Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India by Vaibhav Saria

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India by Vaibhav Saria Nikhil Pandhi Vaibhav Saria. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 268 pp. In an early, instructive ethnographic vignette, anthropologist Vaibhav Saria, who is living with a community of hijras (commonly referred to as a "third gender" in India), describes a conversation with an interlocutor who has just returned from conducting sex work along a local highway in eastern India. Nandita, a poor hijra, ecstatically shows off a used condom and proclaims she "finally ate Saajan" (8). Amid peals of laughter and jubilation, Nandita empties the contents of the condom into her mouth, momentarily consuming her lover's semen before spitting it back into the condom. The hijra swallows and spits her lover's semen repeatedly, declaring, "I want his smell in my mouth, so that I can smell him every time I breathe. It's like perfume…" (8). Attuned to such intimate, intricate scenes of pleasure and desire, alongside the wider sensorium of affective labors and longings, Saria's ethnography skillfully traces the textures and tapestries that make "the fullness of hijra lives in India" (1). Drawing on 24 months of living and traveling with hijras between 2008 and 2019—including 16 continuous months of fieldwork in Bhadrak and Kalahandi, two of eastern India's poorest districts—Saria traces fraught webs of kinship, sexual fields of fantasy and fucking, libidinal attachments and gendered labors, as well as everyday struggles and quotidian pleasures. The author grounds his vital analysis in a decolonial critique of global public health, which both singles out hijras as biopolitical mascots for spreading information about safe sex and casts hijras' own quests for survival and sexual desire as stigma-ridden, dangerous, and incommensurable with the normative goals of global health practice. [End Page 697] Replete with ethnographic rigor as well as creative engagements with South Asian social and literary theory, Saria's analysis disrupts Euro-American theories of kinship, queerness, and the psyche by foregrounding hijra's stories and bodies, which deepen decolonial understandings of "living and dying in the contemporary world" (3). Chapter 1 explores how hijras' affective labors of laughing, flirting, and fucking are crucial means to sustain shifting moral modes of normative kinship. Hijras' open invitations to men to fornicate in fields and marketplaces dramatize the everyday anxieties of heteropatriarchy and poverty, allowing for masculinities and domesticities to be (re)inscribed as well as (re)imagined through wild sex. Hijras provide their lovers with sex to "enjoy the pleasures of betrayal afforded by the temporary suspension of the moral" (27), relieving them from "the deceptively comforting shelter of domesticity" (61). The hijra engages in the "drama of seduction" (30), wilfully knowing that by "opting out" (21) of a reproductive future, she can never really set up a house with a man. Hijras are haunted by fantasies of unborn children, yet sex becomes an "instance of sexual pedagogy between a hijra and lover" (30). The hijra teaches her man sexually to calibrate his relationships precisely so that he can return "more fortified to meet the demands of domesticity" (61). In Saria's sensitive analysis, this "care afforded by the erotic relationships of hijras" (55) makes life more "bearable in the world" (56). Chapter 2 analyzes how hijras move through webs of domestic relations burdened by the normative demands of fertility and futurity. Far from being socially abandoned, hijras remain tied to their families in ways that sustain fraternal intimacy yet allow for the contradictions of internecine disputes and familial disruptions—e.g., feuds over property among sons and brothers—to be absorbed without annihilating the scaffolding of kinship. Saria intriguingly notes that for families, "the presence of a hijra sibling was not seen as a breach of nature so much as a breach of structure" (64). Hijra lives and the brokerage they provide to sustain "everyday domestic existence" (84) become central to the kinship calibrations that brothers, daughters, sisters, and mothers must make as they negotiate patriarchal futures for the family. Beyond the familial, the love and lust that hijras receive from their sexual pleasures "dilates" (88) the violent hold...