" … Understanding “Queerness” in India: Not a Global Identity

The queer movements in the west have deeply informed the understanding of gender in the colonized world. Marx showed that capital is not merely value but is a social relationship emergent from the method with which it appropriates surplus value in production, through which it continuously produces more capital. As capitalism is now firmly in the stage of imperialism, there is a continuous export of capital from the monopoly capitalists in the ‘developed’ world to the former colonies. This capital brings with itself distorted social relations which affect all aspect of life to subvert our understanding of reality in the service of further capital production, including that of gender. This understanding forces us to then look at the history of South Asia to find the particularities of these distortions in our understanding of the term ‘queerness’ itself and its ahistorical nature on a global scale.

South Asia, like all other societies, displayed its own unique development of gender based on the particularities of the time. There is historical mention of the existence of hijras, kinnars, jogappas, khwaja saras, aravanis etc. as gendered social groups beyond the binary understanding of gender as male and female. One finds that various members of these gendered groups not only had a social function in feudal society in terms of a mythological existence but also an active role in the courts of the feudal ruling classes. Many hijras were engaged in the feudal mode of production as tax collectors for the zamindars, even amassing means of production by ways of gifts.4 Khwaja saras found themselves in the roles of guards, both to emperors as well as their harems, holding an important social role in the Mughal court, with their own unique culture centered around their role in these societies. Khwaja saras function can be enunciated by the fact that many found themselves holding high zat ranking within the Mughal mansabdari system, a system which determined the position of a government or military officer by way of the amount of zat points they hold. The mansabdari system organized the militaristic nobility of the Mughal empire and determined how feudal surplus extracted through taxes would trickle down among the nobility in the form of allowances, military holdings and even land governorship. Khwaja saras like Etmad Khan and Firoz Khan found themselves with the high zat ranking of 3000 while others like Khwaja Agah would become commanders of garrisons.5 Others also played an active role in the Mughal court in other ways as well, either as domestic workers serving the emperor and their families or as brokers who would maintain the existence of khwaja saras within the court.6 Apart from this, these gendered communities would also have a lot of mythical value attached to them, with many being considered as deities along with others being provided sole access to being allowed to tend to shrines. The entrenchment and positions of these gender groups in feudal society is apparent and there is a clear role in the production process which they play. Europeans like Francisco Pelsaert expressed their shock at witnessing this, which serves as a point of enquiry into the different development of gender within South Asian society in contrast with European society.

The demarcation between the development gender is also demarcated by the changes in the relations of production in each society. As pointed out previously, capital is in itself a social relation but the production of surplus capital itself occurs on the basis of relations of production, or in simple terms: class relations. Within European society, mercantile capital would gradually develop into industrial capital, categorized what is termed as the industrial revolution which in reality coincided with the larger bourgeois revolution in European society, marked by the eradication of feudalism in European and the onset of capitalism. The bourgeois democratic revolution not just transformed the economic aspect of life but would pervade in all aspects of life, including the family which would transform into a rigid monogamous and heterosexual structure wherein the role of each gender would be deeply entrenched in the production process, namely in the production of surplus (male gender) and reproduction of labour itself (women and children). Here, capitalism served as a progressive force in overthrowing feudalism but also created new social realities. This process was not allowed to occur in large parts of the world, with European capitalism developing from the stage of industrial capital marked by domestic competition to a period of monopolies where finance capital was exported to the rest of the world, in the stage of capitalism termed as imperialism. Imperialism, functioning by way of colonialism, introduced a distorted form of changes in relations of production wherein instead of the eradication of feudalism, imperialist finance capital would align with the feudal lords to both sustain the positions of feudal lords within society as well as perpetuate ‘development’ in a manner which most benefits the extraction and export of resources as part of the colonial process. Colonialism introduced a backward form of capitalism in India wherein instead of overthrowing feudalism, foreign capital would align itself with feudalism and create new distorted relations of production. This is entirely in contrast to the type of trajectory that occurred in Europe, where capitalism initially played a progressive role.

The colonial project also aimed to transform society in a manner which best facilitates its own interests and creates the best conditions for extraction of resources from the colonies. So there were multiple reforms that the colonial project undertook to transform the colonies into the ‘ideal’ islands for plunder, particularly when it comes to gender. There was a strong pushback against gender groups which did not fall into the European understanding of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in the form of their marginalization from the production process and the legal outlawing of their existence under the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871.7 Important to note is that this attack sharpened after the Indian war of independence in 1857, wherein anti-colonial, nationalist and peasant forces were defeated, and large-scale social reforms were undertaken to better transform the old feudal society in a manner where it can better serve the cause of imperialism. This saw the imposition of an understanding of gender which is imported by way of imperialist capital itself, that of rigid binary genders. But the outlawing of other gendered communities and social groups does not necessarily see their elimination, given the fact that feudalism was never overthrown the way it happened in European society. Instead, we find Indian society mired by this contradiction wherein the alliance of imperialist forces with feudal landlord class is reflected in all aspects of life. Simply put, this provides us with a society which attempts to be deeply binary while simultaneously seeing the presence of gender groups which developed under feudalism such as the hijras who continue to have both internal practices as well as a larger social position that is derived from feudal society. This is reflected in the hijra guru-chela system (master-apprentice) as well as in the biggest practice that fuels the hijra economic and social life, that of badhai. Under this practice, hijras make their way into celebrations held on hetero-normative occasions such as that of childbirth and weddings and perform a variety of activities like dances, songs and prayers. They would then provide blessings to the occasion and in return for those blessings, they are provided with gifts either in the form of cash or goods.8 The practice is deeply feudal, from its rituals to the medium of exchange being undertaken. Hijras are also engaged in begging as well as sex work as their other activities for subsistence, pushing them into a lumpen class background in certain spaces but even this status requires more enquiry, given the fact that the process of begging itself is still driven by feudal values associated with hijras in that being cursed by them and displeasing them is considered highly inauspicious.9

