The character Radha in Anand Mahadevan's 'The Strike' (2011)

The novel The Strike by Anand Mahadevan, published in 2011, is set in India in the 1980s. It focuses on the accidental troubles of an innocent boy, Hari.

Radha, an hijra, first appears in Chapter 10. Hari meets her on a train after he wanders away from his family. She is initially described this way:

“Her arms were slender and fine, though her skin was very dark. Her thick hair was pitch black and tied into a neat bun at the back, with coral jasmines braided around it. There was a trace of red kumkum powder where the furrow of the parting met her forehead and under the kumkum, a short grayish white stripe of holy ash on her forehead. A small golden earring dangled from an earlobe. An electric blue sari was draped loosely on her thin frame, over a blue cotton blouse. She squatted atop a small red suitcase, next to the toilets, in the corridor that led to the umbilical linking the coaches. A woven bamboo basket stood next to her.”

She has been chewing betel nuts. In Hindi, she asks Hari if he wants oral sex, and she makes "the typical gesture of the hijra" with her hands clapping, pointing toward Hari. Because of her "disguise," Hari initially "failed to notice the man in the pretty woman," but then he "realized that she was a eunuch." He “found her rather pretty” but then thought: “This bizarre wretch was permitted her idiocies because she was an hijra – impotent, castrated – her head filled with superstitious nonsense as she was simultaneously revered and reviled.”

Radha is a strong personality.

‘What are you doing here?’ Hari said.
She frowned, ‘What? Is this your father’s train? What do you care what I do here?’

In another situation, she tells the legend of Kannaki who tore off her breast to save a city, and she acts it out by pulling out and throwing the cloth she uses to stuff her bra.

Radha comes to the car where the men are playing cards, and she “teased the men until they coughed up money.” She claps and says “chakka, chakka, chakka.” She warns them: “Remember, I can curse you with impotence as easily as I can bless you with sons.” When someone gets angry, she says: “It’s just dhandha [i.e. business], don’t get all spoiled.”

As is common for eunuch characters in other novels, Radha tells the story of her castration. She says, “No one is born a Chakka; you have to be selected to become one.” She says the selection process is secret. Hari requests more information and pays her five rupees to tell her story. Radha explains that, as a boy, at about age 13, she ran away to Bombay and took any work she could find, eventually becoming a Bollywood makeup artist. She liked wearing women's clothing but found that she didn’t like sex with men. An older hijra found her crying and took her into a household of about a half-dozen hijras, where Radha did their makeup. Eventually, in 1984, the older hijra traveled with Radha to a small village outside Bhopal. In an abandoned Devi temple, they offered alcohol to the goddess, and then Radha drank it and her genitals were tied tight. She nearly passed out, and, “just before the first ray of the dawn sun hit the sky,” the older hijra castrated her with a “long knife and slick”. Radha claims it was painless. They returned to Bhopal that day, which was full of poison gas. It was the day of the Bhopal gas tragedy.

This was probably a helpful story for Hari to hear. Hari is beset with guilt for committing small transgressions that are immediately followed by larger, unrelated accidents. He feels that he is somehow responsible for the larger accidents because of his own personal sin. In hearing Radha's story, he may be able to understand that Radha's castration did not cause the Bhopal gas tragedy.

Radha remains a mentor or guardian figure for Hari throughout the novel.

The eunuch Kalima in Dominique Lapierre's epic 'The City of Joy'

Kalima is one of the hijras, male-bodied people who have been castrated and who live as women in self-designated communities, in Dominique Lapierre's book The City of Joy. Lapierre based the book on real experiences.

Originally published May 5, 2014 to Helium Network.

Dominique Lapierre's book The City of Joy, published in 1985, was based on his experiences in India several years previously. The epithet "City of Joy" refers to a neighborhood of the city of Calcutta characterized by extreme poverty, where people died every day from hunger, disease (notably leprosy) or unsafe living conditions such as open storm drains.

Among the main characters are the Polish Catholic priest Stephan Kovalski and, later, the Jewish doctor Max Loeb, both of whom are in India to do humanitarian work. Hasari Pal is an Indian man who features in the book from beginning to end. A group of eunuchs (hijras) appears in the last quarter of the long story; among them is Kalima.

