Bringing together art history, ethnography, and literary and historical analysis, the papers in this panel examine how trans* frameworks illuminate religious life across multiple temporalities in South Asia: from medieval devotional histories to early modern aesthetic traditions and contemporary ethnographic encounters. Rather than treating the past merely as evidence for present-day identities, these projects approach historical and contemporary materials as sites where different possibilities for future trans lifeworlds have taken shape. In this sense, the panel asks how attending to religious practices and histories in South Asia might expand the conceptual and methodological horizons of trans studies while also contributing to broader scholarly conversations on caste, conversion, and embodiment.
Queer Dalits in Nepal face double discrimination: caste discrimination for being Dalit and gender or sexuality discrimination for being queer. In this paper, I explore the ways in which this double discrimination intersects with religion. For many Nepali Dalits, queer or non-queer, the ongoing trauma of caste discrimination leads to their conversion from Hinduism to Christianity. Already notable for its divergence from Ambedkar’s call for Indian Dalit conversion to Buddhism, many Dalit Nepalis find that caste discrimination nevertheless persists within the Christian community in different ways. Further, for queer Dalits, conversion to Christianity introduces a new source and variety of gender and sexuality discrimination that they previously had not faced, namely, religion. This raises questions about the role of religion in gender and sexuality discourses and discrimination in Nepal and the multiple, intersectional identities that inform queer Dalit subjectivity, discrimination, and activism. In addition to addressing trans as a gender identity, I enlist trans as an analytical heuristic to think through the implications of queer Dalits crossing religious boundaries.
From as early as the fifteenth century, artists in South Asia developed a vocabulary to paint music, especially the musical modes (rāga). Evoking an ocean of moods and emotions accompanying the rāga, this genre of paintings is known as Rāgamālās (lit. “garland of rāgas”). Musicians, musicologists and connoisseurs’ taste blended an array of themes and iconographies in Rāgamālā, and by the 1600s, musical modes came to be gendered, with rāga (husband), rāginī (wife) and rāgaputras (their sons). Within this rich tradition, a fundamental question remains unanswered: when and how did Rāgamālā come to be gendered? More importantly, was this a gendering binary, as is assumed conventionally? And why is gender expansiveness articulated in the language and depiction of asceticism? This paper focuses on a single folio of a rāginī named Set-Malhār, from a Rāgamālā series made in mid-18th century Rajasthan (possibly Jaipur), to think through provisional answers.
This paper considers the constellations of alternate gendered embodiments and plural notions of being-in-the world within the subaltern religious tradition of Faqiri in contemporary Pakistan through the figure of an elderly faqir called Hajji Habib who sees themselves as neither man nor woman. The state sees Hajji Habib through the categories of “trans” or khwajasara but they actively reject these as well. I trace the use of paradox and double negation within Hajji Habib’s speech and as a staging of the dilemma of saying the unsayable through its resonances with Sufi thought and Indo-Islamic poetic traditions. Just as paradox in this tradition reveals the limits of a discourse enables meaning to go beyond the dualistic, I argue that paying attention to Hajji Habib’s words allow us to look past classificatory regimes and binary, biologized gender to see how gender is plurally performed, embodied, and imagined within Faqiri.
This paper explores the circulation of the figure of Mātā to Sri Lanka, enabled by the travel of transwomen from Sri Lanka to India. In tracing the circulation of Mātā between Sri Lanka and India, the paper seeks to chart a regional account of Tamil trans lives animated by songs, rituals, and medicalized care across Tamil worlds.
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).
This paper is a methodological reflection on the twentieth century genderbending Urdu poet Mīrājī, who reconceptualizes the way religion, literature, and gender fit together. The primary tension animating this paper is: how might a historian resist models of recuperation in service of modern evidentiary standards to prove trans people always existed? I argue that Mīrājī's cultivated illegibility resonates with imaginations looking to surpass legalized and medicalized discourses on transness.