[Hijras occupy a special place in Hinduism.
But their relationship to modern Mumbai, where transgender people are legally
recognized, remains fraught.]
Photographs
by Sara HyltonText by Jeffrey Gettleman Produced by Eve Lyons
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Radhika’s “daughters,” as
she affectionately calls them, pose for a portrait near their
shared settlement in
Mumbai, India. The hijra community is hierarchical, such
that more experienced and
mature hijras act as guardians and superiors
to younger hijras.CreditSara
Hylton for The New York Times
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MUMBAI,
India — When Lord Rama was
exiled from Ayodhya and his entire kingdom began to follow him into the forest,
he told his disciples: “Men and women, please wipe your tears and go away.”
So they left. Still, a group of people stayed
behind, at the edge of the forest, because they were neither men nor women.
They were hijras, which in Urdu means something like eunuchs. Those people
waited in the woods for 14 years until Lord Rama returned, which won them a
special place in Hindu mythology. There's a bit of a mystery about the story’s
origin — scholars say it's not in the early versions of ancient Hindu texts —
but in the past century this folk tale about the hijras’ loyalty has become an
important piece of their identity. Hijras figure prominently in India’s Muslim
history as well, serving as the sexless watchdogs of Mughal harems.
Today hijras, who include transgender,
intersex and hermaphroditic people, are hard to miss. Dressed in glittering
saris, their faces heavily coated in cheap makeup, they sashay through crowded
intersections knocking on car windows with the edge of a coin and offering
blessings. They dance at temples. They crash fancy weddings and birth
ceremonies, singing bawdy songs and leaving with fistfuls of rupees.
Many Indians believe hijras have the power to
bless or curse, and hijras trade off this uneasy ambivalence.
Gurvinder Kalra, a psychiatrist who has
studied the hijra community, recalled the time when a troupe showed up
uninvited at his nephew’s birth.
“The first thing people said was, ‘Oh my God,
the hijras are here.’” Then there was a nervous pause, he said. Then laughter.
“There is this mixture of negativity and
positivity, a laughter, a fear, this sense they are oddities,” Dr. Kalra said.
Behind the theatrics are often sad stories —
of the sex trade and exploitation, cruel and dangerous castrations, being cast
out and constantly humiliated. Within India’s L.G.B.T. community, the hijras
maintain their own somewhat secretive subculture.
Radhika, a hijra living near a railway
station in Mumbai, didn’t think of herself as different until she started
school, a chapter of her life that did not last long. After being teased by
other children, she realized she wasn’t exactly a girl, but she wasn’t a boy
either. Her mother told her not to dwell on it.
“She told me, ‘You’re a girl. Stick to it.’”
It hasn’t been easy for Radhika. Her parents
split up when she was young, and her mother died soon afterward. None of her
relatives wanted to take care of her. After she was essentially abandoned, an
older prostitute discovered her and put her to work in a garbage-strewn park
selling sex. She was 8.
A decade and a half later, Radhika is still a
sex worker. She wears dark saris, chipped purple nail polish, a gold ring in
her left nostril and her hair down the middle of her back.
When asked how she feels each evening as she
heads off to work, to stand in a line of other prostitutes along the railway
tracks, waiting for customers, she shrugged.
“Ever since I was a little girl, I learned
the world runs on money,” she said. “I learned that if I don’t have money, I
don’t exist.’’
In many ways, Radhika’s story is no rougher,
lonelier or more desperate than those of many other hijras. Many are engaged in
sex work, locked into service for a guru who takes most of their earnings.
Radhika wouldn’t utter her guru’s name. She
seemed scared to talk about her. Within the hijra world, gurus fulfill the
hybrid role of den mother, godfather, spiritual leader and pimp. The gurus are
hijras as well, usually in their 40s or 50s.
There is a bit of a pyramid sales scheme
within the hijra community. Younger “chelas,” or disciples, are managed by
midranking hijras who report up to gurus, who are often steered by their own
elder mentors. For every hijra, the idea is to get as many chelas working for
you as possible. The money flows up; the protection from abusive customers or
police officers flows down.
When I tried to interview a guru in Radhika’s
neighborhood, the guru shook her head and said she had to get permission from
her guru.
But one guru opened up. She lives on the
second floor of a slum house in Mumbai, up a narrow metal ladder, like on a
ship. Different from Radhika and most hijras, who spend their years in small,
airless shanties with the smell of feces wafting through cracks in the walls,
this guru, who calls herself Chandini, rents a relatively large apartment. She
sat on a cleanly swept floor, slumped against a Whirlpool fridge.
“These days, it’s so much easier to be a
hijra,” Chandini said. “Now there are doctors. When I had my sex change, we had
to do it ourselves.”
In the past, she said with a sigh, countless
young men died from sloppy castrations. They were often performed by people
with no medical training.
India has come a long way from that. In some
states, such as Kerala, in the south, a person can now get a sex change at a
government hospital. A few years ago, India officially recognized transgender
as a third gender, eligible for welfare and other government benefits. Not all
transgender people are hijras or members of guru families.
Hundreds of years ago, under traditional
Hindu culture, hijras enjoyed a certain degree of respect. But Victorian
England changed that. When the British colonized India in the mid-19th century,
they brought a strict sense of judgment to sexual mores, criminalizing “carnal
intercourse against the order of nature.” That was the beginning, scholars say,
of a mainstream discomfort in India with homosexuality, transgender people and
hijras.
Many hijras feel a sense of alienation, of
being looked at as freaks. They complain about being heckled, harassed and
assaulted. Gurus help the young hijras navigate some of this; their networks of
disciples are known as “houses” or “families.” The houses operate a bit like
street gangs — they fight over territory for begging and prostitution and
settle disputes among themselves, sometimes violently, in the shadows of train
stations and slums.
Chandini made no bones about how it worked
among her 15 chelas.
“They give me what they earn,” she said.
She even keeps a stack of receipt books,
heaped by her TV, so anyone making a donation to a hijra in her neighborhood
can keep a record of it
Puja, a 28-year-old hijra, said she felt a
“sisterhood” with the other hijras in her house. Puja seemed a lighter spirit,
happy in her own skin. She lives with three other transgender women and they
cover their rent by dancing at temples and begging on the street.
“Personally, I don’t want to beg. Nobody
wants to beg,” Puja said. “And the situation is worse now for begging. The
police harass us. They don’t let us beg anymore on trains. But we aren’t given
any other opportunity, and now you ask us not to beg? This is not fair. This is
not justice.”
At end of interview, Puja looked at me and asked
very earnestly:
“What do transgenders do in your country? Do
they do sex work?”
