Elsewheres in Queer Hindutva: A Hijra Case Study

introduction

In July 2021, a series of gruesome videos began circulating in several WhatsApp groups comprising hijra, kothi and transgender people. Hijra and kothi are South Asian terms that describe diverse yet overlapping communities of feminine-identified people who are usually assigned male (or, rarely, intersex) at birth, including persons who designate themselves as feminine males, as women or as a third gender, and people with fluid or multiple identities. ¹ While most people in this spectrum tend to be from working-class and/or oppressed-caste origins, some are from dominant-caste and middle-class backgrounds (Phukan Biswas, 2020, p. 93). Indeed, as a researcher undertaking ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative activism with these communities in West Bengal, India since 2006, I have been gradually included as a community member due to my gender nonconformity despite my privileged class and caste background, which explains my presence in the WhatsApp groups where the videos first went viral before reaching the Bengali news media (Calcutta News Live, 2021a).

The videos featured Ratna Chowdhury, a guru or leader of the hijra community, who was brutally torturing a relatively junior hijra person. Chowdhury is a nayak or senior guru based in a southern suburb of Kolkata and affiliated with one of the three main hijra gharanas or lineage-based groups of Bengal. As ethnographers note, many hijras are organised into multitiered hierarchical lineages of gurus, their chelas or disciples, chelas of chelas and so on; gurus live in their own households or kinship units with their chelas, unlike kothis who maintain contacts with their community while living within mainstream society (Reddy, 2005, pp. 9–16). In Bengal, nayaks typically lead separate residential households that claim distinct territories where hijras of that household carry out professions such as badhai: blessing middle-class families during occasions like childbirth for money and gifts (Reddy, 2005, p. 159). However, the lines between hijra and non-hijra spaces and identities may be blurry. Some hijras join lineages while living partly within heteronormative families and may be married to women (Hossain, 2012, p. 500). Some people even contextually identify as hijra, or as both kothi and hijra, without formally joining any lineage, though their legitimacy may be questioned by lineage-based hijras (Dutta, 2012, p. 835; Saria, 2021, p. 101). In this case, Chowdhury’s victim was not affiliated with any gharana but had undertaken badhai in an area claimed by Chowdhury. The torture was intended as punishment.

The videos, in themselves, do not mark a new phenomenon. Over the 2010s, I observed the increasing circulation of such videos, paralleling the growing use of social media within these communities. Hijra gurus sometimes intentionally publicised such videos as warnings to potential trespassers. However, the aforementioned videos stood out for their extreme brutality, which attracted widespread condemnation in the WhatsApp groups. ² The victim was beaten severely and partially burnt with hot metal and coal. Rumours circulated that she had died, but eventually it surfaced that she had managed to escape to the residence of another hijra nayak who protected and took care of her.

In this context, Chowdhury was swiftly denounced not only by kothis and trans people but also by several senior hijra nayaks. A Kolkata-based transgender activist lodged a police complaint on 9 July 2021, and Chowdhury was arrested and detained in police custody for a few days; her arrest was covered in Bengali electronic media along with clippings from the videos (Calcutta News Live, 2021a).

This would perhaps be just a brutal crime related to territorial conflict and competition for resources within a marginalised community. What makes the case relevant to a discussion of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism in relation to queer or gender/sexually nonconforming communities is that Chowdhury is of Muslim origin and allegedly an immigrant from Bangladesh. Her putative background was particularly mentioned by her non-Muslim hijra, trans and kothi denouncers in both WhatsApp groups and public spaces. In this article, I will explore how the case became a flash point for the consolidation of Hindu right-wing tendencies within hijra, kothi and transgender communities in West Bengal, paralleling increasing affiliations between some community members and the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). As the case progressed, Chowdhury was repeatedly singled out to direct blame towards Bangladeshis and Muslims and otherise them within hijra communities, even though community members sometimes conceded that hijra gurus from Hindu backgrounds had perpetrated similar crimes.

In this article, I will link this specific case to emerging alliances between Hindutva and queer politics (Upadhyay, 2020; Shahani, 2021). Increasing intimacy between the Hindu Right and queer/trans people in West Bengal suggests Hindutva’s capacity to make seemingly unlikely forays into groups that have been historically oppressed and excluded by the caste and gender hierarchies of Hinduism, such as Dalits or formerly ‘untouchable’ castes (Teltumbde, 2020). It also signals Hindutva’s expanding influence in regions lying outside its traditional strongholds in western and northern India (Longkumer, 2020). However, as I will argue, the progression of the case and Chowdhury’s eventual escape suggest that emergent alliances between Hindutva and queer communities might be ruptured or even fall apart due to the multiple logics of power and resistance manifested by these communities, which cannot be entirely assimilated into the typical forms of Hindu nationalist politics.

