Reimagining Trans in Contemporary South Asia

Our conversations toward “Reimagining Trans in Contemporary South Asia” began in the dismaying aftermath of the 2023 Pakistani Federal Shariat Court judgment in Hammad Hussain v. Federation of Pakistan. This judgment (now in abeyance while being appealed) deemed major portions of Pakistan's 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act “unIslamic” and unenforceable. However, this judgment was written not only in the register of Islamic jurisprudence, but it also deployed common global tropes emanating from anti-gender, homophobic, and allegedly decolonial religious nationalist registers (Awan 2022; Redding 2022). Despite the loss, disappointment, and precarity resulting from this judgment, many of Pakistan's trans-hijra-khwaja sira communities and allies continued to work against the exclusions represented by this decision and hostile mechanisms of transgender rights and legitimacy.1 Such efforts to reimagine trans possibility entail reckonings with the coconstitutive scripts of gender, sexuality, nation, region, language, kinship, class, caste, labor, and religion. This special issue grows out of the robust scholarship engaging such reckonings across South Asia and asks how regional conversations in their “collusions and collisions” (Arondekar and Patel 2016: 151) might further reimagine trans-hijra-khwaja sira possibility with, against, and beyond the state.We come to these issues and questions ourselves through over fifteen years of participation in South Asian queer and trans-hijra-khwaja sira communities and mobilizations, albeit from significantly different disciplinary locations—namely, sociolegal studies and theater and performance studies. As a sociolegal scholar interested in the mutual entanglements of law, gender, and religion, Jeff's extensive documenting of transgender legal developments in Pakistan has not only provided a foundation for further scholarship and commentary by others but also opened up new archival ways of looking at ordinary legal processes emphasizing the fundamental effervescence and elusiveness of what is too often thought of as an iconic “law” (Redding 2019, 2020). Claire's theater and performance studies background, and experiences of collaborative devised theater making and film projects with khwaja sira and trans communities in Lahore (Pamment 2023a; Pamment et al. 2020) shapes her emphasis on embodied, aesthetic, affective, religious, and imaginative dimensions of trans-hijra-khwaja sira world making (Hossain, Pamment, and Roy 2023; Pamment 2019b, 2022; Pamment and Awan 2024).Since our earliest meetings in Lahore, not long after the 2009–12 hearings concerning transgender rights and welfare in Pakistan (Nisar 2022; Hamzić 2016; Redding 2015), we have witnessed an incredible and multidisciplinary engagement with South Asian trans-hijra-khwaja sira communities. Trying to take stock of this momentum and impasses reached—including the continuing dominance of global North epistemologies and vocabularies—offered a ripe opportunity to organize a collective at the 2023 Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison to contemplate the current situation and to imagine futures. Sixteen scholars from a range of disciplinary and regional locations (some of them featured in this special issue) gathered to deliberate on trans movements of the last decade and possibilities of resistance, intervention, speculation, failure, and fabulation.2 From these reflections and further ones assembled here in this special issue, the following themes in trans studies from contemporary South Asia and beyond emerged.In centering South Asia in this special issue for TSQ, we contemplate the queer historian Anjali Arondekar's (2023: 95) provocation: “While it is laudable to have scholarship on India, Egypt, Philippines, Brazil (pick your favorite queer else/where) take center stage for a special issue or two . . . how can such scholarship become central and not ‘special’ and how can our voyages out forge a queer/trans geopolitics?” While South Asian queer and trans scholarship is often marginalized by Euro-American “canonical” trans studies, this scholarship promises important resistance to bourgeois global North forms of governance and epistemologies prioritizing “the liberal humanist ontological self” as the basis for trans experience (Sharma 2023: 10; Amin 2023) and more “relational modes of existence” (Shroff 2020: 261). However, as anti-transgender laws and movements are gaining traction globally, trans scholarly canons are increasingly looking to South Asia (Butler 2024: 233; Gill-Peterson 2024; Gould 2024). A significant strand of this work has placed temporal weight on hijra criminalization under nineteenth-century British colonial laws (Gannon 2009; Hinchy 2019) and the legacy of this criminalization in marginalizing Indian hijras today, even while commonly overstating a separation between hijra and transgender and often eliding how these communities are mobilizing possibility in contemporary contexts (Butler 2024: 233; Gill-Peterson 2024: 31). Although