Kalima

Kalima, at age 20, has "gaudy bracelets and necklaces, brightly colored saris, dark eyes circled with eyeliner, eyebrows penciled in, and her pretty mouth reddened with betel juice." Her beauty "delighted" the priest Kovalski. "The only problem," Lapierre writes, in Kathryn Spink's translation from French into English, "was that Kalima was not a woman, but a eunuch." (Exactly why this poses a "problem" is unclear, since Kovalski, as a celibate man, is probably not supposed to take too much delight in anyone's beauty, regardless of their physical sex.)

After identifying Kalima as a eunuch, Lapierre switches to masculine pronouns when he refers to her, and he puts all references to her gender as a "woman" in quotation marks. Lapierre says directly: "He had been castrated."

Readers learn a little bit of Kalima's history. He was an effeminate child with male genitalia that "were only slightly developed." When he was 14, his wealthy Muslim parents married him to a girl who ran back to her parents the next morning. Soon after, he was approached by a eunuch named Sultana. Sultana adopted him in a ceremony in which he pretended to breastfeed from her. Other ceremonies were held to dress him as a woman, to give him the new name Kalima and to castrate him.

Castration was essential, since the hijras

"must be neither men nor women. Mothers, who called them to take upon their shoulders the sins committed by their newborn babies in previous lives, had the right to verify this fact. And be damned those guilty of deception!"

Kalima was given the alcoholic drink todi made of palm tree juice, together with the narcotic bhang, until he fell asleep. A bowlful of butter (ghee) caused a fire to burn more brightly, which was a good omen. His genitals were severed with one stroke of a razor blade; the narcotic was not strong enough to keep him asleep through this. Sultana applied

"a kind of plaster made of ashes, herbs, and oil mixed together. The recipe dated back to the days of the Mogul conquest, a time when the eunuch caste had undergone a veritable Golden Age. That was the era when, all over India, poor parents sold their children to traders who emasculated them. One nobleman at the court of one of the Mogul emperors possessed twelve hundred eunuchs. In those days some Hijras raised themselves to elevated positions, not merely as guardians of the harem, court dancers, or musicians, but sen as confidant of kings, provincial governors, and army generals."

When Sultana died of a heart attack, Kalima was taken under the wing of another eunuch named Boulboul (meaning "Nightingale").

Kalima and Kovalski became friends. During a major flood, Kalima lit candles in front of Kovalski's photograph of the Shroud of Turin with the intent that the candles should ask the "deity of Big Brother Stephan" (that is, Kovalski) to stop the rain. Kovalski was often perceived by the inhabitants in the City of Joy as a holy man who could be interceded with, as, although he lived in poverty alongside everyone else, he was able to make food and medicine appear in emergency situations.

The birth

When a child was born nearby, Kalima was one of five eunuchs who appeared to sing, dance and bless the baby. Kalima said:

Long live the newborn child!
We bless you,
That you may live for a long time,
That you may always have good health,
That you may earn lots of money.

Kalima performs a dance that appears as if she is giving birth, and then she cradles the baby.

The dancers say: "Our newborn baby is as strong as Shiva, and we beg the all-powerful god to transfer the sins of all his past lives to us." Lapierre says that this expresses "the eunuchs' credo, the justification of their role in society"; they have "the role of scapegoat."

The group leader, Boulboul, performed a special blessing for the baby.

"With the tip of his index finger he dabbed up the red powder from one of the drums and marked the baby's forehead with it. This symbolic gesture transferred onto his person, onto his companions and onto all the Hijra caste the past sins of the newborn child. For eunuchs, the red powder, which is the emblem of marriage among Hindu wives, represents their ritual union with their drums."

Boulboul also collected money for the performance, as such blessings earned the eunuchs their livelihood.

The death

One of the five eunuchs in the dance troupe, Bela, was reported to have placed a cobra in Kovalski's room with the intent of causing his death. Bela's motivation was unclear. When confronted by a self-appointed detective, Bela fought back and was quickly impaled upon her own knife.

Lapierre explains that "tradition would not allow eunuchs to bury or burn their dead other than at night, out of sight of 'normal' people." This, however, apparently did not apply to the people who were intimately involved in the funeral, since Kovalski — Bela's intended victim — and several other men were asked to bear the body to the funeral pyre. As Lapierre says was typical, Bela's hair was cut and she was dressed in men's clothes for her funeral, and the attending eunuchs prayed that she would not be reincarnated as a eunuch.