I analyse these ruptures as arising from contradictory negotiations between Hindutva and its ‘elsewheres’. As Kasmani et al. (2020, p. 93) note, ‘the Elsewhere is a figure predominantly tied to the study of religion’ but may also supersede ‘the sphere of the religious’. I am particularly inspired by their formulation of the ‘elsewhere’ as ‘a where in excess to what is present in any given time and place’ but ‘never completely removed from it’ (ibid., p. 92). Building on this sense of difference from a given location that is yet not neatly separable from it, I evoke two distinct but potentially intertwined connotations of ‘elsewhere’: one, the ‘elsewhere’ as a spatialised site of otherness that is variably sought to be sequestered from or incorporated into a normative sociopolitical order, and two, the ‘elsewhere’ as a site of excess relative to that order which possibly disrupts or even transforms it while interacting with or being incorporated into it. In the context of Hindutva, particular spaces and communities may be constructed as ‘elsewheres’ that are positioned as threatening to Hindu nationhood but are crucial to its self-construction. Hindu nationalist imagination constructs Muslim-majority spaces ‘as the Other’, associating such areas with threatening ‘enemy’ nations like Pakistan, but also uses such spatial othering to entrench Hindutva ideology (Desai, 2011, p. 115). Hijra lifeworlds are also, in certain senses, imagined as ‘elsewheres’ by dominant-caste and middle-class people, who form Hindutva’s core support base (Manor, 2019, p. 119). While hijras often live in working-class areas, middle-class people typically see hijras as dirty, shameless and violent people who live elsewhere in worlds distant and different from middle-class spaces (Reddy, 2005, pp. 13–14; Hossain, 2017, p. 4). Because of their mixed Hindu and Muslim practices, hijras may also be positioned by Hindu nationalists as religious outsiders who were compelled to adopt Islam and must be reconverted through ghar-wapsi, that is, welcomed back into their original ‘home’ of Hinduism (Phukan Biswas, 2020). This suggests Hindutva’s shifting negotiations with its ‘elsewheres’ as it seeks to not just exclude its ‘constitutive outsides’ but also assimilate them into Hindu national culture (Shani, 2021, p. 264). Indeed, the Hindu Right has periodically attempted to widen its reach to include otherised groups such as Muslims for reasons like electoral expediency, but without abandoning its ‘core values’ like Hindu majoritarianism and reverting to Hindu-Muslim polarisation during crises (Hebbar, 2012, p. 132). However, even as the Hindu Right tries to expand and assimilate, I explore below how its ‘elsewheres’ might enter into liaisons with Hindutva while shifting and troubling its usual dynamics. To evoke José Muñoz (2019, p. 28), the aforementioned multiplicity of power and resistance in these communities represents an excess or ‘surplus’ that not only prevents neat assimilation into Hindu majoritarianism but also gestures towards ‘something else’ that lies beyond the ‘here and now’ of Hindutva.

a case of homohindunationalism?

On 9 July 2021, soon after the videos began circulating, Shompa, a hijra guru based north of Kolkata, issued an impassioned plea to Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a famous hijra and transgender activist associated with the Hindu Right (Upadhyay, 2020, p. 473). Shompa sent Tripathi the videos along with a WhatsApp voice message in Hindi, which she subsequently circulated and publicised in the WhatsApp groups. ³ Shompa began her appeal by hailing Shri Mahakal or Lord Shiva and Ma Kamakhya, a Hindu mother goddess:

Jay Shri Mahakal, Jay Ma Kamakhya! Mata Ji [respected mother], crores of obeisances at your feet! Today … a murat [hijra community member] was captured […] See how much she is being tortured! […] You people are in high posts, please make a fair judgment in this matter! She [the guru] has come from Bangladesh to create terror [santrash] here […] Look into this, respected mother, and do something!

In a subsequent message, Shompa explained that she made the appeal as a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Kinnar Akhada, a Hindu monastic order for kinnars—a more Sanskritic and Hinduised name for hijras —that Tripathi initiated around 2015 (Phukan Biswas, 2020). ⁴ The Akhada marked a pronounced departure from the usual religious customs of hijra gharanas which blend Hindu mother-goddess worship with Islamic practices and beliefs (Reddy, 2005; Saria, 2021). As Gayatri Reddy (2005, pp. 107–109) notes, hijras in Hyderabad identify as Muslims irrespective of their Hindu or Muslim origin but also continue with mother-goddess worship. Shompa’s voice message is illustrative of a departure from such mixed religious practices to a more orthodox version of Hinduism. Instead of the Arabic and Islamic salutation ‘As-salamu Alaykum’ (also pronounced ‘As-salam Alaykum’ in Bengal) or ‘Peace be upon you’ that hijras customarily use irrespective of their natally ascribed religion, Shompa invokes Hindu deities. This overt Hinduisation accompanies the predictable otherisation of the (implicitly Muslim) Bangladeshi as a foreign terrorist threat, a tendency that mirrors broader patterns within Hindu right-wing politics. Since the 1990s, ‘undocumented Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh’ have been ‘increasingly viewed as a severe threat to the security and integrity of the Hindu nation’ (Ramachandran, 1999, p. 235). More recently, this logic has driven the exclusion of Bangladeshi immigrants from Indian citizenship through the NRC (National Register of Citizens) (Longkumer, 2020, p. 270). In one WhatsApp group where Shompa circulated her message, a hijra community member replied saying, ‘Evict Bangladeshi hijras and save the country!’. ⁵ Bangladeshis carry the mark of a threatening ‘elsewhere’ to which they must be expelled to keep India safe.

