The Transgender Nation and its Margins: The Many Lives of the Law

Hindu Nation and its Queers: Caste, Islamophobia, and De/coloniality in India

“…In 2016, when Indian forces crossed the Pakistan border to attack Pakistan's sovereignty, Tripathi appealed to the Modi government to start a "kinnar battalion" that would help erase Pakistan from the world map. Bhattacharya (2019) notes: "While Laxmi's proclamation chimes in with the jingoist climate currently dominating India, this invocation of nationalism as a trope to claim Indian citizenship and thus legibility in the Indian polity is similar" to other videos depicting hijras signing national anthems and participating in drills for Independence Day marches. More recently, in 2018, Tripathi publicly supported the Hindutva call for the construction of a temple at the controversial site in Ayodhya where, in 1992, Hindu mobs destroyed a sixteenth-century mosque, the Babri Masjid.…”

Clapping Along or Clapping Back: Of the Discourse of Hijra Community’s Resilient Happiness in Y-Film’s Hum Hain Happy

“…These are highly stigmatised professions and also precarious sectors of work; thus, hijra communities often find themselves struggling financially and are simultaneously socio-culturally ostracised. Through the lens of recent legal reforms and related discourse in India, the term hijra has been interchangeably used with transgender whilst Hijra itself does not connote a gender identity and has more to do with ‘a specific group of people (which could include transfeminine individuals, kothis and women) with specific religious and linguistic practices’ (Bhattacharya 2019, 11). Moreover, Hijra has often be seen as the translation of transgender itself in India, given how collective imagination of the term transgender is associated with non-normative gender expressions and how hijra communities have been exemplary of socio-culturally defined heterogeneous gendered dissidence.…”

Peer Research in Health and Social Development

“…However, to date, such actions have not led to supporting legislation or consistent on-the-ground implementation by government stakeholders. Amidst such concerns, while larger Indian transgender movements have been conscious of the need to take along anyone who has an identification or affinity to the transgender umbrella, there have been disagreements about such processes that have been manifest in Manipur in particular ways (Bhattacharya 2019). Hijras constitute one of the most prominent and recognised sections of Indian transgender movements, their geographical spread more or less correlating with large parts of what the Manipuris often call the 'Indian mainland'all of northern, western and central India and parts of southern and eastern India, extending up to Assam in the North-East.…”