evidently valuable, these works unfortunately do not account enough for the multiplicity of how transgender, hijra, khwaja sira, and other identities and materialities play out in relation to region, religion, caste or class, economic policy, and South Asia's impermanent or porous postcolonial political borders “in ways that belie stratifications between ‘global’ and ‘local’ languages of gender and sexuality” (Dutta 2024: 3). Our call for “reimaginings” borrows from David Valentine's (2007) critique of an imagined and ahistorical unity of transgender as an institutional category while also building on trailblazing South Asian scholarship that moves away from the imagined unity of any category. We accent the many creative ways that trans-hijra-khwaja sira possibilities are making life livable—opening horizons of social justice and world making with, against, and beyond nation-states, and with deep implications for the broader field of trans studies.The dissolution or historicization of imagined unities has been an important intervention made by not only trans studies but also the broader field of South Asian studies. For example, the historian Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar (2010) has rearticulated the traumatic partition of British India not simply as something that happened in 1947 but as something much more “long” and murky, thereby challenging the assumed naturalness of always-already discrete nation-states like “India” and “Pakistan.” Similarly, trans scholarship has explored “trans, inter- and intra-regional networks, flows and movement” (Hossain 2021: 18; Dutta et al. 2022) in constituting trans-hijra-khwaja sira communities. Such flows not only complicate a global North–centered paradigm of nongovernmental (NGO) and activist organizing (Khan 2016; Dutta and Roy 2014) but also include trans-hijra-khwaja sira ongoing cross-border migrations through participation in rituals and performance labor (Hossain and Nanda 2020; Hossain, Pamment, and Roy 2023).Unsurprisingly, then, what one might call “critical regionality” has been a theme of at least four recent special issues on queer or trans studies regarding Asia (Arondekar and Patel 2016; Chiang, Henry, and Leung 2018; Roy et al. 2023; Thangaraj and Inhorn 2024). We take inspiration from these and other prior collective meditations regarding the imbrications of geopolitics with sexuality and gender studies and express unease with any view that an epistemically continuous and coherent global North either birthed or owns queer and trans studies (Kasmani 2023: 4–5). In the South Asian context, critical regionality includes highlighting and problematizing the global North's imperial imaginings of South Asia and its relations with other regions and powers, whether territorial or cultural. But it also means highlighting inequities and hegemonies within South Asia too. In this vein, we heed Adnan Hossain's (2018) important critique of the India-centricity of hijra and trans studies and have sought contributions focused on the wide diversity of contemporary South Asian states—including two articles on Nepal, two interventions on pressing contemporary developments in Bangladesh, and innovative contributions regarding Sri Lanka and Pakistan. We have also sought contributions working beyond dominant modalities of the nation-state, including those focusing on nonmetropolitan locations, nonstate communities, and movements with supralocal reach, thus again bringing contemporary borders (southern and northern) into relief and question.Following Omar Kasmani (2023: 3), we engage contributions that “stretch, also trouble or make capacious, the idea of the modern nation-state to open it up to shifting conditions and plural possibilities.” Examples of this kind of stretching work in this special issue include Sophiya Sharma's discussion of muratan suspicion of state-sanctioned biomedical technologies impacting sex and gender in the western Indian state of Punjab, especially when these technologies fail to effectuate trans beauty ideals that find inspiration from feminine styles in Pakistan's Punjab Province. This stretching is also evident in Rasel Ahmed's provocative cinematic staging of how queer/trans citizenship in Bangladesh is negotiated and reimagined through Ahmed's short film Who Killed Taniya. Following violent attacks on queer/trans activists in Bangladesh in 2016, which forced Ahmed into exile in the United States, Ahmed's filmmaking explores new imaginaries through autofiction and strategic misidentification that challenge the very premises of national space and belonging. Kumud Rana's multipronged analysis of the interactions between international and local human rights activists over multiple years demonstrates how Nepali gender identifications are impacted by transnational flows. Despite our best efforts, we acknowledge that this special issue inadequately represents trans lives and experiences across all contingencies of South Asia and the capaciousness of its reach from the Maldives in the south to disputed Kashmir in the north and onward to its diasporas