How the British Attempted to Erase the Hijra

Words by Shahrazad Hand

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How the British Attempted to Erase the Hijra by Shahrazad Hand

The Hijra community are the oldest gender non-conforming community in South Asia. Gender non-conformity in the Indian subcontinent can be dated back over 2800 years. Some believe that these ancient gender non-conforming groups may be what is known as Hijras today. In India and Pakistan today, they are a legally recognised third gender, an alternative to male and female. They are usually assigned male at birth, although sometimes they are born intersex. The process of becoming a Hijra has remained the same for hundreds of years. During the Raj and to the present day, it is believed that many sacrifice their genitals to Hindu goddess Bahuchara Mata, usually through castration, to become a Hijra. This sacrifice makes the Hijra infertile, but it is believed by many in South Asia that this sacrifice gives them the power to bless people with fertility, which has historically made this community spiritually important in the subcontinent. 

Under British rule the Hijra community saw a considerable amount of change. For thousands of years, gender non-conforming people in the Indian subcontinent were an accepted part of social structures. The Islamic Mughal Empire, who ruled India before the British, respected the Hijra community, often giving them important roles as bodyguards in royal courts. The arrival of the British in the subcontinent saw the lives of the Hijra community change drastically.

A major part of how British colonization maintained control over colonized people was through classification. In his book Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott argues that “typifications are indispensable to statecraft,” because it makes a population legible on paper and therefore, easier to govern. The British were desperate to categorize people in all of their colonies to make it easier to control them, but Hijras were difficult to classify.

British views surrounding gender in the Victorian period can be summarized as what Early Modern historian Catherine Hall calls “separate spheres.” Hall states that Victorian gender norms assumed that “men and women occupied separate spheres because they were naturally different.” Hijras actively embraced androgyny and lived outside of recognizable gender categories. The Raj began to see them as a threat to colonial rule. 

The British lacked the understanding and language to classify Hijras in British India. The British wanted the laws of British India to resemble native legal understanding so the transition to British rule would not be so starch. Desire to make the laws recognizable to the natives drove the British to read and translate many ancient Indian religious texts. However, many of these texts included a plethora of terms describing gender non-conforming people. Not only was the British mindset unable to comprehend these ideas, but the English language was unable to translate them. The wide array of terms were all simplified and translated as “eunuch” (castrated men). Many of these gender non-conforming people were not eunuchs, but to British translators it did not matter. The British also referred to all Hijras as “eunuchs” but simplifying the Hijra identity to merely a “castrated man” is not only incorrect (many are intersex) but it does a disservice to their spiritual significance.

The 19th Century European fear of homosexuality created issues for the Hijra community. The British saw Hijras as eunuchs and, because they were often in sexual relationships with men, they viewed them as homosexual men. In the 19th Century homosexuality became the cause of much concern within British society. French philosopher, Michel Foucault, famously captured this sentiment of change surrounding how homosexuals were perceived by saying, prior to the 19th century “sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their author was nothing more than the juridical subject of them”. However, after the 19th century the “homosexual became […] a form of life” and as a result “nothing in his total being escapes his sexuality.” This idea of punishing the person rather than the act is clear from the anti-Hijra legislation becoming increasingly more intense in the mid-1800s. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (1861) condemned the act of homosexuality, whereas the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) made the Hijra’s way of life completely illegal.