Hijras

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Hijrās

Hijrās constitute a religious community of sexually charged and sexually ambiguous men who dress and act like women. They are religious ascetics who are required to be celibate servants of the goddess Bahucharā Mātā. Many undergo castration, and some work as homosexual prostitutes. One of the stories told about Bahucharā Mātā is that she cut off her breasts to avoid being raped by thieves; this suggests that her male priests should castrate themselves in imitation of her act. Of equal religious significance is the fact that hijrās identify with the sexually ambivalent god Śiva, who is both the great ascetic and the virile husband, particularly in his ardhanāriśvara form of half man-half woman and in the legend of his self-castration.

RELIGIOUS ROLE OF HIJRĀS

In many ways hijrās seem to mimic devadāsīs: women dedicated to the temple who enact the role of divine courtesans, each of whom usually has a male patron who is her lover. As with devadāsīs the ritual roles of hijrās center on temple festivals, births, and marriages. In the temples of Bahucharā Mātā they act as her servants, tell stories about her, and bless her worshippers. After the birth of a male child hijrās visit the child's home to sing and dance, examine the child's genitals, and demand money for blessing him with fertility, prosperity, and a long life. Hijrās who have lost masculinity or who represent the third sex (tritīya prakriti), such as hermaphrodites, transvestites, and homosexuals, seemingly are perceived as individuals who have intimate knowledge of changeable or inadequate sex organs. If the infant's genitals are ill defined or are those of a hermaphrodite, the hijrās have the right to claim the baby as one of them. To the families they serve hijrās embody fears about losing masculinity—they can take the child away—yet they have the power to give what they do not have: the power to create new life by blessing the fertile masculinity of the infant. They receive this power from the mother goddess Bahucharā Mātā, who is the bestower of life or death, but their powers cut both ways: They can curse as well as bless, and their curses are feared greatly.

At weddings they bless the married couple for fertility. Unlike devadāsīs, who go to the bride's house, hijrās perform at the groom's house; like the devadāsīs, they attend with or without an invitation. While they sing and dance the hijrās tell various family members that "you will have a son," or "you will have a grandson" (Nanda 1990, p. 4). Often the bride is not allowed to be present. Hijrās are presented as a masculine concern, a concern of the patrilineal family that must have sons who will be capable of siring sons of their own. Brides are outsiders, merely the vehicles for male fertility, in that viewpoint.

HIJRĀS AND THE RELATIONSHIP OF SEXUALITY AND SPIRIT

Hijrās are connected ritually to the maintenance of patrilineal descent. It is as if having surrendered their masculine fertility, they can confer it on others, and the power of their austere asceticism is sufficient to assure male babies. Their actual or rumored homosexuality, though frowned on, increases their contact with semen, thus increasing their power to confer patrilineal fertility. Many people believe that loss of semen reduces a man's power. Male south Asian ascetics act on that belief by building up their spiritual power through celibacy. Castrated hijrās cannot ejaculate even if they want to or by accident, such as nightly emission. They are ascetics par excellence, yet some are also prostitutes; they encapsulate within themselves a sexual-ascetic tension and use that power to bless or curse the fertility of others. The complexity of the sexual and religious ideas and activities that define them are ancient and reveal other aspects of south Asian concerns about the relationship of sexuality and spiritual power and the uses and abuses of fertility for secular and religious ends.