and beyond, or what Gayatri Gopinath describes as a “queer regional imaginary” (2018: 5, 26) with its interplay of “different spatial scales” (29).Critical regionality brings into focus unequal flows of resources, epistemes, and prestige in a world overwhelmed by globalizing infrastructures of progress keenly invested in invidious discrimination between respected global tops and denigrated global bottoms. Recent important work has demonstrated queer abundance exceeding the epistemological parameters set by archives situated in the global North (Arondekar 2009) and global South (Arondekar 2023; Puri 2016) alike. Similar to these disruptions of unreflective representations of a global South known chiefly though tropes of trans impoverishment or sexual backwardness, contributions here situate South Asia as a fluid or even slippery site of trans imagination and momentum.Trans imagination and momentum can be located across the multiple social, cultural, and political spheres impacting contemporary trans-hijra-khwaja sira life in South Asia. Echoing the previous discussion, flows and disjunctures are pronounced in the legal sphere. Famously, Pakistan's 2018 Act granted an individual right to gender self-determination—with effects impacting a trans person's Islamic share of wealth and property inheritance—while India's 2019 Act permitted the state to inspect bodies seeking certain kinds of official gender changes. Yet just five years after its legislation, Pakistan's 2018 Act was undermined by the Federal Shariat Court's seduction by Islamist petitioners invoking Hindu nationalist India's bureaucratized gender-recognition framework and “anti-gender” and TERF tropes now loudly bounding across the world's regions, borders, and states (Butler 2024). The transnational anti-trans mobilizations (while taking their own particular scalar trajectories) conjure certain details of the circulation of evangelical Christian anti-gay discourse between the United States and Uganda marking the opening scenes of Rahul Rao's Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020). In this issue, Adnan Hossain's magisterial overview of the complex impact of the 2024 Bangladeshi uprising on LGBTQI communities takes note of the translation into Bangla of Urdu anti-trans fatwas as they have traveled from Pakistan to Bangladesh. By way of contrast, the securing of transgender rights moving regionally from Nepal in 2007 to Pakistan in 2009 and then to India in 2014 (Dickson and Sanders 2014; Jain and DasGupta 2021) has suggested the possibility of more inspiring transregional mobilizations of laws, activism, and community solidarities. Notably, the deeply intersectional legislative efforts South Asia has witnessed in the past several years confirm Gayatri Reddy's 2005 observation that “axes of religion and gender mutually constitute each other in interesting and complex ways” (105).Gayatri Reddy and Shakthi Nataraj in their graphic contribution to this special issue explore the regulations of hijra lives in British colonial and postcolonial Indian contexts, foregrounding how the social regulation of gender often materially implicates kinship, labor, aesthetics, caste, class, and religion. Their collaboration builds on Nataraj's (2017) work around the wide-ranging circulations of colonial-era laws and legends and Reddy's (2005) pathbreaking ethnography on hijra communities that challenged then-prevalent ideas that hijras could be understood primarily on the basis of gender and sexuality alone, positing that they are also embedded in kinship, class, caste, and religion. As their cover image for this special issue makes clear, these ideas continue to offer vibrant ground for diverse trans-hijra-khwaja sira kinship and community across the region and inform key scholarly interventions of this special issue.Regarding kinship, scholarly literature has traced developments in the legal sphere under the rubric of transgender inheritance law (Gulati and Anand 2022). Reimaginings of kinship have also been the focus of ethnographic explorations of alternative and variegated South Asian trans-hijra-khwaja sira kinship systems (Cohen 1995; Goel 2022; Hossain 2021; Purayil 2022; Ramberg 2014; Reddy 2005). Nithin Manayath (2015: 251) considers how kinship practices working to keep property and inheritance within hijra lineages can be threatened by a “rush to rights” mediated by the state. Such attention to kinship networks of sociality, solidarity, relationality, and inheritance has become increasingly urgent in the neoliberal present with its common exhortations to rescue the imputed “victims” of trans kinship structures (Hamzić 2023; Saria 2021; Redding 2021). Liza Tom's discussion in this special issue of the impact of development-sector NGO norms on trans kinship in southern India, including NGO attempts to minimize or efface the contributions of trans collectives to welfare, thus provides a timely intervention.In the absence of such community structures (jamaats, deras, community-based organizations) in Sri Lanka during its civil war (1983–2009), Gowthaman Ranganathan