Power, perversion and panic : eunuchs, colonialism and modernity in North India

In north India in the 1870s, the 'eunuch' became a criminal type under British colonial law. Colonial officials in this region sought to cause eunuchs to 'die out' by preventing emasculation and aimed to transform the occupations, gendered practices and domestic arrangements of several diverse groups who were classed as 'eunuchs.' This study explains the criminalisation of the 'eunuch' through a history of the multiple indigenous groups that this English-language term described in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The English-language colonial category of the 'eunuch'-its various inclusions and exclusions, its historical shifts, and its contradictions and tensions-is the focus of this thesis. The term 'eunuch' was used to label diverse indigenous groups, and was not internally coherent or unified. Some eunuchs, such as khwajasarais, were slaves but were nevertheless socio-economic elites and powerful state officials. In contrast, the hijras were socially marginalised and were variously denoted as 'eunuchs from birth' or as biological males who were subsequently emasculated, and who identified as feminine or 'neither men nor women.' In addition, several groups that were not emasculated were also classified as 'eunuchs' due to their gendered and sexual practices. This dissertation examines the colonial regulation of eunuchs in two contexts: first, in the Indian-ruled state of Awadh from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, when the British sought to regulate the employment of khwajasarais in the Awadh administration; and second, under Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the British-ruled territory of the North-Western Provinces (NWP) from the 1850s until the end of the nineteenth century. The CTA, which primarily targeted the hijra community, aimed to facilitate the surveillance and counting of hijras, discipline their gender and sexuality and prevent emasculation in order to ultimately bring about the passive extermination of this group. Due to the diversity of groups that the colonial category of the 'eunuch' labelled, this thesis adopts multiple analytical frameworks to understand the various colonial projects targeting 'eunuchs' and their effects. This study foregrounds three questions. First: how did the everyday lives of khwajasarais and hijras change over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; how did they resist, subvert and evade colonial projects; and how did colonial modernity impact upon the intimate, domestic domain of these communities? Second: what do projects to govern the disparate groups that were labelled as 'eunuchs' tell us about the modes of colonial power deployed against marginalised groups at the local level? Third: what does the criminalisation of the internally diverse category of the eunuch tell us about the multiple impacts of colonialism on gender and sexuality in India? This study concludes that colonial regulation, and colonial modernity more broadly, had significant long-term impacts upon all the various groups labelled as 'eunuchs.' However, colonial projects were uneven between different geographic and temporal contexts and were internally fissured

The eunuch archive : colonial records of non-normative gender and sexuality in India

This essay explores the quotidian, mundane colonial archive of sexuality. It is particularly concerned with accounts of colonised peoples’ sexuality that were produced at the local level of colonial administration and were deposited at the margins of official archives. In the 1860s and 1870s, British colonial administrators in north India compiled district registers of ‘eunuchs’ that recorded brief notes on the lives of local people who challenged a binary understanding of gender and were understood as sexually ‘perverse.’ The British were particularly anxious about the transgender hijra community, whom they labelled ‘habitual sodomites’ and ‘criminals.’ This essay builds on Anjali Arondekar’s analysis of sexuality and colonial archives, but argues that there are some limitations to her approach. In particular, this article argues that attention to practices of record keeping, circulation and archiving reveals contested and contradictory forms of knowledge about ‘eunuchs’ in colonial archives.Nanyang Technological UniversityThis work was supported by the Australian National University, Nanyang Technological University and Endeavour Australia Cheung Kong Research Fellowshi

Gender, family, and the policing of the 'criminal tribes' in nineteenth-century north India

