Clapping Along or Clapping Back: Of the Discourse of Hijra Community’s Resilient Happiness in Y-Film’s Hum Hain Happy

Abstract

Eva Illouz, whilst discussing her text Manufacturing Happy Citizens in an interview, points out that happiness in a neoliberal economy has become a way to measure our self-worth especially as it is individualised. Being happy, thus, means to be able to strive despite the odds and yet be optimistic: to be happy in a neoliberal setup is to be resilient. Indeed, resilience means bouncing back and putting your best foot forward in the gravest of circumstances, showing strength when things are against you: to be happy despite the odds. Keeping this aspect of resilience in mind, this essay is interested in broaching a more specific question: what happens when a structurally marginalised group is called resilient—when value of the group is solely located in its capacity to bounce back and remain within and not resist status-quo? The structurally marginalised group I will be referring to is the hijra community in India and I will discuss the idea of happiness in a video produced by Y films, the youth division of one of India’s biggest film production houses: Yash Raj films. The music video produced in 2016 is named ‘Hum Hain Happy (We are happy)’, a Hindi rendition of Pharrell William’s famous song of the same name, features six hijra community members from the city of Mumbai. The essay here offers a ‘friendly critique’ of the video’s efforts towards mainstreaming trans inclusion in representational practices which romanticise the struggle of the marginalised by valorising resilience as an inspirational response to systemic inequality. My critique, thus, does not invalidate representational practices in total but calls for looking at the dominant logics through which such representation is rendered possible. In so doing, I look at how the video’s narrative serves to quell collective resistance by translating individual resilience within status quo as happiness. On one hand, the makers of the video see the oppressed as valuable and respectable only in term of their resilient happiness and relatedly, by pedestalising this resilience as inspirational, essentialise/naturalise systemic inequalities and conditions of struggle. Anything that deters from this pedestal then is naturally seen as a negative response and not aspirational/inspirational. The essay first contextualises the video in the contemporary conditions of transgender rights in India and then proceeds to analyse its content regarding the narrative of resilience which obscures the conditions of transgender struggles in India, while elevating their positive attitude as inspirational, effectively obscuring the realities and possibilities of righteous rage and resistance.