and Angel Queentus reveal how theater performance provided a crucial site for transfeminine life and kinship to flourish. Ranganathan and Queentus contribute to recent scholarly attention to queer and trans aesthetics, art, and performance in South Asia. Such work centers the imaginative and materially grounded ways in which trans-hijra-khwaja sira persons have made possibilities, pleasures, livelihoods, and relationalities, often beyond dominant registers of transgender identity, legality, and epidemiology (Horton 2020; Hossain, Pamment, and Roy 2023; Khubchandani 2020; Roy 2019; Samuel 2015). Tracing out transfeminine performance in a period of Tamil militancy, ordinarily defined as a time of trans absence, Ranganathan and Queentus unfurl intimate imbrications of transfeminine lives within these histories and locate contexts for contemporary trans organizing. Considering that trans-hijra-khwaja sira scholarship to focus on British colonial or the onward of and liberal Ranganathan and Queentus to the possibility of Dutta to performance in their contribution concerning known as as by or hijra in North India (Dutta 2022) and the of these practices within the gender and (Dutta often trans and state discourse in Dutta literature challenging dominant neoliberal forms of trans and queer and in South Asia 2021; 2020; Pamment Roy 2022; Saria 2019; especially as such works to and or of trans performance and labor 2024; Hossain, Pamment, and Roy 2023; In forms of trans including and trans Dutta the of and a for more of trans-hijra-khwaja sira lives and as caste and are up with trans labor, caste this special issue whether in of kinship transgender religion or histories of criminalization and governance and As critical caste have long caste social, and practices 2022; 2009; all kinds of and across and work has how imaginaries have contemporary transgender rights and and trans and queer in India 2019; 2024; 2023; and DasGupta 2023; Reddy 2020). The to how caste out in other regional contexts is up by in this special issue through queer and trans organizing in how conversations might be across national by engaging and and imaginaries of and trans movements in and beyond Hindu the of Hindu nationalist trans organizing in India has been as the of the a Hindu religious for persons with the and hijra 2019; and DasGupta 2023; 2019; 2020). has been for to in a Hindu past the of in the of and against and trans in this issue that the of the as a centers and her dominant caste and has significant and of this religious which do not with Hindu makes this in foregrounding a of the caste a in the of the and has religious while also being an against the of caste, gender, religion, and in contemporary other scholars have that and resistance to of Hindu (Dutta 2023) and for more conversations around trans-hijra-khwaja sira religious Similar have also been made in the Pakistani through highlighting the of khwaja sira persons within the Islamic of through a of possibilities (Pamment engagement with trans-hijra-khwaja sira religious are that and trans have often up modes of to religious and caste 2024; 2024; Ramberg and laws play out in a of ways across South whether moving with, against, or beyond the state. include trans activist mobilizations of in Pakistan 2021; Pamment and Hindu of in and legal in Pakistan around Islamic inheritance for transgender In this issue builds on her for scholars to more with the South Asian political religious, and gender that a like Nepal to further that more attention be to and other religious as as the that have with more of from In the of this scholarship a long way in challenging the epistemologies in gender and sexuality studies religion as to trans and This scholarship also any assumed Hindu of persons Nanda and for religion trans and queer (Kasmani of religion and trans is in contribution foregrounding Pakistan's shifting transgender legal contexts and as to participation in through recent scholarship in challenging the of trans Henry, and Leung in South Asian contexts that are as for a of trans 2024; 2024; Thangaraj 2022; Thangaraj and Inhorn 2024; Purayil 2022). A of scholarship and commentary on trans issues in Pakistan has the legal focused on transfeminine persons in Pakistan's Court between 2009 and and then in Pakistan's in However, the that these to the legal of in the (2007) and as one important of the to continue to through is being or can be imagined as to trans-hijra-khwaja sira and has been an South Asian theme for the past This provides a on the and situation for trans rights in of the we to acknowledge this situation not least it has the conditions under which of our and have been We are for the efforts that our and at made in this special issue to and into of through which our scholarship might broader and of justice in to trans around the in the of the creative practices of a Anjali (2023: has “the weight of but also the to not to a or to the of a violent past was and to continue in our to and We this observation in here an abundance of trans moving with, against, and beyond the state in South Asia and too.