The Khwaja Sara in Faqiri

“I am neither man nor woman, I have neither a mustache nor a beard, neither vagina nor penis, some call me hijra some call me khwaja sara, I am a faqir” Hajji Habib, an old third gender person said to me in crisp Urdu one afternoon in Lahore, Pakistan. Faqiri commonly refers to the transgressive, often antinomian, tradition of Sufi holy poverty. The most visible figures of Faqiri are wandering, world-renouncing men and women known as malangs, who reject the hegemonic social norms, including the reproduction of wealth and family, in pursuit of love for the divine, and perform an embodied critique of society’s hypocritical attachment to worldly wealth and success. Tens of thousands of Faqirs wander across contemporary South Asia – an important if often-unremarked-upon aspect of millions of people’s lives. In this contribution to New Directions in South Asian Studies, I propose to explore Pakistani khwaja saras as a unique vantage point into an inter-religious world of Faqiri. Faqiri, I argue, is a distinct, overlooked South Asian religious lifeworld; one which challenges our understandings of South Asian religions and which remains illegible and indigestible to the liberal capitalist state. The lived religious imagination of Faqiri, I contend, opens up possibilitiesdf of living gender outside the binary system.

A few weeks after speaking with Hajji Habib, I was having with tea with Madam Waheed, another third gender person. The tea-stall owner refused to charge her, saying he knew that khwaja saras were “God’s beloved sparrows.” As she thanked him, Madam Waheed clarified in Punjabi: “I was born with a feminine soul trapped in man’s body, I am not a khwaja sara because my Guru did not declare me one, I am not “trans” as they are saying these days, I am just a zenana [femme] in faqiri.” Khwaja saras not only generally define themselves in relationship to this tradition but are normative within it. In both these conversations, and countless others, my third gender interlocuters turned to Faqiri to not only explain that which existing categories failed to capture but also to draw on a religious imagination and lived tradition that they share with wandering ascetics and, as my research shows, a range of nonnormative people. What unites those “in Faqiri” – from low-caste Hindus to transgressive mystics to occult practitioners to peripatetic animal entertainers is a subaltern religious imagination that defies and exceed the state and the ruling class’s conceptions of “Islam” and “religion” and “Sufism”. While those who locate themselves in Faqiri are often “marginal” populations, they are sustained by a wider world of relationships with people who live with a foot in both worlds and who recognize and respect the importance of Faqiri – from business owners to military and police personnel.

Third gender people across South Asia, variously known as hijras, khwaja saras, murats, kinars and mukhanas have over the last few decades received increasing scholarly, activist, and state attention. Vaibhav Saaria has only been the most recent scholar to argue that Indian Hijras represent a broader religious lifeworld, which cannot be flattened into the simple category of “trans.” Hijras, Saaria argues, live in a “diagonal” relationship to normative, secular society, in a world they share with a range of other peoples. While scholars such as have noted the incompatibility of third gender lifeworlds with secular, legal categories, and a few such as Claire Pamment have noted Pakistani third gender peoples’ location of themselves in Sufi traditions, their location of themselves in Faqiri has remained largely overlooked.

In Pakistan there has emerged a secular, legal discourse that recognizes these people as “Trans,” specifically following the passing of the Transgender Persons Act of 2018 that sought to de-stigmatize the community and accord them legal rights. However, as scholars have noted, the absorption of third gender people into a rights-bearing subjects did not substantively affect the lives of the vast majority of third gender people. While a small class has been able to accrue social and material benefits, many third gender people’s lives have remained the same, even as violence against them has grown. The secular category of Trans, and sometimes even the more respectful term khwaja sara, obviates their nuanced, often religious self-identifications. The term Trans is also underwritten by a history of medicalization of the third gender body by state and non-governmental organizations during the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and an association of third gender people with sex work. Further, the 2018 act explicitly outlawed a central tenet of third gender life: the Guru-Chela relationship, whereby third gender people leaving their natal families are adopted by a Guru into a hierarchical relationship that is interestingly parallel to the Sufi dyad of Pir and Murshid.

At the time I was having these conversations, the country was in the grip of a Trans panic fanned by right wing religious parties who insisted that the right to perceived gender expression and inheritance was an un-Islamic and fueled by a “western agenda”, threatening the “safety of women” and the “sanctity of the family.” This discourse, also championed by members of the capitalist classes, and eerily similar Trans panics in the west, soon led to the Federal Shariat Court to repeal major sections of the 2018 Act. While progressives, activists, and Trans spokespeople understandably decried this move, my third gender interlocuters told me that they were not “Trans” anyway, they were “in faqiri”, and that their interest lay in continuing and safeguarding their ritual livelihoods of begging, performing, singing, and travelling to shrine festivals. In well-meaning attempts to integrate khwaja saras into the state, jurists and activists have effectively sought to erase Faqiri. 

People like Hajji Habib and Madam Waheed are far from alone in feeling alienated from legal and activist categories. Across South Asia, climate change and rising Hindu and Islamic fascism threaten to erase this rich tradition. Understanding Faqiri is a step towards protecting and supporting it and the rich religious worlds and alternative kinship networks that it contains.