Re-writing the Subject and the Self: A Study of Hijra Life Writings

Abstract

Indian mainstream feminist discourses, with their fixation on the universalization of Indian women’s experiences, have regarded gender as an unsophisticated category. This assumption was ruptured through the interventions of Dalit women and Adivasi women inserting caste and ethnicity into the focus of gender. The recent emergence of sex workers’, sexual minorities’, and transgender women’s voices into the mainstream literary scenario has complicated the category of gender and demanded multiple dimensions of identity and social systems like sexuality, expression, orientation, socio-economic status, and class dimensions to understand their lives. The literary genre of autobiography has received a great deal of critical attention in the recent past in the Indian literary market. Women and minorities from the margins of Indian society have used autobiography as a crucial tool to engage with issues of caste, gender, ethnicity, and identity and for self-assessment, self-evolution, and self-construction. Through a reading of two life writings—The Truth About Me by A. Revathi and Me Hijra, Me Laxmi by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi—within an intersectional identity frame, this chapter examines how these hijra women re-define the genre of autobiography, re-construct their identities, re-present their othered bodies, and insert their voices of difference into the mainstream discourses that have always imputed their identities. An attempt is made to see how, through these processes, they negotiate their public spaces with its multi-layered violence, break the stereotypes entrenched in dominant ideologies, and subvert the hegemonic power structures that undermine their subjectivities. Also, by articulating critical questions of choice and difference, this chapter seeks to see how these women deploy agency to change the Indian social fabric that weaves them as the other and assert positive or alternate subjectivities at the margins with pride.