Comment

I must have been 12 years old and was standing with a group of my friends on Main Street in Pune (Poona, then) contemplating, I suppose a choice between tea, bhajias and bhel puri or between one cinema or the other when a group of hijras crossed the road clapping with wide open palms and singing. One of them came up to me, kissed me on the forehead, caressed my cheeks with his smooth palm and, smiling through paan-stained teeth said “Kya cheez hein? Salim hain Salim!”

Then his entourage moved and he did too, blowing kisses in my direction.

My friends thought it was the most revealing encounter and for a few days after I was referred to as ‘Salim’. It was traumatic. What did the creature intend? In fact what was the creature? At 12 I knew something about sex and gender but none of my friends could
quite explain whom or what we had encountered. We knew the word and someone said they were half-man, half woman, but the
mechanics of such a state were left to the imagination.

I must have asked some adult at the time what a hijra was but can’t remember getting a satisfactory answer.

A teacher, discussing sex in a ‘GK’ (General Knowledge) class displayed a mystifying ignorance when asked the question and urged me to find out by paying one some money and asking him to raise his sari. The class was more amused than curious and the moment passed.

An older fellow of our circle who prided himself on having a vast vocabulary announced that these were ‘hermaphrodites’, a challenge to go to the nearest dictionary. Not terribly enlightening.
Then, as one’s acquaintance with Indian historical stories and with Western culture grew, I read about ‘eunuchs’ in the
courts and in the choirs of the western nobility and I as clear then that these were young boys whose testicles had been
purposely removed at an early age so that their voices would not turn from soprano to tenor or bass and they could sing as sweetly as nightingales for their patron’s pleasure.

The function of men without testicles in harem seemed quite clear — they couldn’t sample the commodities they were in charge of — and yet the question of whether men without testicles could have sex but not have babies lingered.

One of the things I noticed when coming to the West was that there were no hijras on the street or anywhere else. Was it a condition peculiar to Indian genes?

These memories and thoughts are occasioned by the panels of photographs of hijras in a grand exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery of 150 years of ‘Indian’ photography. Among the maharajas and the portraits of different families, of the tombs and palace, fauna, flora and street scenes, there are the obligatory photographs of hijras. Come to think of it, I have never seen an anthology of Indian photographs without portraits of Indian prostitutes with the hardened features that are supposedly symptoms of their trade, or of hijras. These would seem to be photographic obsessions.

The labelling of hijras in the present exhibition has been updated. The photographs used to carry various descriptions: ‘eunuchs’, ‘hermaphrodites’ and ‘transvestites’. This exhibition calls them ‘lady-boys’, the word for male prostitutes of the Far East who dress and make-up as women.