In the South Asian setting, the fields of gender history and family history are still predominantly concerned with relatively elite social groups. Few studies have examined issues of gender and the family in the history of Dalit, low-caste, and socially marginalized communities, especially those that were labelled 'criminal tribes' from the mid-nineteenth century on. This article explores the ways in which gender patterned criminalized communities' experiences of everyday colonial governance under Part I of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in the first two decades that it was enforced in northern India. In this early period, the colonial government did not closely regulate marriage practices, domestic arrangements, or the gendered organization of labour within communities categorized as 'criminal tribes'. Nevertheless, notions of sexuality and gender underlay colonial knowledge of the 'criminal tribes', which emerged in dialogue with middle-class Indian gender and caste politics. Moreover, the family unit was the central target of the CTA surveillance and policing regime, which aimed to produce 'industrious' families. Officially endorsed forms of labour had complex implications for criminalized communities in the context of North Indian gender norms and strategies of social mobility. Gender power dynamics also shaped criminalized peoples' interpersonal, embodied interactions with British and Indian colonial officials on an everyday basis. Meanwhile, different forms of leverage and evasion were open to men and women to cope with their criminalization and so the colonial state was experienced in highly gendered ways

Hijras and South Asian historiography

Since the 1990s, scholars of South Asia have framed the hijra community in a variety of ways, for instance, as a third gender, a transgender group, and an identity made through more than gender difference. Both interdisciplinary and historical accounts have debated the relationship between “hijra” and other gender, sexual or social subjectivities and categories. Hijra histories suggest that the community has often been at the center of historical transformations in governance, households, gender, embodiment, epistemologies, and political economies. Yet historical research has especially focused on the 19th century, raising questions about what a deeper genealogy of the term hijra might reveal about longer trajectories of historical change in gendered categories and practices. I argue that hijra histories may provide openings for gender historians to think critically about what precisely they mean by “gender.” Moreover, because hijra and transgender studies from South Asia have foregrounded the geopolitics of translation, this literature prompts fruitful questions for the field of transgender history

Introduction : children and knowledge in India

In contemporary postcolonial India, states, ethnic groups, elites and marginalized people are rearticulating identities in relation to transnational forces. Neoliberal capital and globalization have produced new forms of the ‘politics of culture’1 including: redefinitions of ethnic identities in the context of late capitalism; changing politics around caste; the increasing prominence of Hindu nationalism; and digital media producing new youth identities. To understand these complex social changes, and their historical trajectories, an understanding of the experiences and perspectives of young people is crucial. The articles collected in this special issue are focused on children’s lives in historical and contemporary India, but were informed and enriched by broader discussions about childhood across the South Asian region at an interdisciplinary conference held at The Australian National University in 2013.The editors gratefully acknowledge the following sponsors who funded the conference, ‘Childhoods in South Asia: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives’, held at The Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, July, 2013: The South Asia Research Institute, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific; The Australia–India Council, DFAT (The Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade); ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences; AusAID (The Australian Agency for International Development), DFAT; and the ANU Gender Institute

Children and Knowledge Contemporary and Historical Perspectives from India

Children and Knowledge sheds light on what it is to be a child in India in the contemporary moment and in history. While acknowledging the ways Indian children are situated within structures of power, this volume foregrounds innovative methodologies for conducting research into childhood and children’s lives that meaningfully engage with young people’s understandings, stories and agency. The chapters probe conceptualisations of Indian childhoods, and interrogate both singularising models of childhood and the idea of ‘multiple childhoods’. The contributors use the theme 'children and knowledge' to analyse young people’s interactions with institutions of modernity and social structures – including gender, family, class, community and caste, as well as media, markets and development – that often marginalise and frame children in multiple, cumulative ways. The chapters juxtapose and triangulate three approaches to knowledge: knowledge about children; knowledge for children; and children’s own knowledge. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how this juxtaposition is a useful framework for the analysis of historical and contemporary Indian social processes. Demonstrating that understanding Indian children’s experiences and knowledgeable perspectives is fundamental to any proper understanding of social complexity and change Children and Knowledge will be of great interest to scholars of childhoods studies, gender, education and South Asian studies. The book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.ANU South Asia Research Institute; ANU Gender Institute; CASS; The Australia India Council; DFA