Proclamations against Bangladeshi immigrants turned up in public online spaces as well. Underneath a Bengali electronic media report on Chowdhury’s arrest on 9 July, a trans woman commented: ‘Bangladeshis are perpetrating atrocities on Indians day after day’ (Calcutta News Live, 2021a, my translation). Another online commentator stated: ‘These people have wives and children in Bangladesh, then come to India and become hijras … check in hijra houses, they are all Bangladeshi … this should be stopped … the entire hijra society is losing its reputation because of certain bad people’ (Calcutta News Live, 2021b, my translation).

Such statements build on older tensions within West Bengal hijra gharanas. The transnational migration of hijras between West Bengal and Bangladesh is a common phenomenon (Hossain, 2018, p. 324). During the 2010s, I noticed rising anti-Bangladeshi sentiments among West Bengali Hindu-origin hijras; some claimed that Bangladeshis were increasingly capturing senior positions within the gharanas and driving out hijras from West Bengal. Dipa Bandyopadhyay, a senior hijra nayak, initiated a campaign against Bangladeshi hijras in West Bengal in the mid-2010s before her death in 2015 (TNN, 2015). Paralleling anti-Bangladeshi sentiments, some hijras also began cultivating increasing alliances with the Hindu nationalist BJP, particularly before the 2021 assembly elections in West Bengal. In a conversation in March 2021, Roopsha, a kothi and trans activist linked to several hijra gharanas, told me that local BJP leaders were inviting her to their campaign events, and while she desisted, some hijra leaders were responding positively. In a conversation in September 2021, Roopsha elaborated:

Before the elections, hijras began to raise the Hindu-Muslim issue during everyday conflicts … anti-Muslim hate messages circulated in hijra WhatsApp groups […] Hijras from West Bengal and Bangladeshis clashed on the Hindu-Muslim issue […] Many from the hijra community also started cultivating contacts with BJP leaders, even a Muslim hijra guru attended rallies with BJP heavyweights. Now after BJP has lost the elections, this trend has lessened.

Roopsha’s statement suggests increasing but fluctuating alliances between Hindutva politics and hijra and trans communities in eastern India. Emerging scholarship in queer studies has observed that while previously Hindutva was pronouncedly anti-queer, the Hindu Right has become more accommodating of queer and trans people (Bacchetta, 2019; Upadhyay, 2020; Shahani, 2021). Bacchetta (2019, p. 377) traces a historical shift from Hindutva’s explicit ‘xenophobic queerphobia’—the exclusion of queer people as alien to Indian nationhood and culture—to a more ambiguous and sometimes accepting stance towards queer people. Nishant Upadhyay (2020, p. 471) more emphatically asserts an ‘escalation of Hindutva support for queer rights’, matched by increasingly visible support for Hindutva from dominant-caste queer people, though this shift is not totally linear and queerphobic elements persist within the Hindu Right. Upadhyay (ibid., p. 469) theorises this phenomenon as ‘homohindunationalism’: the selective assimilation of ‘certain Indian (a.k.a., dominant caste, upwardly mobile Hindu) queer and trans bodies … within the Hindu nationalist project’ even as Muslim, Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Kashmiri and North-Eastern queer/trans people (among others) are excluded. Besides elite gay men, hijras from dominant-caste Hindu backgrounds such as Laxmi Narayan Tripathi are also complicit in this trend (ibid.).

This scholarship notes the contradictory and uneasy nature of the alliance or reconciliation between Hindutva and queer politics. The Hindu Right’s nativist exclusion of LGBT people as foreign threats to Indian culture and the BJP-led government’s ambivalence on the decriminalisation of same-sex activity contrast with the right-wing evocation of queer-trans people to bolster Hindu exceptionalism and Islamophobia by projecting Hinduism as exceptionally tolerant, diverse and inclusive compared to other religions, particularly Islam (Upadhyay, 2020, pp. 469–471; Shahani, 2021, pp. 59–71).

Yet, scholars contend that such contradictions can be managed or contained. As per Upadhyay (2020, p. 472), queer and trans people can be ‘assimilable within the Hindu fold’ as long as they ‘emulate neoliberal, casteist, Islamophobic, and nationalist agendas of the Hindutva project’. Nishant Shahani (2021, p. 34) argues that, despite fractures, the relation between ‘queerness, globalization, and Hindu nationalism’ assumes ‘the appearance of seamless form and internal unity by papering over fragments, splinters, and internal differences’. Shahani (ibid., p. 58) attributes this ability to contain differences to Hindutva’s malleability: it contextually adapts to globalised LGBT rights discourse to allow for ‘unexpected alliances between LGBT visibility and a historically queerphobic and antifeminist state’. Hindutva’s adaptability ensures that its ‘fractures work to its benefit rather than its detriment’ (ibid., p. 55). Thus, Hindutva can strengthen itself by incorporating or forging alliances with queer politics to bolster Hindu exceptionalism and Islamophobia (Upadhyay, 2020, p. 469; Shahani, 2021, p. 71).

