1How can a ritual performance be interpreted beyond the prism of religion? In Badhai: Hijra-Kwaja Sira-Trans Performance across Borders in South Asia, Adnan Hossain, Claire Pamment, and Jeff Roy take a sensitive approach to badhai (literally translated as “congratulations”), placing the emphasis on affects and aesthetics. This ritual—performed by hijra-kwaja sira-trans from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India—usually takes place on specific occasions, such as the birth of a baby or a couple’s wedding. The categories of hijra, kwaja sira, and trans correspond to what is often defined as “South Asian transgenders.” Despite territorial differences, hijra is often used in India and Bangladesh to refer to people who consider themselves neither man nor woman and who also maintain a devotional relationship with Hindu or Sufi deities, such as Bahuchara Mata (Nanda 1996). Kwaja sira refers to the same context in Pakistan. Beginning in 2000, after the arrival of transnational NGOs, the designation trans came to be included in the regional spectrum as some members of these communities began identifying as such. The authors sought to analyze the performances of badhai observed in their respective fields from a multidisciplinary perspective, forged at the intersection of South Asian studies and performance studies. The book thus presents a central problematic rooted in the following questions. What are the similarities and dissonances of the badhai tradition in the three countries where the researchers conducted their ethnographies? What are the consequences of badhai performances for the social structure of South Asian societies? And how do Hinduism and Islam intertwine to create a particular ritual language? Little has been explored on these performances because these events, considered rituals by the anthropological literature, are implemented through a fluid mise-en-scène, in which there is no order of events or even a particular discourse that emanates from the actors. Those involved in the performance go with the flow of the performance itself. Performers and audience become a united entity assembling individual relationships collectively focused on the religious. This is sensitively developed by the authors in each of their chapters.
2The work features a preface by Simon Shepherd, editor of the Methuen Drama Collection under Bloomsbury, in which he argues that social performance and aesthetic activity are juxtaposed and therefore has an impact on the social function of a particular performance. According to Shepherd, drama has always taken place over time. The aim of the Methuen Drama Collection, in which Badhai is included, is to understand how different performances from different cultures around the world adapt to specific social and historical contexts. Gayatri Reddy, professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and author of With Respect to Sex (2005) agrees with Shepherd’s argument that performance can incorporate a “polyvocal” methodology, revealing the subaltern encounters of contemporary reality in the countries of the Indian subcontinent. In fact, multiculturality can be observed in badhai through its gestuality and narratives, which take the audience beyond geopolitical boundaries.
3The introduction presents the reader to the sensibility represented in the book’s various ethnographies. The authors begin by asserting that badhai involves multiple intercorporeal exchanges (p. 3). The meeting of different corporalities within the context of performance represents the binary and standardized structure of local societies. The actors involved in badhai allow themselves to traverse the intersectionality between gender, sexuality, class, and caste while deploying “networks of reciprocity.” This intersectional journey is a test of the mobility and precariousness that the authors believe characterizes the badhai tradition. Both of these aspects make badhai significant for local societies and help to challenge the institutions and social categories imposed on individuals in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. On the one hand, the practice is fluid, bringing out a bricolage between Islam and Hinduism, as well as between Urdu and Hindi and even other South Asian languages. On the other hand, it is a performance accomplished by actors who find themselves in precarious living conditions, facing not only the marginalization of their existence but also of their actions. A common concept runs through the authors’ ethnographies: the hijrascape. Drawing on theory elaborated by Arjun Appadurai (1996)—according to which the world and, consequently, landscapes are made by an incessant movement of readaptation as individuals integrate a particular territorial and social context—the authors assert that the fluidity present in the South Asian badhai tradition transforms the performance itself into a methodological tool. The suffix “-scapes” represents the subjective nature of these performances. Three elements therefore edify the diversity that local societies face when experimenting with badhai: history, linguistics and politics. Through this conceptual taxonomy, Hossain, Pamment and Roy attest to the transnationalization of the performative culture of the badhai in three linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse nations. Several actors thus traverse the landscapes framing the relationship between hijra-khwaja sira-trans and the citizens of the various countries where they are present: the nation-state, multinational corporations, diasporic communities, religious and political movements, in addition to the physical interaction between all these actors.
