JY 00:00
Welcome to the latest episode of Lecture Theatre. With us today we have Jessica Hinchy, an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. Jessica focuses on the intersection of gender, sexuality, and empire. Her latest book, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India was published in April. Thank you for being with us, Jessica.
Jessica 00:45
Thanks for having me.
JY 00:47
So Jessica, tell us more about your life story. How did you become a historian?
Jessica 00:53
So I guess I became a historian because I was always really interested in history. And you know, I did history at school. And I unlike many people, I actually loved history at school. So when I went to university, history subjects were the ones that I enjoyed the most. I tried to do art history, but I wasn't very good at it. So yeah, I just ended up doing history. And I guess I was always interested in Asian history, but over time, became more interested in South Asian history in particular.
JY 01:30
Why was that?
Jessica 01:32
I think, in part because I had read a lot of Indian literature in English, when I was a teenager. And when I was in university, I read Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and stuff like that. To be honest, I think that was a large part of it. And I was interested in colonialism and race. And so British Empire in India is so interesting. And as a feminist, I was interested in gender and sexuality in particular. So yeah, I guess my research interests brought together all those things.
JY 02:10
So you moved to Singapore six years ago from Australia after doing your PhD and undergraduate work there. Do you think it's different studying history in those two countries? They were both part of the British Empire, but in a very different way. So how has the experience differed or converged?
Jessica 02:33
Moving to Singapore was interesting in terms of not being based in India but being based in another place where there're post-colonial repercussions, I guess, of colonial governance of gender and sexuality, in very similar ways to in India and in some different ways, as well. And I tend to think more broadly about empire, gender and sexuality. In terms of how studying is different in Australia than in Singapore, in both places, I wasn't studying the place where I was living. So in that respect, I think you get some interesting comparisons coming from different directions. Something I'm very interested in, but haven't worked on myself, is the ways that ideas about colonial governance, ideas about and colonial knowledge, and gender and sexuality circulated both within non-settler colonies and across settler and non-settler colonies.
JY 04:00
So let's jump right into your, your new book. It's about the Hijra community in India, which we might broadly describe as transgender. Tell us more about that community, and the big arguments that are making.
Jessica 04:14
One of the difficulties in the book that I had to deal with is historically how to describe Hijrahood, given the fact that I was working from 19th-century colonial sources, and to a lesser extent, the journalism of people we might call the Indian middle class at that time. So, you know, largely English-educated people who tended to be from higher caste or more dominant social groups. Given that, it's actually quite hard to describe who the Hijra community were historically and that was something that I really tried to grapple with.
But I guess a simple answer to your question would be that the Hijra community are a discipleship-based community, into which people are initiated, and it's structured by relationships between gurus and their disciples. Hijras also have a feminine gender identity and/or feminine gender expression. They wear female clothing, and adopt other sort of feminine gestures and forms of deportment and so on. And traditionally, they've had a role as performers and collectors of congratulatory gifts, particularly for births and marriages.
So, under British colonial rule, the Hijra community became seen as a ungovernable population by the British. Between the 1850s and 1870s, the colonial government in northern India determined that they should cause the elimination of the Hydra community. So they attempted to do that in a few ways, including policing the gender, embodiment and performance practices of the Hijra community in order to erase them as a public presence. Also, through registering members of the community. And, you know, keeping track of initiations—the aim there was to prevent castration. The British saw castration as necessary for Hijrahood, or otherwise equated Hijrahood with enuchhood. And so they saw the policing of castration as a way to limit the numbers of eunuchs, as they would have put it, and to cause eunuchs to gradually die out. So to that end, as well, children were removed from the Hijra community. So the book is really looking at this colonial project to cause the elimination of the hijra community, both culturally and physically, at least from the colonial perspective.
JY 07:22
And how and why did this become a concern for the British colonial authorities? And why the late 19th century in particular?
Jessica 07:31
Yeah, okay. So I mentioned before that the Hijra community is seen as ungovernable. And they're seen as ungovernable in multiple ways. So, certainly, the gender performance is a concern to the British, not only because it's seen as immoral, but I think also because of the ways that the British tried to classify population. This community that doesn't seem to fit into a binary understanding of gender is difficult from the British perspective to make legible or visible to the state and difficult to classify and understand.