Scholars typically turn to spaces positioned outside or against queer Hindutva alliances to imagine different political possibilities, noting oppositional, radical and anti-Hindutva tendencies within queer and trans communities that contest Hindu nationalism (Bacchetta, 2019, pp. 75, 295; Upadhyay, 2020, p. 470). While Shahani (2021, p. 78) questions dichotomies between total assimilation and radical resistance to hegemonic structures, he largely evokes spaces outside right-wing formations to imagine political horizons beyond the hegemony of Hindu nationalism, such as leftist and Dalit-Bahujan coalitions within college campuses labelled as seditious by the state.

The tense reconciliation of queerness and Hindutva and its resistant or seditious counters are certainly significant tendencies for study. However, I am interested in probing the disruption of queer right-wing alliances by their potential constituents themselves and the failure of emergent alliances to sustain themselves over time—at least in some cases. I contend that, in certain contexts, ruptures in the nexus between Hindutva and queer/trans politics might be less manageable than suggested above and such alliances unravel from within even as they develop, undermining Homohindunationalist assimilation and Hindutva’s malleable capacity to incorporate its ‘elsewheres’. The aforementioned narratives of assimilationist or reconciliatory alliances between Hindutva and queer politics may be expanded further if we consider constitutive fissures within emergent queer right-wing formations that result from the wavering political affiliations of queer/trans people with the right that blur distinctions between assimilation and resistance, reconciliation and seditiousness. The last sentence of Roopsha’s statement above—‘now after BJP has lost the elections, this trend has lessened’—suggests not only the limits of the Hindu Right’s ability to capture state power across India, but also that for some trans, hijra and kothi people, alliances with Hindu right-wing forces do not amount to a lasting assimilation within Hindutva politics. Rather, they mark strategic and contingent formations that become prone to rupture even as they emerge: increasing before the 2021 West Bengal elections and decreasing after BJP’s loss.

However, this is not merely an instance of electoral expediency. I return below to the case of Ratna Chowdhury to demonstrate that some of the fissures within ‘Homohindunationalist’ alliances arise due to the multiplicity of relations of power within marginalised communities that do not neatly align with a majoritarian Hindu versus Muslim dynamic. James Manor (2019, p. 129) argues that the Hindu Right’s drive for hegemony through religious polarisation is impeded by the way in which Indians contextually shift between multiple, fluid identities (regional, linguistic, class, caste, etc.) such that ‘tension and conflict do not build up along a single fault line in society’. Building on this observation, I explore shifting and multiple logics of status, power and resistance within hijra and kothi communities that impede the crystallisation of communal rifts and destabilise alliances with Hindu nationalism. These unstable liaisons suggest how the Hindu Right might become fractured and vulnerable as it tries to assimilate ‘elsewheres’ that trouble it from within rather than from a ‘removed position’ (Kasmani et al., 2020, p. 92).

fissured alliances and shifting relations of power

On 9 July 2021, Santosh Giri, a transgender activist, lodged a complaint against Ratna Chowdhury at the Baruipur Police Station, south of Kolkata. Chowdhury was arrested later that day (Calcutta News Live, 2021a). Subsequently, on 11 July 2021, Giri and some hijras staged a demonstration against Chowdhury at Lalbazar, the police headquarters at Kolkata (Calcutta News Live, 2021b). I learnt from Roopsha, the aforementioned trans activist, that many of the hijra protestors were junior disciples of Noor Begum or Noor Nayak, Chowdhury’s rival guru who had helped rescue the survivor. Roopsha noted that Begum had publicly campaigned for the BJP before the West Bengal elections earlier that year, while being from a North Indian Muslim background and living in Metiaburuz, an area near Kolkata known for its large Muslim population. Ironically, before the elections, her surname—Begum, meaning queen or princess in Urdu, a language often simplistically associated with Muslims by the Hindu Right—was used by BJP leaders as an insult against their political opponent Mamata Banerjee, the incumbent chief minister of West Bengal (Ahmad, 2021). BJP leaders mockingly called her ‘Mamata Begum’ for her supposed pro-Muslim propensities and warned Hindu voters that her win could turn West Bengal into a ‘mini-Pakistan’ (ibid.). This evokes the threat of West Bengal becoming an ethno-religious ‘elsewhere’, a different place not integrated with a Hindu vision of Indian nationhood. Simultaneously, in its bid to maximise votes, the BJP also sought to expand into otherised spaces like Metiaburuz. In Hindu Bengali imagination, Metiaburuz is an ‘elsewhere’: a dangerous, avoidable area associated with Muslim criminality and predictably labelled as ‘mini-Pakistan’ (Bhattacharya, 2021).