A rare character

Kalima's character is not developed in The City of Joy beyond what is reflected in this article. Nonetheless, she is notable because Indian hijra characters are rarely found in works by Western authors. (For another example of such a character who plays a larger role within a novel, see Cool Cut by Sharad P. Paul.) Kalima reveals how the priest Kovalski continues to encounter "the other" in India, even after he has lived there a while.

The image above is of a hijra participant at the Chhath puja ceremony, 2013, in Kolkata, India. Image by: Biswarup Ganguly. © GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or later. Wikimedia Commons.

'Necessary' and with 'magic powers': Eunuchs in Sharad P. Paul's 'Cool Cut'

Dr. Sharad P. Paul's novel Cool Cut (2007) captures childlike simplicity while tackling large themes of love, death, violence and cultural continuity. Originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 4, 2014.

Image: Statue in Tamil Nadu representing the dance form "Karagattam." Tamil Nadu, India Image by: Wikimedia Commons user 'Balaji' © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license Wikimedia Commons.

Dr. Sharad P. Paul's novel Cool Cut (2007) follows three friends growing up in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, in a small Tamil-speaking village on the banks of the Kaveri River. It is the mid-twentieth century and the teenagers look toward Madras as the big city. Told in clipped, Hemingwayesque sentences, the novel captures a certain childlike simplicity while tackling large themes of love, death, violence and cultural continuity.

Kumar and Lakshmi are just old enough to begin to dream of falling in love with each other, but they must contend with a culture that expects arranged marriages. Their friend Raman flies kites with them in games that are won by maneuvering one's own string to slice through the competitors' strings. The "cut" remains an important metaphor for Kumar, who becomes a barber, and for Raman, who becomes a eunuch.

After he is all but expelled from school, Raman takes the train to Madras to live with his uncle, but at the train station he is jumped by several eunuchs who throttle and club him unconscious. The next thing he knows, he has been made one of them. After his recovery, other eunuchs don white saris and put turmeric paste on their skin to perform his naming ritual. They put lit candles at his feet, burn camphor and chant a prayer. He is renamed Ramani, "the adopted daughter of Lord Ganesha." From this point on, the narrator consistently uses feminine pronouns for Ramani's character, just as is done for the other eunuchs.

The leader of the group that has kidnapped Ramani considers herself a kind of adoptive mother of her girls. Discovering that Ramani has a talent for dancing, she charges a fee for her to dance at parties.

Ramani herself does not express regret for her situation. Although she is angry about having been kidnapped and violently assaulted and she resents the leader of the group for her severe ways, she does not seem to mind her own forced gender transition or her physical loss. Only in an abstract way does she reflect that

"Eunuchs have no identity; zombies with no identity and no options....eunuchs are like weeds - catching debris from the river of life; a combination of stagnation and decay. The river of life will flow through the weeds, until life is renewed again in the sea."

It is home that she longs for.

The group's leader privately rationalizes her behavior of kidnapping and mutilating teenagers: "Everyone knows eunuchs are necessary, and have magic powers." Besides, "all birth is traumatic." (Another character suggests that eunuchs must kidnap because they cannot reproduce, and if they do not have younger dependents like themselves, they will have no security in old age.) When annoyed by a group of boys, the leader threatens to reveal what is (or rather, is not) under her skirt, which would be considered as a form of curse against the boys.

Some readers might find this characterization stereotypical and off-putting. That eunuchs ever kidnap or raise their skirts at all is a controversial claim; Dr. Piyush Saxena's recent nonfiction book Life of a Eunuch argues vehemently against both of these allegations.

The leader also proves capable of brutal castration as an act of vengeance, not just as a way of creating more adopted daughters.

"Ali" is the word for eunuch most commonly used in the story. It is identified as a southern Indian term, whereas the more widely known term "hijra" is said to come from northern India. A character with the trust-inspiring epithet of Professor explains that "hijra" derives from the Arabic word for a spiritual pilgrimage. One might be perplexed by a competing claim on the first page of John Speed's novel Tiger Claws (also published in 2007, but set in the year 1658) which says rather that "hijra" was perceived as a derogatory term from common Hindi and that Muslim eunuchs of that era preferred the term "mukhunni" meaning "short-tusked."

