Papers Session: Trans* Religion(s) in South Asia
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
This paper foregrounds 'trans' as an analytic and method for understanding South Asia's religious pasts and presents. It does so by focusing on two historical vignettes from premodern/medieval western India (present-day Maharashtra and Gujarat respectively). First: the tomb of an unnamed hijra disciple of the well-known Sufi saint Jalāl al-Dĩn Ganj-i Ravān (d.1247) of Khuldabad; and second: the historical record of Bahucarā Mātā - a vastly popular and self-consciously androgynous 'folk' goddess in Gujarat - whose earliest textual mentions (c. fifteenth - seventeenth centuries) limn her fondness for hijras and for turning men into women (or sometimes, women into men).