Given this contradictory negotiation with elsewheres, the BJP’s willingness to ally with a Muslim-origin hijra guru surnamed Begum in their (ultimately failed) bid to win the Metiaburuz constituency may be seen as electoral expediency trumping strict ideological consistency, as evident in the BJP’s past attempts to woo Muslim votes (Hebbar, 2012, p. 143). Moreover, as Bacchetta (2019, p. 388) notes, the Hindu Right may also expand its reach by selectively incorporating some Muslims deemed to be adequately Hinduised in their cultural outlook. On her part, Begum might have selectively adopted some aspects of Hindutva discourse herself. In a media report from January 2021, Begum was accused of abusing a group of hijras from south Kolkata over another territorial conflict, during which she and her associates allegedly attacked one of them as Bangladeshi: ‘they threatened to beat me, they said, from where have you come, why have you come here, you Bangladeshi?’ (24hrs TV, 2021, my translation). If true, this suggests that despite the minority religious position that Begum shares with many Bangladeshi immigrants, she implicitly relied on the relative privilege of her North Indian origin that permitted her to otherise Bangladeshi-origin people and position them ‘elsewhere’ in relation to the Indian nation (the ‘here’) while Muslims like herself remained included.

Despite this history, during the Chowdhury case Begum and her disciples did not evoke the anti-Bangladeshi narrative publicly, suggesting that unlike some other accusers, Begum might have been motivated by factors other than Hindutva. Roopsha speculated that intra-community rivalry over territory or status more likely may have been at play. ⁶ In any case, public statements by Begum’s disciples did not mention Chowdhury’s background and instead focused on countering her might as a senior guru. During the 11 July protest, Fiza, one of the disciples, told the media:

We want insaaf [justice] […] She is using her money power … she is trying to get bail […] We have all gathered here against this […] Letting her come out of jail means danger […] She could get something done to us as well! (Calcutta News Live, 2021b, my translation)

Further, Begum’s alliance with Hindutva politics is not accompanied by a broader Hinduisation, unlike aforementioned hijras like Shompa. In her public statements during the Chowdhury case, Begum does not manifest any attempt to overtly demonstrate Hinduness or underplay Islamic elements, unlike some Muslims within the BJP who have downplayed visible markers of Muslim identity (Hebbar, 2012, p. 140). Soon after Begum helped rescue the survivor, she publicised a video in various WhatsApp groups where she addressed her audience as miyan, a salutation connoting respect commonly associated with Muslims: ‘Miyan [respected people], As-salam Alaykum! See, miyan, my heart cries out […] Even if any child of mine does anything wrong, I have never even slapped my children!’. Besides asserting an affective solidarity with junior hijras whom she calls her ‘children’, Begum’s statement contrasts with Shompa’s message mentioned above, where salutations like As-salam Alaykum are replaced by invocations of Hindu gods.

Thus, although Begum allegedly evoked anti-Bangladeshi rhetoric, her affinity with Hindutva is, at most, selective and contextual. She does not target Chowdhury as a putative Bangladeshi, and in effect, undermines efforts by Hindu-origin hijras such as members of the Kinnar Akhada to erase Islamic elements within hijra cultures, Hinduise hijra customs and otherise Muslims as a whole. As the BJP seeks to expand into the spatial ‘elsewhere’ of Metiaburuz, its allies do not neatly conform to its majoritarian stances. Despite the inconsistencies of Begum’s overall politics, her actions suggest the subversive possibility that Muslims allied with the BJP may not end up extending its reach but rather ‘dilute the ideology from within’ (Assadi, 1998, p. 1369).

Meanwhile, on the other side, Chowdhury’s ‘money power’ and status within the gharana system were already at work. There was a marked absence of senior gurus in the 11 July protest. As Roopsha explained, ‘high-ranking hijras did not attend because Ratna had let them know that she would pay them whatever fines needed!’. By mid-July, Chowdhury was out on bail, and in late July, the case was taken up by an extra-legal chatai or arbitration council of elders from two major hijra gharanas. Several videos from this chatai were again widely circulated across WhatsApp groups. Chowdhury confidently announced her readiness to pay fines levied on her by other gurus and her willingness to support the survivor financially. All the hijra nayaks present, including several from Hindu and West Bengal backgrounds, made peace with her after she paid them token fines such as small gold ornaments, which seemed to be more a symbolic demonstration of her largesse as might befit a nayak, rather than only a show of financial power. Even the survivor appeared via a video call and indicated that she would accept Chowdhury’s support. As the activist Giri lamented to me, the survivor did not proceed further with the police case, rendering Giri’s efforts for legal justice futile. Significantly, in Chowdhury’s assurance to the survivor, she proudly evoked her Muslim background as a mark of honour and integrity:

I will bear all your expenses for life, I am giving you my word […] Just like I caused you harm, you also harmed me […] You stole from my territory, I had to go to jail for you, I lost my respect in society, the entire media saw me. Yet after all that, in the name of insaniyat [humanity], and because I am the child of a Muslim, I will do everything for you!

