social and material landscape of ‘AIDS cosmopolitanism’.
Drawing on hijras’ articulations of izzat, I argue for a retheorisation or refraction of this notion. Specifically, I call for an extension of its meaning beyond a unitary and coherent ‘libidinised’ frame (Gilmore 1987). Contrary to most analyses of honour/izzat in the South Asian literature that construct the notion as a communal and gendered/sexualised construct – a matter of sexual regulation, typically located in the body of women, for men to safeguard or preserve on behalf of the family or community – I argue that hijras’ use of this notion of izzat is a more individualised (and arguably more commodified) register of moral value. Critically, I argue that hijras’ understanding of this construct spills out of a purely eroticised framework to incorporate several dimensions of subjectivity not entirely subsumable under the rubric of gender/sexuality. The transaction or negotiation of relative status through the currency of izzat occurs not merely through sexualised exchanges, but also through practices located outside the domain of sexuality. In other words, the concept of izzat among hijras has a moral valence that derives strength precisely from its diffusion beyond the axis of sex/gender to encompass a range of other domains, including kinship, religion and corporeality, in addition to sexuality.
By contrast, in the public domain, it is through the idiom of sharm that hijras are commonly represented. By lifting their saris and publicly flaunting their lack of procreative potential (and shame) in the public’s face, hijras are disrupting the regulation of sexuality in the public sphere. As such, they embody shamelessness and, by the mere threat of such exposure, can apparently communicate their lack of shame to the ‘respectable’ public.
Drawing on this belief, perhaps one of the more interesting and troubling developments in recent years has been the capitalisation on such shame. Lately, hijras have been employed by major credit card companies to threaten and intimidate customers into repaying their credit card debt by manipulating precisely this fear of hijra shame (see for example http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south-asia/332173.stm). Even more strikingly, the Patna Municipal Corporation recently hired hijras as tax collectors; revenue officials accompany hijras with tax records to settle outstanding arrears on the spot (AP, 10 November 2006). Such practices are, in a sense, public commodifications of shame, drawing on hijras’ perceived ‘reputations’ in the public sphere (as public shamers extraordinaire). But while the commodity is izzat in the hijra subaltern imaginary, in the public cultural matrix, it is sharm. In this mirrored logic of exchange therefore, what gets traded are not only the moral registers of individual and social worth, but also their entrenchment within the domain of sexuality and stigmatised moral difference.
Following the early recognition of the HIV epidemic and subsequent flows of AIDS-related NGO capital into India, there has been, from the public health perspective, a seeming consolidation of identities as I have noted; an incorporation of sexual difference under the label MSM, a complex category that repudiates cultural difference in favour of a risk–behaviour model. It is the particular acts that men who have sex with men engage in and the risks associated with those acts that condition their inclusion within this category. Such a conceptualisation, as scholars and activists have repeatedly pointed out, takes into account neither the differential power inequalities nor the different moral economies of value embedded in this social landscape.
Partly in response to such critiques and contests over meaning – that is, with a growing recognition of the importance of the ‘cultural’ in development/public health discourse – as well as in direct response to the material politics of HIV funding, MSM (both as category and community) is showing distinct signs of wear in recent years. Not only has there been a proliferation of sexual identities in the domain of public health – including kothi, hijra, gay, MSM who are married, and ‘double-decker’, to name a few – all, importantly, laying claim to the MSM label, but differentiating themselves on cultural grounds in order to access greater resources, but the boundaries between these categories are becoming increasingly rigid as these various groups (and their public health interlocutors) have attempted to splinter off to form separate organisations to capitalise on such ‘difference’ and funding potential. Just a few years ago, in April 2004, a new initiative was floated in Hyderabad to set up a separate organisation for nirvan hijras – a new ‘TG project’ as one of the two MSM-identified non- hijra field staff associated with it referred to the initiative. When I asked him why he thought a separate organisation was needed, he replied: ‘Because funding is there, no? And also it is easy to get the funding for this project because there is nothing like this for these people in Andhra’. Well intentioned as these projects might be, they invariably reproduce the hierarchies of gender, class and sharm (and the discriminatory practices stemming from these divisions), with ‘these people’ – the visibly ‘othered’ hijras – on the bottom rung of this ladder of respect/care.
Whether we attribute the shifting sexual landscape – this social formation of AIDS cosmopolitanism – to the politics of HIV-related funding, or as some scholars argue, to a neo-colonial sexual globalisation (Altman 2001), how do we understand this proliferation of categories, each predicated on emphasising and maintaining their sexual difference, even as they articulate these notions within the terms of (state and) public health-recognised discourse? What issues does such a politics of sexual difference raise for each of these ‘communities’ and for the hijras, in particular?
