Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900 by Jessica Hinchy (review)

"On the 17th of August 1852, a Hijra named Bhoorah was found dead with her 'head nearly severed' in the north Indian district of Mainpuri. In the aftermath of Bhoorah's violent death, the British rulers of north India resolved that the Hijrah community should be rendered extinct" (1). Opening with this chilling episode, Jessica Hinchy's book tracks the perverse logic by which panic caused by the violent death of an individual unraveled into a quest to exterminate her entire community. The Hijra remains strangely invisible in the historiography of sex and gender in India. Hinchy sets out to rectify this situation through a close reading of part 2 of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, which sought to create an exhaustive register of all Hijras in the North-Western Provinces with an eye to their gradual extermination; she goes beyond filling a gap by raising critical questions about the historiographical silence on this part of an otherwise extensively studied colonial law. By using the state's obsession with the classification and control of Hijras to comprehend the contours of colonial governance, Hinchy demonstrates the centrality of gender and sexuality to the quest to classify bodies and govern populations. The classification of the Hijras as ungovernable, she suggests, enables us to understand the notion of colonial order itself as located in sedentary social patterns, economic productivity, and normative household arrangements.

The Hijras were misclassified as "eunuchs" by the colonial state and reclaimed as a prominent non-Western "third gender" or transgender group in postcolonial scholarship. Interdisciplinary scholars now understand Hijra "as a complex identity of marginalised male-born (or rarely intersex) transvestites who combine kinship-based social organisation with Islamic and Hindu religious practices."¹ While several ethnographic accounts of the Hijras showcase the complexity and diversity of the past and present of the community, Hinchy's is the first full-length account focused on colonial India. The book unfolds in three sections. Section 1, "Solving the Hijra Problem," looks at the constitution of the Hijra in colonial and middle-class Indian discourse. The first two chapters trace how the figure of the Hijra stood for several British anxieties, particularly the fear of deviant sexuality at home and the fear of criminality in the colonies. Instead of focusing on the state's classificatory and enumerative strategies to exercise power, Hinchy utilizes the lens of information panics to complicate our understanding of the colonial state. In chapter 3, representations of the Hijra serve as a lens into the morality and politics of Indian middle-class men. Chapter 4 homes in on the peculiar solution to the "eunuch problem," which included a plan for their physical and cultural elimination through surveillance, registration, restricted movement, the destruction of lineages through which property could pass, and the removal of children from Hijra households.

In the second section, "Multiple Narratives of Hijra-hood," Hinchy makes the Hijra archive a focus of analysis. In chapter 5, the author reads "along the grain" to assess the structures and logics behind the organization of colonial knowledge on the Hijras to contest the view that a monolithic, homogeneous understanding prevailed throughout the archive. In chapter 6, reading police archives "against the grain," so to speak, and building on the renewed interest in life histories in gender and sexuality studies, Hinchy seeks to recuperate individual lives in order to "highlight new aspects of broader structures and historical patterns" (14). The move from a critical reflection on the colonial archive to an unreflexive use of those archives to retrieve marginal lives is somewhat incompatible. Theorists looking for a robust engagement with the thriving scholarship on sexuality and the archives might be disappointed that chapter 5 offers but a passing glimpse of the issues at stake, even as historians of gender sympathetic to the pursuit of life histories as an approach to the broader context in which they unfold might be left...