Aside from the questionable depiction of the eunuch community in this novel - a depiction that is simultaneously sympathetic and damning - this is a memorable, ambitious story that packs many broad themes into a short text.

Piyush Saxena's 'Life of a Eunuch' on the marginalization of eunuchs in India

Life of a Eunuch sheds light on a large social issue in India: the poverty faced by a large eunuch population. The author claims this population begins life with an intersex condition, as a result of which they leave home to join groups of others like them, and because of their homelessness and lack of family ties, they cannot obtain identity documents, which in turn interferes with their ability to travel, get jobs, and open bank accounts.

The author is Piyush Saxena, a wellness counselor with a Ph.D. in naturopathy who, according to his biography, "believes that the root cause of all medical problems is pollution and parasites." After taking an interest in the plight of eunuchs in India, he founded an organization called Salvation of Oppressed Eunuchs (SOOE) which seeks to integrate eunuchs into Indian society. Saxena's mother and father also contributed to the book. The book is available online as a free download.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on March 4, 2012.

The many words for "eunuch" in various Indian languages all run the risk of being understood pejoratively, so Saxena reluctantly uses the word "eunuch" as the next best option, although he calls it a "total misnomer" that contributes to the marginalization of these people. He defines a eunuch as someone who is born with an intersex condition (or, as he puts it, "a dysfunctional male or female reproductive system") and also has some gender identity issues. Those issues are never presented consistently: sometimes he says eunuchs are more male-bodied yet more feminine-identified, other times that their gender identity doesn't conform to conventional standards for men and women, and still other times he acknowledges that their identities may fall along a spectrum of masculine, feminine and "neutral." In one spot he claims that they have no sexual libido and have sex only for money, but in another spot his data indicates that less than half declare themselves asexual.

After joining a eunuch community, they will have their atypical genitalia removed in a ceremony called "nirvana". He comments that "the only true eunuchs in India are those who are genderless and suffer from the lack of any distinct sex organs" (in which case it is unclear exactly what would be removed, unless he meant that they do have sex organs that are merely mismatched with existing scientific categories). He dismisses, and thereby fails to explore, the possibility that any significant number of eunuchs in India were born with normal male bodies and are essentially what the West would call transsexual or transgender women.

According to Saxena, such people generally come to a fuller understanding of their situation when they reach adolescence, at which point they will leave home, travel to a city where eunuchs are generally successful as beggars or prostitutes, join a band of eunuchs organized under a eunuch leader (guru or nayak), and undergo the nirvana ceremony. "Leading a life without undergoing nirvana is incomplete for a eunuch and there is intense craving for this procedure in all eunuchs," he writes. He attributes to eunuchs a magical "inherent capability to recognise the status of nirvana of other eunuchs," even though they will still ask each other if they have had the ceremony performed.

Saxena perceives this as more of a ritual act than a real castration because, he says, the person's genitalia never behaved in a typical male fashion in the first place; therefore, the person was already a eunuch from birth. The act is indeed ritualized. Because castration is illegal in India and because most eunuchs can neither document themselves as transsexual women nor afford a surgeon, the cutting is generally performed underground.

The chapters in this 540-page book are a bit disorganized and the information is quite repetitive, sometimes contradicting itself along the way. The chapters take medical, social, and mytho-religious approaches. Large sections are not about the Indian eunuch gender at all, but instead about transsexuals in the Western sense of that term (using language that dates back to the 1990s when the subject first entered the popular and academic consciousness), or about various biological categories into which intersex bodies can be fit. It is unclear what connection the author intends to draw between eunuchs and transsexuals. In the first chapter he says that eunuchs have a "transsexual nature" but this is never demonstrated. Some of his basic medical definitions are problematic, such as his definition of a female as someone "capable of being penetrated" and a male as "able to penetrate". An abundance of anatomical diagrams and photographs of surgeries in progress may be useful for some readers but are unnecessary for the reader who seeks social analysis. The latter type may be more interested in the chapter consisting of brief first-person statements from eunuchs.