But there're other concerns too. So the British see the Hijra community as been addicted, as they put it, to sex with men and with being professional sodomites. That's the colonial term. So there you have a concern both with what the British say is same-se, male-male sex. Of course, that's misgendering, the Hijra community, who don't have a male or masculine identity. But they also see this as a problem of prostitution. And we know in the 1860s, in particular, but really between the 1850s and 1870s, you've got a whole heap of laws passed in different British colonies that are regulating prostitution, to regulate venereal disease. So there's this concern with prostitution.
The British also see the Hijra community as being an obscene presence in public space. So there's a concern with both their performance practices, and also what the British view as begging. And so this intersects with broader governance of public space in British India, and particularly the development of the policing of public nuisance, which really consolidates in that second half of the 19th century, as a way to control marginalized people in public space. At the same time, the British also see the Hijra community as being wandering people. And that was somewhat of a misnomer. It seems like most Hijras were primarily sedentary. And it was partly because the British saw them as wandering people, partly because their so-called begging was sort of associated with vagrancy. But this is the period in which the British are very concerned with groups called the criminal tribes, who they see as wandering criminals. And they were mostly low caste groups, and who were nomadic groups who were classified in that way. So there's a concern with mobility and criminality.
Then there's also a concern with children and childhood. And this idea that the Hijra community are a danger to Indian boys who the British claim they kidnap and forcibly castrate. So then this intersects with the ways that the British tried to govern the trafficking of people, which was very uneven. They didn't care about slavery in a lot of contexts, and then they do in some sort of contexts, including when it's marginalized people. And it also picks up on this sort of colonial child-saving rhetoric. So it legitimizes British colonial rule.
JY 11:08
So I want to look back to a point you made earlier. For modern-day historians and students of history, how do we make sense of groups like the Hijra? When things may not map neatly onto terms like transgender as we understand them today? But nonetheless, we rely on these analytic categories to define our subjects of study? How do you navigate that?
Jessica 11:33
So it's a really tricky question. As you point out, transgender is anacrhonistic in this historical context, it's obviously a more recent term. It's also an identity category. And so of course, the people I'm talking about in the 19th century would not have described themselves as transgender. Right. That said, your question is, how do we translate these forms of embodiment and gender identity into an English language that makes sense to people today. And that's really, really tricky. So on my blurb, it does say transgender, which was this sort of shorthand for the purposes of selling the book.
JY 12:27
For bookstores and publishers.
12:31
But in the book itself, I don't refer to the Hijra community as transgender. And that's not just because it's anachronistic, it's also because it's an identity category that present-day Hijras also don't necessarily identify with. And many trans women in India today also don't identify as being Hijra. So because of that, I tend to use terms more like gender non-conforming, or gender diverse, which are, of course, still present-day terms, but not tied to particular identity categories that I would be projecting onto these historical subjects.
JY 13:06
They're more analytic in nature .
Jessica 13:08
And I think potentially, transgender is a really useful category in that it is describing a broad range of gender identities that don't fit within a binary understanding of gender. But because it's also an identity category, I think that's where its use can begin to homogenize things in the past or to obscure historical ideas about gender.
JY 13:42
So, let me now ask you about method. Given that the Hijra must have spent a considerable amount of effort trying to evade state surveillance, how do you go about uncovering sources about their experiences?
Jessica 13:56
So yeah, the Hijra community resisted this kind of project to police them in multiple ways: keeping on the move, breaking the law, continuing to perform their sort of feminine gender and perform in public space and so on. But among those forms of evasion and resistance was resisting colonial record keeping. So I guess, the way that I dealt with that was to track that history. Both in terms of the colonial anxieties about the fact that people who the British called eunuchs were, you know, not telling them the truth or that they were hiding their property which was registered under the Act or that they were not disclosing details of their personal histories. To think about colonial anxieties, about gaps in their knowledge, but also to think about the ways that the Hijra community were evading and resisting, not just the policing, but also the ways they were classified by the colonial state, the recording of their lives and so on. So I guess you need to trace that at the same time.
I was, in addition, looking for fragments within these policing sort of records, so particularly the police registers of eunuchs. I'm using scare quotes when I say eunuchs. So to use those registers for fragments of people's lives that didn't fit within the dominant colonial narrative, and didn't fit within the dominant, middle class Indian narrative, either. I really was putting a lot of emphasis on those things that seemed to not fit . And to use them to try to get a bit of more of a fleshed out idea of what 19th century Hijra lives were like. But just quickly, the problem then is that the Hijra community was targeted by this category of eunuch. But there's a lot of slippage between Hijra and eunuch. And they both operate as colonial categories in the 19th century records. So I don't know people's own self-descriptions. .
