Criminal ‘folk’ and ‘legal’ lore: the kidnap and castrate narrative in colonial India and contemporary Chennai

Between 2009 and 2011, there was a dramatic re-emergence in Chennai of a nineteenth century colonial narrative that ‘eunuchs’ kidnap and castrate children. Although often framed as a ‘legend’ by LGBT rights activists and anthropologists, the narrative was cast here as a police complaint, prompting these very activists to initiate a fact-finding mission, of which I was a part. How could a colonial-era narrative emerge as both fact and fiction, law, and legend, so rapidly fit the language of contemporary moral anxieties, such as sex-reassignment surgery and LGBT rights activism? Using M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘genre,’ I demonstrate that narratives of kidnapping, from the early colonial period onward, have circulated in genres ranging from ethnography and medical jurisprudence to fiction and even pornography. As activists in contemporary Chennai weave together past fragments to make their claims, these historical traces are re-animated in indeterminate, unexpected ways. I suggest that by abandoning fixed notions of genre such as ‘folklore’ or ‘law,’ and focusing instead on how texts circulate between genres, scholars can discover the political stakes for participants in the arena of transgender rights movements in India, including folklorists and ethnographers themselves.