New Directions in South Asia

This paper explores the lifeworlds of third gender khwaja saras in Pakistan within the expansive, underexplored religious tradition of Faqiri. Faqiri refers to the transgressive, often antinomian, tradition of Sufi holy poverty. Khwaja saras in Pakistan have been the locus of well-meaning activism and legislation to integrate them into the state as rights-bearing subjects through the secular category of Trans, which has also produced a strong backlash from right-wing conservatives. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in which my khwaja sara interlocuters turn to Faqiri to explain what Trans and other categories fail to capture, I argue that both khwaja sara lifeworlds and Faqiri produce gendered selves that cannot be flattened into secular categories. Moreover, 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’s conceptions of “Islam” and “religion” and “Sufism.”