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The Humpbacked Hijdas of Haji Malang
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When I first came to Haji Malang it was during Moharam, I had come to meet the late Sikandar Wali Baba of the Chancawalli Rafaees or body piercers , hijdas were not part of my blogs or my photography.It was meeting Laxmi Narayan Tripathi my transgender friend from Bollywood here after a gap of 11 years , that got me going , to capture the hijda soul in spiritual flight .
There was no ulterior motive , I write as I shoot pictures no morphing what does not exist in hijda human emotions..
As a Shia Pandit I could penetrate their layers and see them in their androgynous vulnerability .I could feel their inner struggle , the struggle with their dubious dichotomy.
My recent trip twice to Haji Malang back to back, once with Dr Glenn Losack MD American photographer and second time alone , was a trip of learning and intermingling with the Hijdas.
Laxmi had offered me to stay with them at their spacious lodge , but I refused politely preferring the cot of the Ketkars lodge.
In retrospection I never slept just shot pictures night and day.
Shooting the Hijdas is divine photography.Its capturing what cant be seen by the naked human eye.You have to become a Hijda behind the camera to really get into the spirit of the Hijda you are shooting.This is a metaphor , so read it as such…in spectral light.
This may sound like bullshit to the present lot of photographers , I dont include photojournalists who represent high end cameras but not high end human photography.
Photojournalism in India is pedestrian and sucks barring a few ..that is just a miniscule.
The photos in leading Mumbai newspapers is nothing but trash..no originality , hackneyed and famine ridden..almost making viewers go suicidal..
Well excuse my rant..no love lost between photo bloggers and main stream media.
Date: 09/22/2005 Time: 09:30
When I try to recollect today what really pushed me towards shooting Hijdas, I think firstly it was the stray Hijda shanties on the railway tracks of Matunga , after that came the Makhdoom Shah Baba Urus, the pictures of the Possessed series.
But it was at Haji Malang , meeting Laxmi Narayan Tripathi after 11 years , that pushed me over the brink of Hijdadom.
As a salon photographer I shot one Hijda picture a classic in black and white, it was a Hijda sitting in a garden at Bandra Band Stand removing his facial hair with a tweezer.. facial hair and balding are a Hijda nightmare .
At the All India Hijda Sammelan, Vikhroli a street vendor did soaring business selling human hair extensions..now the majority of the Hijdas are from the poor strata of society, they have pangs , real human pangs to look beautiful, sex change , but with what they earn it is next to impossible…
Besides the Hijda community has been invaded by guys with Hijda pretensions , who with their glib make it big, but these guys are nothing but homosexuals eating away into the Hijda pie..They do not belong to the Hijda ethnicity far from it…they dress up as women..cruise the gay haunts..make a fast buck..They are less promiscuous, you find this varity near the Naval Mess at Wode House Road or a little further away near Mumbai University..
Most of the begging variety Hijdas like the ones I shot at Carter Road too are men dressed as Hijdas , crime by this variety is rampant..I am told .
The Matunga Hijdas are a thing of the past , their shanties were totally demolished , the entire community od slum dwellers shifted to Mankhurd a distant suburb.. I miss the dread head hjda a devotee of Goddess Yellamma who stayed in one of these shanties..she would light up when I stopped my cab on my way to town, giving her some money she of course blessing me in return, my wife watching my antics quietly from the back of the cab.
I wanted to call the Hijdas to perform at my sons wedding but the Shia folks that were invited would have run away from the site..though there was a separate section for males and females.
The Grey area
Thursday August 4 2005 19:54 IST
courtesy
sourced from net for hijda awareness
Scharada Bail
Eunuchs has always been a subject of curiosity and an object of ridicule. People stop and look when a groups of hijdas — as the eunuchs are known as — troops into a newly-opened shop to demand money or lays siege on a house celebrating a marriage or the birth of a child. And then you see them in the movies, where their mannerisms — the clap and the pelvic thrust — is expected to make you laugh. Another way of evoking laughter is to have the heroes dressed in drag — Amitabh Bachchan in the famous Mere Angane Mein song in Laawaris, Aamir Khan in Baazi and Shah Rukh Khan in Duplicate. A notable exception was Sadashiv Amrapurkar, who played a frightening eunuch brothel owner, Maharani, in Mahesh Bhatt’s Sadak.
Other than in wedding functions and in movies where they are supposed to evoke comedy, you never really see a hijda. No wonder an important work on hijdas in India, written by Zia Jaffery, is titled The Invisibles.