On the one hand, such mobilisations of sexual difference could merely remarginalise hijras in the spheres of politics, law and public health. In the domain of juridical politics for instance, the Madhya Pradesh High Court has deemed invalid the recent election of at least two hijras for seats reserved for women; hijras are not women, the court ruled. Perhaps for the first time since the hijras’ incorporation into the colonial Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, their position has been publicly legislated in the courts, cementing or fixing their sexual/gendered difference more rigidly than their earlier location between the cracks of the post-/colonial Indian state. Further, as noted earlier, hijras themselves are moving the courts in Tamil Nadu to recognise them as civic citizens of the modern world; citizens of a different, ‘third gendered’ status. The irony, of course, is that such a lens of sexual difference allows for a certain visibility in mainstream society – the ostensible goal of an emancipatory discourse of rights – at the same time as it fixes hijras’ location within this domain, often remarginalising them in the process.
In the domain of public health too, hijras’ incorporation into the wider MSM rubric expressly criminalises their activity, bringing them under the purview of the anti-sodomy law. Even if they do form their own community outside this semantic/ practical domain, they are constructed and accessed through the domain of HIV prevention, being ostensibly high risk for HIV on account of their ‘criminal’ sodomitical practices. Both in politics and in the field of public health, far from emancipating hijras, their mobilisation of sexual difference thus risks a further entrenchment within a criminalising, pathologising and marginalising framework.
On the other hand, if the examples provided here indicate anything, it is that these categories of difference (and subjectivity more generally) are not rigid domains but are shifting and constantly becoming in contexts of relationship – with each other, with NGOs, with the state. How then do we make sense of this domain and of the fluid if discrepant cosmopolitanisms (Clifford 1998) that structure patterns of subject formation and the differential provisions of care within this field of social relations? As I have suggested, one avenue or pathway of research (and activism) is to move beyond carving out sexuality as a separate arena, but to see it within a field of social difference. Hijras themselves provide the model here in terms of the ways in which they conceptualise their identity as beyond merely a sexual category. Although sex/gender is one, and perhaps even the most important aspect of their lives, hijras do not reduce their understanding to just this frame of analysis, articulating perhaps the best argument (and model) for a politics of intersectionality rather than a politics of identity – a framework that takes account of the multiple ways in which sexuality, gender class, caste, religion and kinship intersect with and construct each other in constituting difference.
Given the ways in which stigma plays itself out along these very faultlines, perhaps the most important avenues through which to speak to hijra stigma and marginalisation are: one, a collective mobilisation across various sites of difference, incorporating struggles for caste, class, gender and religious oppression within the bounds of ‘sexual’ oppression, as localised struggles for human rights – a ‘pragmatic solidarity in response to structural violence’ as Paul Farmer notes in a different context (2003: 220); and two, seeing the need for ‘caring and being cared for’ to invoke John Borneman’s phrase (1998: 29), as vital to the wellbeing of hijras (and all humans), and fundamental to addressing stigma along the faultlines of social difference. In his paper, Borneman calls for a shift in the object of anthropological research – from regulative ideals for humanity (including and especially, kinship and marriage, the focus of his article), to an ontological process, ‘a concern for the actual situations in which people experience the need to care and be cared for and to the political economies of their distribution’ (1998: 30). Care, he notes, is the ‘source and result of human creativity’ and as such it is in foregrounding this ethic – and obligation (if not ‘right’ as Borneman argues) – that we can not only attend to questions of social justice but also better understand the ‘diversity of relations in which caring is expressed and the power matrix in which they are assigned value’ (1998: 584).
The lack of care extended to hijras can be seen as a violation of such an obligation, a symptom of deeper pathologies of power (Farmer 2003) that determine this social landscape of suffering. As Surekha, one of the few hijra sex workers remaining in Hyderabad indicated to me when I returned in the summer of 2005: ‘These programmes-wogrammes are mostly for the mogabatta kothulu [the male-clothed kothis/MSM]. Nirvan hijras’ lives and concerns are different. We can come here to this office and to the clinic and everything. But ultimately, who is going look after us, Gayatri?’ This chapter offers a very preliminary attempt to take up the challenge posed by Surekha’s question. It points at one small way by which attention to the local politics of izzat and sharm reveal the ways in which ‘caring and being cared for’ are articulated, shape and play themselves out in the cosmopolitanisms of hijras and their interlocutors in Hyderabad. Even as the answers to Cohen’s question as to the kinds of ethics and care that are possible within these global conjunctures remain fraught – it is only in wrestling with such questions of ethics and care at the local level that concrete starting points can be delineated for better understanding the logics of self and ‘other’-making in the contemporary cosmopolitan world.
1 This chapter is based on research conducted in the south Indian city of Hyderabad at various points between 1995 and 2005. It is a revised version of an article that was published in 2005 in the journal Anthropology and Medicine.
2 See Cohen 2006 for a problematisation (and historicisation) of the ‘kothi model’.
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