To Be Some Other Name: The Naming Games that Hijras Play

Abstract

This article begins by studying the ritualized changing of names that hijras undertake and proposes that we understand them as a subjunctive, which is to say that these rituals create an order in which names and the selves they entail can be shed for new ones. I then show that the failure of this subjunctive mode of fashioning one’s past and future is met in its confrontation with the law, which names the hijra in a discernible pattern in order to locate criminality and identity with her male name. I argue that this implication of maleness reveals a commitment not only to biology and sex but also an Oedipal understanding of violence. This understanding links naming with the dynamic of asli (real) and nakli (false) and draws a social field between the two through the figures of the hijra politician and the hijra criminal.

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