Besides her Muslim natal origin, Chowdhury also evokes the concept of insaniyat, an Arabic-origin word found in Urdu and Hindi which roughly connotes humanity or humaneness and has a rich history within Islamic thought (Aijazi, 2020, p. 34). The salutation As-salam Alaykum also reappears in the videos. For example, one hijra offers the greeting to hijra gurus all over India before proceeding to condemn Giri for lodging the police case and taking the matter into the public domain. This resistance to legal adjudication suggests the desire of hijra gharanas to maintain sovereignty in matters seen as internal to the community, and corroborates Vaibhav Saria’s (2021, p. 6) observation that hijra lives and imaginations are not determined by ‘secular liberalism’.

Significantly, the chatai included Hindu-origin hijras who have previously espoused positions against Bangladeshi hijras. When Roopsha and I watched the videos together, we particularly noticed one hijra guru of Hindu Brahmin origin who was a disciple of Dipa Bandyopadhyay, the late nayak who had publicly espoused anti-Bangladeshi positions (TNN, 2015). Previously allied with her guru’s standpoint, she now indicated her assent to the extra-judicial exculpation of Chowdhury.

Thus, there are disruptions of Hinduisation and Hindutva tendencies across both the anti-Chowdhury coalition and the group that exculpates Chowdhury. More than a result of opportunistically wavering alliances, such disruptions indicate relations of power that partly overlap but do not neatly tally with majoritarian Hindu visions of social order and suggest how normative hierarchies associated with Hinduism, especially caste, may be transformed by the others and elsewheres of Hindutva.

Chowdhury’s ability to deploy financial largesse to effectively shield herself from legal justice and win over the survivor is linked to a complex economy of status in hijra communities. As mentioned earlier, Chowdhury is a nayak, a senior guru with her own designated territory to carry out badhai, belonging to the Gumghor gharana or lineage of Bengal. In contrast, as the activist Roopsha told me, the survivor ‘did not belong to any gharana … she informally called some hijras mothers […] When a hijra guru helped her lodge a case, only then was she formally made a disciple’. Hijras affiliated with old, established gharanas in eastern India tend to regard hijras outside gharanas as inauthentic or illegitimate (Dutta, 2012, p. 838; Saria, 2021, p. 101). Hijras belonging to gharanas tend to be more organised than hijras outside lineages and may use the media to disseminate ideas about authentic versus inauthentic hijras (Dutta, 2012, p. 838). Further, hijras working within large households belonging to established gharanas also tend to make more money (Saria, 2021, p. 123). But there are differences of status even within hijra lineages. Gayatri Reddy (2005, pp. 80–83) describes a complex economy of izzat or respect among hijras in Hyderabad, according to which hijras claim higher intra-community status based on various factors, including anatomy, asceticism, profession, age, level of seniority within the multi-tiered ranks of gurus and disciples, etc. Hijras who have undergone the nirvan (castration-penectomy) operation, ascetics and performers of badhai or ritual blessing claim greater prestige and higher positions within lineages than non-castrated hijras, hijras in sexual relationships and hijras who perform sex work. Adnan Hossain (2012, p. 497) demonstrates that status among hijras is more contested and regionally varied, noting that in Bangladesh, anatomy (castration or lack thereof) is not necessarily a marker of status, whereas skill in hijragiri (hijra professions and rituals) might be more salient. Relations of power among hijras are thus linked to a multiply determined and contextually shifting calculus of status.

One significant but relatively invisibilised aspect of this calculus is caste, but not exactly caste as practised within broader Indian and Hindu society. Caste hierarchy is linked with reproductive heteronormativity and maintained through endogamy and control over female sexuality (Abraham, 2014). Given that a common social perception of hijras links them with impotence and non-reproductivity, hijras are often regarded as a pariah group located outside social rankings of caste and class altogether (Reddy, 2003, p. 164). This is also part of the way gharana-based hijras construct their identities: hijras in Hyderabad ‘explicitly emphasised their lack of caste’ (Reddy, 2005, p. 118). This is linked to an idealised renunciation of worldly ties with natal families and hence caste ascribed at birth (ibid., p. 150). As the Dalit transgender author Living Smile Vidya (2013) notes, ‘there is not so much caste in the hijra community because everyone’s names are changed. As you enter the hijra community, you lose location, language, last name’. The putative castelessness of hijras is also linked to their overall social marginalisation that, to some extent, cuts across caste origins. Even well-off hijras may not be able to translate their community status or money into sociocultural capital (Saria, 2021, p. 123). Roopsha, the aforementioned activist, is from a dominant-caste but working-class family. In a conversation in October 2021, she said, ‘when we clap to get money, we all become Dalit!’. Roopsha alludes to a distinctive form of clapping that immediately socially marks one as hijra (see Reddy, 2005, p. 136).

