Translating the Hijra: The Symbolic Reconstruction of the British Empire in India

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationships between citizenship and sexuality and gender in imperial formations, through an archaeology/genealogy of the subject position of those classified as the hijra. Combining Lacan's symbolic order with Foucault's historic a priori in order to understand empire, this project examines two main questions: how were sexuality and gender -- notably manifest in the subject position of the hijra -- used as forms of political control in colonial India; and how transformations in empire were produced through changing representations of the hijra. Consequently, the hijra represent a key point -- or, in the words of Lacan, le point de capiton -- in the anchoring of a field of meaning that enabled colonial governance in both a diachronic and synchronic fashion; in other words, the figure of the hijra was translated by the colonial writers in such a way as to facilitate the creation of an ideology that privileged British understandings of sexuality and masculinity, not to mention civility, modernity, and, to a degree, religiosity, establishing British authority in the region. This project consists of a textual analysis of nineteenth-century British documents and writings, especially historical records, such as ethnographies, translations, census information, official reports, intra-government communications, and legal documents from the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, with a focus on the nineteenth. Through an examination of these sources, this dissertation explores how this group was translated by the colonial authorities; that is, it queries the conditions under which they were represented as a group that was constituted by those who were defined by sexual and gendered characteristics -- eunuchs, hermaphrodites, and impotent men.