Fixed, fluid, and radical: exploring hijra life-worlds at the bahucharaji temple, mehsana

Abstract

Hijras occupy a unique position in the Indian social milieu, underscored by their gender ‘deviant’ practice and their religio-cultural authority which legitimises their presence and ritual roles. In light of this, this thesis is an exploration of hijra life-worlds at the Bahuchara Mata’s prime temple in Mehsana, who is regarded as their patron Goddess. Going beyond scholarly tendencies of classifying hijras in numerical or categorical terms, the attempt is to study the ways in which gendered and religious discourses come to permeate their everyday, which inform their practices and worldings and shed light on their subjectivities. By a method of ‘coming close,’ I show that their life-worlds at the temple are guided by their sacred position cemented in opposition to that of the duniya, which results from the failure of the social to assimilate their beings and becomings. With this, I argue that their sacred position is characterised by a ‘fixed’ spatio-temporal orientation, a form of non-heteronormative temporality that renders them wholly in the present granting them radical, ‘unstraight’ opportunities of worlding. Furthermore, by centering their everyday practices of desiring and naming I show how they construct and formulate fluid life-worlds, enabled by their fixedness, in liminal spaces of qurb that doesn’t allow containable framings. I end with a reflection on the affordances of hijra life-worlds, as alluded to in this exploratory inquiry, not just for future scholarship but also for queerness, which in its elitist form, I contend, is increasingly mirroring ‘straight’ economies of (re)production. 7