And yet, despite the ideal of renouncing natal affiliations and the generalised ascription of social marginality, in practice, hijra lifeworlds do not conform to a neat cleavage from social caste order and caste might inflect intra-community status in multiple ways. Despite the renunciatory ideal, hijras may retain links with their natal families to varying extents (Reddy, 2005, p. 260; Hossain, 2012, p. 500; Saria, 2021, p. 16). Vidya (2013) notes that some hijras allude to their natal caste status to indicate their caste pride, while others feel compelled to hide their caste background. Although Roopsha claimed that becoming hijra entails loss of caste, she later qualified her assertion by noting how some hijras do deploy caste to bolster their status:

Among hijras, if they can claim they are from uchcho-bongsho [high-caste] families then they get more respect […] They claim, I am from a Brahmin family […] During conflicts, sometimes hijras insult others as low-caste […] Even many high-ranked hijras of Muslim origin adopt high-caste surnames like Chatterjee, Banerjee, Saha.

Such use of surnames linked with caste status seems to be a relatively new tendency. As Vidya indicates above, initiation into hijra communities often entails the loss of one’s last name. In West Bengal, up to the early 2010s, I observed that most hijra gurus would use a generic surname like Hijrani (a stylisation of hijra) in addition to their adopted feminine first name. For instance, a senior guru of Murshidabad district north of Kolkata mentioned her name as Bhobani Hijrani in several interactions with the local press and administration where I was present. However, from the 2010s onward, prominent nayaks like Dipa Bandyopadhyay started using their natal surnames in public (Bandyopadhyay, 2015). Roopsha corroborated my observation: ‘now, the prayog [use] of caste is much more among hijras!’.

However, as caste moves from mainstream Hindu society to ‘elsewheres’ like hijra gharanas, there are transmutations in the logics of caste hierarchisation. Dipa Bandyopadhyay used her natal family name, which is well-known in West Bengal as a Brahmin (highest-caste) surname, and also explicitly indicated her Brahmin family background in an interview (Bandyopadhyay, 2015). On the one hand, this parallels rising Hindu right-wing tendencies among hijras, as Bandyopadhyay also publicly opposed Bangladeshi onuprobeshkari or ‘infiltrators’ who had entered hijra communities, as evident in a meeting with an NGO in June 2015 where I was present. On the other hand, Bandyopadhyay was also commonly known as Dipa Haji in hijra-kothi communities, where haji is an honorific indicating a hijra who has completed the Islamic Hajj pilgrimage, linked to higher prestige within the mixed religious practices of hijras. Bandyopadhyay never disavowed this honorific, combining both Hindu and Islamic markers of status.

Beyond such multiple, shifting identities that complicate a unilateral alliance with Hindutva, caste status may also become more mobile and even somewhat elective within hijra spaces relative to orthodox Hindu ideology that ties caste to birth. While Dipa Bandyopadhyay’s surname was derived from her Brahmin family, Roopsha’s statement above indicates that other ‘high-ranked’ hijras of Muslim (and thus non-Brahmin) origin may also adopt ‘high-caste’ Hindu surnames. As an example, Roopsha mentioned a hijra nayak of Bangladeshi Muslim and working-class origin who has adopted the Hindu surname Saha, which in West Bengal is linked with a relatively high caste. Another kothi friend of mine, who is from a Dalit but upwardly mobile family and has worked both in NGOs and in hijra professions, has adopted the Brahmin surname ‘Chatterjee’. These examples suggest the translation of status gained in other ways—for instance, through ascent into senior hijra positions—into the terms of caste. Muslim and Dalit hijras adopting Hindu dominant-caste names is not possible in orthodox Hindu caste ideology and indicates transmutations in logics of caste as it moves elsewhere.

I was unable to confirm whether Ratna Chowdhury’s surname is natal or adopted; my interlocutors cautioned me against approaching her directly since I have links with activists like Giri who had mobilised against Chowdhury. Chowdhury is a transregional surname used by both Bangladeshi Muslims and some Indian Hindus, and historically, was a title bestowed by rulers on military commanders and persons of eminence of both Hindu and Muslim backgrounds (Hanks, McClure and Coates, 2016, p. 501). Roopsha noted that ‘Chowdhury is counted mostly as a higher caste’ in West Bengal. Whether natal or chosen, Chowdhury’s surname associated her with caste respectability and shielded her from being immediately outed as Muslim or non-dominant caste in media reports. This ensured that her otherisation as a Muslim and alleged Bangladeshi by some community members did not become a pervasively explicit discourse.

Another way that caste bolsters Chowdhury’s immunity to total marginalisation and her aforementioned ‘money power’ is her seniority within the old, established hijra lineage of Gumghor. Several hijras affiliated with the gharana have told me that Gumghor was the first hijra lineage established in the Bengal region by the progenitor of hijra practices in the area, the other gharanas being later offshoots. Some members link this historical status with greater prestige relative to the other two gharanas, Shyambajaria (also called Shyambajari) and Mechhua (also Machhua). In November 2012, Bindiya, a hijra who had been initiated under a guru of the Gumghor lineage, told me, ‘We Gumghors are higher in jaat [caste], Shyambajaris and Mechhuas are lower in caste!’. Roopsha, who is affiliated with the Mechhua gharana, said that she had not heard Gumghor’s status described as a higher caste, but agreed that Gumghor did wield more power and control more territory in West Bengal than other gharanas, which translates into bigger incomes for its senior nayaks.