The marginalization of these gendered groups in this manner did not really change after the transfer of power to Indian big bourgeoisie in 1947. The Indian big bourgeoisie and its nexus with the landlord class continues the marginalization and oppression that occurred in with the onslaught of colonialism. This contradiction wherein feudal gendered groups exist in sharp contrast with the cisgender groups is observed in various countries which underwent colonization too. Nigerian scholar Oyerunki Oyewumi would argue that within the Yoruba community that occupies various countries in Africa, the stratification of gender and the understanding of gender as it is in the present is the product of colonization, with the new stratification unable to reconcile with the plurality of gender prior to colonization.10 Similarly in Philippines, among the Bigus people, among the Javanese people, among the Iban people, various gender groups are found like the bakla, the bissu, the warok and the manang bali which represent similar situations all over South-East Asia too. But as capitalist society in the ‘developed’ world change along with a loosening of the rigid family structure, gendered oppression creates new understandings of what it means to be queer.

Individuality, Sexual Anarchy and Imperialist Distortion of Culture

The hyperfixation on the individual experience is a continuous trend that is a definitive part of how neoliberalism distorts the social relations for persons. For the expansion of the market, there is a need to create more identities to sell commodities to and neoliberalism facilitates this by way of creating new identities continuously, even though they may not be completely defined at all. The individual becomes an alienated being within the social reality and the politics reflects it wherein the individual’s experience is given primacy over the totality of things that impress upon the individual. This creates further identitarian politics, wherein queer theory continues to create more and more new gender, sexual, romantic etc. identities purely out of random individual experiences over an objective understanding of reality. To cater to this, the market has hundreds of different queer flags and other commodities for people who align with those identities. This distorts not only how gender plays out in the lives of people as a form of oppression but also creates further silos within silos to individualize oppression along the lines of identities conceived arbitrarily. For example, the Indian Trans Act itself plays out this confusion by listing the existence of hijras, kinnars, transgender persons, intersex persons, genderqueer persons etc. under the umbrella term transgender or third gender. While many such terms represent a material existence of gender, all of them concrete and different from the ambiguous third gender term, as elaborated upon previously, terms like genderqueer are somehow also lumped into this arrangement wherein genderqueer can itself mean anything, from transgender person to non-binary to even its own unique term separate from those two. By creating such arbitrary lines within the queer space, the focus is then on how the individual ‘feels’ regarding their oppression and on nomenclature instead of how gendered and sexual oppression metes out its violence against them on the scale of a collective. Nomenclature itself becomes a point of expression, resistance and liberation. Not only do these silos alienate the individual, they alienate the already individualized queer movement from engagement with larger people’s struggles. Simply put, such nomenclature, even the practice of changing pronouns may provide one momentary comfort from gender dysphoria, a product of gender oppression, but it will not end said oppression itself.

As mentioned previously, the imperialist capital also distorts social reality and creates an inorganic culture around itself that deeply affects classes within a society wherein said capital is taking up space. This has created a culture centered around individuality and nomenclature but also a culture reliant on desire of a few. Since ignorance of the violence that informs who and what is desirable itself is pervasive, desire becomes individualistic and leads to sexual anarchy. The agency to engage in sex, let alone the ability to consent to sex in a patriarchal society is restricted to few classes. The ability to enjoy sex is also reliant on the amount of leisure-time one receives in their work-day. Since the bourgeois classes in a country like India also have the ability to create more leisure-time for themselves, in contrast to the majority of the Indian population, the question of enjoyable sex, the ability to consent to such sex and the agency to have multiple sexual partners is also a class question. The ignorance of class within queer political spaces also leads to the misconstrued understanding of queerness as the right to pursue desire in an anarchic manner. This manifests into anarchic sexual relationships, where sexual relationships are pursued in a manner which is ignorant of these questions and reduces sex to a market in itself comprised of various partners. Tinder, Bumble, Hinge etc. are mere manifestations of such marketplaces. In such a marketplace, each partner is seen as a commodity to be exploited by way of sex. Such spaces and the anarchic sexual relationships pursued within them are themselves manifestations of the distortions introduced by way of imperialist capital and its effect on culture and life. It is no wonder that the desirable bodies shaped within these spaces are marked deeply by caste and the class of those people these spaces are open to, that is, the bourgeois classes. Reduction of queerness to sexual anarchy is a bourgeois practice, backed strongly by feudal and imperialist forces to provide a few with the space to partake in such reduction.

This subversion of reform, expression of individuality, comfort and accommodation, all of which are already limited to the bourgeois classes, as a form of change, hinders our ability to truly rid ourselves of oppression.

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