An example of one of Saxena's strange generalizations is that eunuchs eat an average of 4,000 calories a day and that they levy a fine on any member who refuses to eat at a party. He says they are healthier than most people because they walk from house to house begging for alms and their expected lifespan is 14 years above average, yet he also cites data claiming that 18 percent have diabetes. It would seem rather difficult to get a good sense of the average caloric intake of a million or so undocumented, uneducated people who share large group residences and only use cash, and anyway this number is not cited to any source, as is the case with many of his facts and generalizations.

To complicate matters, Saxena's own spiritual beliefs intrude in his presentation of medical information. He believes that a human fetus receives its soul at four months of gestation. "In the case of eunuchs," he says, "the soul chooses to become devoid of gender and bear the extreme physical and mental hardship associated with this deprivation." He devotes chapters to his theories of astrology and past-life regression. Among his spiritual beliefs about eunuchs includes his uncritical report that they are rumored "to recognize the purity of gold" by intuition.

The author's intention is benign. He wants the government to find ways to allow eunuchs - though they may be homeless and fatherless - to have identity documents so that they can be better integrated into society. He wants more attention given to a population at risk for HIV. He wants to dispel groundless fears that they kidnap children and insulting rumors that they expose their naked bodies to hapless passersby.

His mission is somewhat hampered by his own patronizing language. In the preface he refers to eunuchs as "disabled"; in the cover story he says they are "hiding deep desires and confusion within" and are plagued by "a lost sense of context and direction" while they make a "humble effort at carving out some semblance of dignity and purpose in their lives"; and throughout the book he insists that they suffer from having "no clear gender." This last idea keeps surfacing despite a large body of evidence that the eunuch gender is indeed recognized as a separate gender in Indian society; indeed, the author acknowledges that they "dress and behave differently, in addition to living apart in bands and groups." They perform a peculiar popping clap with cupped palms that announces that "they are not normal gendered people." They speak a secret variant of Hindi they call gupti or ulti bhasha. He identifies seven gharanas (clans) of eunuchs in present-day Mumbai and provides pictures of their clan symbols in the tenth chapter. These positive details suggest that, at least collectively, they have a gender identity and social role and are able to create meaning and context for their lives.

The national bureaucracy does not always recognize anything beyond male and female on official forms, which is another matter. Saxena observes that there is gender discrimination in India even though it is illegal, including, for example, female infanticide in certain areas.

He acknowledges a major contradiction in attitudes toward eunuchs: "It is really strange that on one hand we call them by derogatory names and on the other, we invite them to confer blessings on newlyweds, newborns, new establishments and enterprises!" Their odd social status, according to which they are treated with a sort of respect born from fear, allows them to feed themselves by openly taking food at the marketplace without paying and to travel by train without showing tickets. He says that southern India is more generally more tolerant of eunuchs than the north.

Most eunuchs are Muslim, he says, which he attributes to their perception of a vague connection with the Muslim requirement that men be circumcised. However, they do tend to align themselves with their guru's religion, and regardless of their personal faith, the eunuch culture celebrates Hindu, Christian, and Muslim holidays together as one sisterhood.

His organization SOOE estimates that there are about 1.9 million eunuchs in India who generally lack a basic level of education and live in poverty. (The government will release the official population estimate at the end of March 2012, which he expects will only register a quarter of that number.) "O" for "other" has been a gender option on the voter rolls as of 2009 and on the census as of 2011. Update: In February 2013, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh reported that over 2,000 voters had registered as 'O' within the previous two years, out of a population of about 75 million. Passports may also be issued as "O" but only 1 percent of eunuchs have a passport. On ration cards and driver's licenses (although few eunuchs drive), the eunuch may declare herself as either male or female.

Saxena suggests renaming the international Transgender Day of Remembrance on Nov. 20 as "Eunuch Solidarity Day" on which non-eunuchs would bring candy and gifts to eunuchs and tie string bracelets of solidarity on them. This may be an appropriate observance in India, but he does not elaborate on his implication that the transgender meaning should be erased, especially in other countries where "transgender" is a more popular concept for understanding people who are outside the male-female binary.

The author has clearly spent a lot of time meeting with eunuchs, trying to help them gain social empowerment, and he does present some useful information in this book. His practical intentions are clear and they are welcome. Unfortunately, the academic and factual underpinnings of his beliefs are not clear at all.