4Adnan Hossain, professor at Utrecht University, entitles his chapter “Badhai as Dis/Ability” to highlight a sociolegal reality faced by the hijras in Bangladesh: the perception of their identity as a handicap. In 2013, Bangladesh recognized the hijras as a third gender, making it a new topic of social development in the country. According to the ruling that grants this new categorization, these individuals are considered to be asexual with hormonal problems and therefore people with a “disability” (protibondhi, in Urdu). This recognition also implies a transformation of the community’s professional practice (hijragiri), since badhai and cholla (asking for money on the streets in exchange for a blessing) have been eradicated. The aim of this is to “transform” the hijras into respectable, productive individuals, following an earlier policy created in 2010 that punished the practice of “begging” on the streets of major Bangladeshi cities with imprisonment. Between 2012 and 2013, when the recognition of an identity “other” than the binarity of man versus woman was being debated in parliament, the Bangladeshi government launched a new project for the hijras’ professional development through the Ministry of Social Welfare. In 2015, the National Social Security Strategy (NSSS) aimed at eradicating famine in the country was put in place and designated the hijras as a community that has been socially excluded from access to social rights. Within a context of democratic weakness and the quest for neoliberal development, Hossain argues that Bangladesh defines the hijras identity as handicapped in order to make them socially visible as an “intelligible subject of development.” (p. 54). However, as Vaibhav Saria (2019) has already pointed out, it is implausible to view the hijra tradition—particulary its occupations (hijragiri)—from a wholly secular perspective. Cholla, for example, is a rather complex exchange practice involving a specific aesthetic and affective presentation. It would be inconceivable to impose the neoliberal normativity of the Bangladeshi government on a regional tradition that crosses territorial and religious boundaries.
- 1 Pakistan only recognized the third status in 2012. Nepal was the first country in the region to do (...)
5The second chapter delves into the affects undertaken by Pakistan’s kwaja sira. Claire Pamment, professor of Theatre at William & Mary University, documents her ethnography in the province of Punjab in Pakistan, which highlights the affects and “relationalities” involved in a badhai performance. She observes that badhai is often viewed in the postcolonial imagination as extortion, a symbol of shame and embarrassment. However, she argues that badhai is in fact an opportunity to experience feelings, produce agency, and also maintain intra- and intercommunity relations. Furthermore, the junction of its human and sentimental relationships produces a “procreative ritual efficacy” (p. 72). Rooted in Sara Ahmed’s notion that bodies extend across spaces in a way that recreates social and hierarchical orders (2006), Pamment’s approach assumes that the religious pluralities that emerge from the badhai tradition reflect suprareligious practices of kinship relations, ritual organization, and oral history. Following ideas previously defended by Hossain (2012, 2017), Pamment reinforces the perception that her interlocutors claim a suprareligious and supranational belonging. In her view, the purpose of the badhai is to turn the fear the kwaja sira usually elicit into pleasure. To do so, the performers use the metaphorical language of Punjabi oral history. The kwaja sira comically draw on a particular cultural repertoire, using their songs and performances to address the sexual constraints imposed by the norm of Islam, Sufi spirituality, and the domestic reality of women. Indeed, this language creates an interdependence between both the kwaja sira and the badhai’s audience as well as an atmosphere that, despite enhancing the cis-heteronormative structure, allows them to penetrate the intimacy of the audience's domestic sphere. In this respect, the performance makes it possible to for the kwaja sira to feel like they are “elsewhere” (p. 83). In other words, these precise moments in the daily lives of Punjab’s kwaja sira take them into an imaginary (and political) territory where their marginalization and precariousness fade into affects. And yet the reality is not so simple. Just like in Bangladesh, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has ruled that the occupation of people belonging to the “third gender”1 is disrespectful to society, which is only the beginning of an official policy that marginalizes this community. For Pamment, these initiatives reflect the economic morality of a neoliberal middle class that imposes the categorization of behavior between respectful and useful citizens (ie., those who contribute to the country’s economic and social development) and citizens whose practices must be eradicated, such as the kwaja sira. This reality generates affective dynamics in the Pakistani community. As these individuals allow themselves to perform the badhai in such a way as to fabricate a practice of “affective worldmaking” (p. 101), whereby the individual agency of those who perform constructs a particular atmosphere in which the world is different, a space where the kwaja sira’s occupation can be recognized.