The ascription of caste to hijra gharanas does not tally with conventional caste groupings of Hindu society. Rather, the linkage of higher caste status with a lineage descending directly from the progenitor of hijras in Bengal resonates more closely with understandings of caste in South Asian Islam. While caste in South Asia is inextricable from Hinduism, caste is also practised in a somewhat modified form among Muslims (Anis, 2020). As Shafiullah Anis (2020) argues, caste within South Asian Islam cannot be reduced to the influence of Hinduism alone and evidences the impact of ideas of lineage from the Arab world—specifically, the idea of high status based on consanguineal descent from the Prophet’s family or the first Caliphs. In South Asia, this idea of lineage-based status becomes connected with Hindu ideas of caste (including and beyond caste as profession), helping consolidate caste hierarchy among Muslims (ibid.). Muslim-majority regions are positioned in Hindutva ideology as spatial others from where invasive threats to Hindu nationhood emanate (Desai, 2011). The impact of Islamic ideas of lineage in shaping caste among South Asian Muslims thus indicates how the spatial elsewheres of Hindutva may inflect and modify social structures associated with Hinduism.

This lineage-caste relation gets transfigured further in hijra spaces. In Bindiya’s account above, the linkage of caste to descent from the foundational figure of a lineage is not via bloodline as in Islamic understandings, but via initiation into the non-reproductive structures of hijra kinship. Significantly, Bindiya was from a Dalit family and had grown up in a Kolkata slum, but her ritual initiation into Gumghor allowed her to claim high-caste status. Initiation into a hijra lineage is not a freely available choice and hinges on acceptance by a guru of the gharana (Reddy, 2005, p. 151). Even so, the gain of status through initiation makes caste affiliation more elective and mobile than the natal ascription of caste among Hindus and Muslims. If Anis’ aforementioned analysis reveals how caste in South Asia is inflected by logics of status that emanate from elsewhere, Bindiya’s narrative and life trajectory shows how caste is transformed further when it moves elsewhere beyond the norms of reproductive kinship practised across Hindu and Muslim communities. Adapting Muñoz, one might say that caste among hijras bears traces of ‘other times and places’, a ‘surplus’ deriving from variant historical logics of lineage and kinship that potentially transmutes it into ‘something else’ beyond its normative ordering (see Muñoz, 2019, p. 28).

conclusion

On one hand, the transmutation of caste in spaces that are positioned elsewhere relative to the Hindu caste order might only seem to perpetuate hierarchies in modified forms. On the other hand, this transmutation means that at least some Dalits and Muslims such as Bindiya and Chowdhury are able to mobilise logics of caste within hijra communities, thus preventing the crystallisation of power along the Hindu-Muslim polarity favoured by Hindutva and disrupting queer Hindutva alliances built on a Hindu majoritarian dynamic. Even if Hindu–Muslim tensions escalate at certain moments, power relations within hijra-kothi communities are not ultimately reducible to a Hindu–Muslim divide, which is complicated and displaced by other logics of status, such as Chowdhury’s wealth and influence despite her Muslim and allegedly Bangladeshi origin. This irreducible surplus poses a hurdle for Hindu nationalist attempts to appropriate ‘queer and trans struggles’ (Upadhyay, 2020, p. 466).

If power does not conform to the typical equations of Hindutva politics, resistance cannot be reduced to a Hindu–Muslim dialectic either. For instance, in a WhatsApp group, Bina, a kothi who had initially made anti-Bangladeshi comments, backtracked upon realising the hypocrisy of Hindu hijra gurus such as Shompa, who condemned Chowdhury but had previously threatened junior hijras and kothis herself. As Bina told me: ‘Is Shompa herself any better? She had threatened to throw acid bulbs on kothis earlier’. This recognition of Shompa as no better than Chowdhury marks a realisation that power within hijra communities is not simply deployed along a Hindu–Muslim axis. Meanwhile, soon after Chowdhury’s arrest, Roopsha ruefully predicted to me that senior gurus would resolve the issue irrespective of religious differences: ‘hijras will levy dons [fines] and sort out the matter among themselves!’.

The critique of both Muslim- and Hindu-origin gurus due to their similar attempts to establish hierarchical authority, even by kothis like Bina who might have some Hindutva propensities, points to an ethical and political ‘elsewhere’ in the sense of a ‘not-yet-here’ that ‘open(s) up imaginal and concrete possibilities of critiquing the present’ (Kasmani et al., 2020, p. 95). That such critique emerges from compromised spaces rather than politically pure ones suggests that they bear a surplus irreducible to Hindutva that potentially gestures towards an elsewhere in the sense of ‘something else’: ‘another formation’ where queer subjects interrogate and reimagine the structures and relations they inhabit, even if momentarily (Muñoz, 2019, p. 59). Even as we heed Hindutva’s ability to malleably expand into diverse regions and communities, these irreducible ‘elsewheres’ not only expose the weaknesses of its assimilationist capacities but also suggest tentative openings towards a future not organised around its central concerns.