In this thesis, I seek to examine how hijras represent themselves, their culture, and their communities in works of stylistically innovative life writing texts. I focus my analysis on Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life by Laxmi Tripathi (2016), Our Lives, Our Words by A. Revathi (2020), and Myself, Mona Ahmed by Mona Ahmed (2001). I frame my research as an examination of hijra life writing as an emerging genre, and I choose these texts as examples from the genre because they complicate questions of authorship (because they are all to varying extent collaboratively authored), and style and form (they all structure their life stories uniquely, and use unusual forms to do so, using photography, epistolary form, and stories from traditional Hindu myth and legend to help tell their life stories).
Although the primary texts are stylistically different, they all share common themes with their authors dedicating large sections of their writing to discussion of five key topics, which will form the basis of my thesis chapters. The first chapter draws on the related themes of identity, culture, and literary form and style, and I discuss how these ideas interplay and create the basis for both the life writing texts themselves, and my thesis. Chapter Two’s focus is violence, and I look at how the authors represent gender-based violence against hijras as both an interpersonal and systemic issue. The focus for Chapter Three is family and kinship bonds, and I analyse the authors’ representation of biological family relationships, as well as the kinship they find within hijra communities. In Chapter Four I look at dance in the life writing texts, which is represented by the authors as both an employment opportunity, and a joyful cultural practice. The final chapter examines how the authors write about the spaces they inhabit, looking to both their physical surroundings, and the conceptual and psychological space they occupy in the mind of the Indian public.
Reading these texts in this way allows for a nuanced and complicated understanding of how hijra authors present their lives, and breaks free of the burden of literary depictions and representations in sociological studies. This aforementioned literature often frames hijras solely as the victims of aggressive political policies (such as under the British Raj) or as perpetrators of violence and criminality (as many sensationalist novels frame them as) which have been at the forefront of scholarship about hijras for many decades. By writing their own narratives, hijra authors are able to take agency of their own stories and lives, often with surprising, joyful, and complex results.