Which is why Santosh Sivan’s Tamil film Navarasa, set for yearend release but screened at the seventh Osian’s Cinefan Asian Film Festival held in Delhi last month, stands out. “Cinema is such a powerful medium. What it says can be carried to lakhs of people in a moment. And yet, in our films, hijdas have only been used for cheap humour, to poke fun at the community. What is worse is that they do not even use real hijdas, who would earn some money if they did. They get junior artistes to dress up and mouth bad dialogue about hijdas to raise some laughs,” says P Aasha Bharathi, president of the Tamil Nadu Aravanigal Association, who contributed at every stage in shaping the script on Navarasa.
“But somehow, with Santosh Sivan and Raja Chandrasekhar, there was a feeling of trust. I knew this team would not exploit or sensationalise our problems,” says Aasha. What makes Navarasa even more special is the remarkable sensitivity shown by the Censor Board, which arranged for a special preview of the film for the transgendered Aravani community, and asked them for a No Objection Certificate before passing the film.
The fact that hijdas earned the right to be consulted by the Censor Board shows how sexual minorities in India have organised themselves in recent years. In a society like India, where all kinds of sexual practices have thrived in the midst of seeming conservatism, the plight of the sexual minorities, consisting of the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian and the Transgendered (BGLT), has been extremely difficult. While each constituent of BGLT has its own set of problems, it is the transgendered who lead the most marginalised lives.
Who is a hijda? How does one become transgendered? Most often, it begins with a feminine psyche getting trapped in a male body. Boys in this predicament go through tormented childhoods till a time comes when they can take no more. In India, such boys, often after attaining puberty, either run away from home, or are driven out by the family — only to land at the doorstep of the hijda community which alone accepts them with open arms. In the absence of the sophisticated sexual reassignment surgery, a crude castration follows and the new hijda is inducted into the community by their guru. For someone who has fled a life of confusion and misery, the new setting provides protection, guidance to the ways of the world and survival and also spiritual education.
Then you have people who are other males but who cross-dress in places and circumstances where they feel safe. Hermaphrodites who are born with the attributes of both sexes also find it hard to fit into the society and become a part of the hijda community. And each of these individuals could have their own preference as to their partners, whether opposite sex, same sex, or someone from the third gender. According to conservative estimates, the hijda population in India today stands at about 500,000.
It is not hard to see why hijdas would be considered such a threat to society. By being patently above the male-female definition, they pose uncomfortable questions about sexual roles, family, ownership and patriarchy. Men shudder at them out of sheer denial of their own feminine side. A society that refuses to look beyond the exaggerated male and female attributes preserved in popular parlance does not give them the recognition of being thinking and feeling individuals in their own right.
“There is a lot more fluidity for the transgendered community in America,” says Elizabeth D Jeffords, the director of Transgendered Voices Inc., a self-funded organisation working for the rights of transgendered people in the US. She was in India recently to network with individuals and groups and looking for ways in which the community could reach out and help each other.
“Education and employment are open to us. I know District Attorneys who are transgendered, I myself am an architect and so on. In India, where you end up is directly related to the class to which you belong. If you are poor, you become a hijda and are forced to take up the twin occupations of begging or sex work that society will let you. If you are from the middle or upper class, you may become a transsexual, go in for surgery, or stay a closet cross-dresser with a perfectly ordinary life. Even from the middle class, if you come out in the open with your sexual identity, there is often no recourse except to run away from home and join the hijdas on the bottom rung. If the bottom is raised up, the people in the middle class don’t have as far to fall. Tackling the problems of transgendered people in India has to begin with addressing basic issues of employment, health and support for the very poor,” she says.
Asks Aasha Bharathi, “Where do our problems start and where do they end? For me, getting a passport was a Herculean task, and I must be the first person in India to have a passport whose gender is not defined as M or F. A ration card, or a voter’s identity remains out of our reach. How can we be denied the rights of common citizens? Forget discrimination and abuse at the hands of the police, we are denied even common decency. Usually eveteasing on the road evokes sympathy from passersby and police comes to help. But when we are teased or troubled, no one comes to our aid.”
The lack of a conventional sexual identity becomes a kind of disability that forces most hijdas to adopt an aggressive persona while dealing with the world. But there are people who have seen only their tender side. One of Elizabeth’s collaborators in India is filmmaker Koushik Chatterjee. This is what he has to say: “I consider whatever work I do with this community as repayment of my own personal debt.” When he was injured in an accident and lay bleeding on a Bihar highway at the age of eight, a group of hijdas took him to hospital, informed his family and vanished before they could turn up. “They saved my life, when others would have let me die, not wanting to get involved in a police case,” says Koushik.
Koushik, Aasha Bharathi and Elizabeth are collaborating today on ways to provide alternative employment to transgendered individuals and communities. “We need to find ways to break the paradigm of hijdas,” says Elizabeth. “We need to let the world know the creative capacity existing in the transgendered community.”
This picture was shot of hijdas having a ball at Haji Malang..
April 24th, 2007
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