6Jeff Roy, ethnomusicologist and professor at California State Polytechnic University, examines the sound produced during a badhai. According to Roy, these events are an opportunity to think about the political and sensorial arrangements generated by the sonic atmosphere of the performances. The actors involved in a badhai are not always in control of the sounds that are produced. The urban environment creates sounds outside the scope of musical coherence. In this way, the urban environment both influences the performance and also modifies the sound of the local environment. Like Hossain and Pamment, Roy views badhai performances as challenging the Indian moral structure along with the hierarchies that segregate and discriminate the presence of hijra in public space by making marginalization itself “new sonically inflected sensorial possibilities” (p. 105). Indeed, sonic experiences are part of a quest to belong to a group and share a common culture. The negotiations that take place when a group of hijra arrive at the home of a newborn’s family, for example, fabricate a relationship between the hijra and the family, as well as between the hijra and the public and domestic space in question. This back-and-forth relationship between spaces has an impact on the urban landscape of the neighborhoods where they go to perform—particularly lower-middle-class neighborhoods—and shapes the conditions of existence of the two central actors of the badhai: the hijra and the audience (in particular, a small family network). These interactions are described by Roy as a “contingent potential of encounter” (p. 113) and present an interdependence assembling not only bodies, but also musical instruments and spaces. This sensitive relationship is forged in a reciprocity between vocality and instrumentality emanating from the local sonority. Roy defines the latter as “sonic arrangements” (p. 121) that make a subversion to the usual local sonority possible while simultaneously engendering affectionate relationships within both the community and the neighborhood. As a result, some emotions arise more noticeably, such as pleasure, humor, irritation, and exasperation. In short, the subversion reflected in the performance of badhai—despite its insertion in the cis-hetero-normative structure of South Asian culture—helps the hijra to create a sense of community and social belonging through the experience of emotions engendered by the sounds perceived through the performance.
7The book closes with common notes by all three authors, followed by a postscript. Hossain, Pamment, and Roy introduce readers to an autonomous reflection by putting key words from their perception of badhai on paper. Entitling these notes an “inconclusive practice” (p. 135), the researchers lead the reader to perceive badhai as a multiple practice that crosses borders. The reciprocity involved in the performances and the improvisation (indeed, the fluidity) that produces the performance itself show a politics of perpetuating a tradition, in addition to a resistance to cis-heteronormativity and a contestation of the place assigned to hijra-kwaja sira-trans in the three societies studied in the book. The book concludes with an afterword by Kareen Khubchandani, professor of Performance Studies at Tufts University, which further supports the authors’ analyses. Khubchandani defends performance as a stimulating approach for the social sciences, valuing the interpretation of sensations. This idea ties in with the researchers’ sensitive methodology reflecting on ambience and feelings, as well as the interpretation of sound and body movements present in the badhai.
8In conclusion, this book opens the door to a new understanding of the lives of transgender people in South Asia. The approach adopted by the the authors encourages the reader to examine the affects and sensations of both the researcher and their respondents. Although the language used in the writing sometimes raises doubts about the exact definition of expressions, the poetics of the writing offers a contemporary and sensible version of the ethnographic method: letting go through the creativity produced by the researcher's bodily and sensory experiences. Unfortunately, the anthropology of affects usually focuses on the feelings of the interlocutors and how they perceive and experience their own emotions. But as David Le Breton (2021) has affirmed in the introduction to his book Anthropologie des émotions :
The emotions are not absolute states, nor are they transposable substances from one individual or a group to another; they are not, or not only, psychological processes whose secret is embedded in the body. They are relations … . In a discreet or sensitive form, they are translated through attitudes, postures, purposes, and behaviors. They resound on the others and on the world in a back-and-forth report between the individual’s perspective on the situation and the way in which he responds to it (pp. 1-2).
9Even though the postmodern current of anthropology places the ethnographer as a key actor inside the fieldwork dynamics, their sensations remain silenced by the methodology. This book adopts the opposite and innovative perspective, whereby the individual senses of every single person involved in the ethnography are connected to the environment in which they happen. It is therefore imperative to pay attention to the feelings and bodily expressions of the ethnographer themself. Ethnography becomes a twofold methodology, in which it is necessary to think through and within the ethnographer’s body and also the bodies of those whom the researcher addresses in their work.
10The study of sexual minorities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh has recently become more widespread in the social sciences, particularly after the decriminalization of homosexuality in the penal codes (the notorious Section 377 of the colonial penal code). Nevertheless, people claiming a nonbinary, and therefore a non-normative, identity are less studied in socioanthropological research, making it difficult for researchers to access this type of fieldwork. However, the reconfigurations carried out by civil society in South Asia, particularly through various international NGOs, are worth analyzing and contesting in a reflective and critical way. The three authors of this book have sensitively and responsibly negotiated their presence in the field. Their study displays a remarkable levely of methodological and theoretical sensitivity, proposing a transnational examination of a marginalized tradition in the region. In this way, Hossain, Pamment, and Roy translate the voices of those who feel alive by engaging with sound, dance, and spirituality.