JY 16:30
To that end, do you face any ethical dilenmas? As a history student myself, there's a way in which the historical method can replicate the regulatory gaze. And especially for group that spend so much effort to defy definition and surveillance, to then try to uncover facts about their lives—did that ever pose ethical tensions for you?
Jessica 17:03
I think this is not just relevant to people who work on gender diverse peoples,. It's also relevant to anybody who works with colonial records. Because there's always this question of, on the one hand, you're reading documents that are absolutely structured by colonial categories. And you want to question, analyze, unpack those categories. But how do you do that without then reproducing those categories in your own work. So how do I go about problematizing this colonial category of eunuch without then centering it in a way that, for example, is quite offensive to the present day Hijra community and to trans activists as well in India, who find the term eunuch rightly offensive, because it's a clinical term? I think in terms of the ethics there're particularities here, but it is that more general question of how do you analyze and problematize colonial categories without then sort of reproducing them?
JY 18:18
Do you have a solution? Or is it just something that we all have to grapple with as we go along?
Jessica 18:23
I think it's something you have to grapple with as you go along.
JY 18:30
What do you think is the role that colonial India takes within the wider British Empire, in terms of colonial sexual regulation? And what is the relationship between the particular case study of this campaign against the Hijra to the wider apparatus of sexual regulation, in the form of 377, for instance?
Jessica18:56
Public discourse about Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code—and also the versions or various reiterations of similar laws and other penal codes in post-colonial nations— is often phrased as the importation of British colonial sexual norms, or gender norms. And to a large degree, that is the case. There is circulations of laws within the British Empire. That's clear. But I think it is an oversimplification to imagine this colonial regulation of gender and sexuality emanating out from the metropole.
First, local context really shape the various sort of governing strategies around gender and sexuality. So this particular project I'm talking about in the book is very much a provincial project. It's in northern India. And it's shaped by the local preoccupations of that provincial government, in this particular point in time, particularly in the 1860s. It's also an oversimplification, because I show in the book that educated Indian men who did write about the Hijra community backed very harsh measures, including their banishment and isolation. So, in that respect, this sort of importation or rather exportation of colonial sexual norms from Britain to the colonies doesn't really work.
So there's that. But I think another reason is that actually, a lot of the developments that I talked about in the book were broadly simultaneous with similar tendencies in Britain. So, for instance, I talked about how this law that criminalized the Hijra community was passed in 1871. And in that year, there was, you know, a lot of press in, in Britain about a particular case. That was of Boulton and Park, who were two men who were arrested for wearing women's clothes, and who were accused of having sex with men, on the basis of their cross dressing. And so this link between male-male sex and male cross dressing— that's how it's viewed by the British, of course, Hijra are not men, but they're viewed as men—these things are a concern, both in India and in Britain at precisely the same time. And there's this increasing sort of British colonial association between what they call sodomy and cross-dressing. So this is all happening at the same time. Right. So that's why I don't think that this idea of Britain exporting these norms really works.
JY 22:11
It's not a model of diffusion, it's more complex than that.
Jessica 22:14
I think so. And local contexts or the politics of particular colonies is really important. That said, you do have laws like section 377, that do sort of reappear in a number of forms and come from the Indian Penal Code. So, about section 377, what in particular, are you interested in, in terms of how that relates to?
JY 22:43
I suppose so much of the discussion around colonial sexual revolution has focused on laws and 377 and 377: laws against sodomy, and gross indecency. But in reality, we know that they were not enforced in as vigorous a way as one might imagine, especially in colonial India. I think one of the real contributions of your book is to reorient our understanding of colonial sexual regulation, away from criminal law, and to a wider range of administrative and regulatory measures. So laws against wandering people or criminal tribes. And I was wondering if you could speak to that. How does that challenge what we think about sexual regulation?
Jessica 23:39
Right, and also gender regulation. What is the relationship between colonial gender regulation, or the regulation of gender expression, and sexual behaviors? The particular case of this 1870s anti-Hijra campaign shows how those things are often intertwined. For colonial rulers, they saw gender nonconformity as very much interlinked with sexual deviance. So cool. But yeah, I think this case does open up questions beyond section 377. And beyond similar laws, how was gender nonconformity policed? From my particular research, I would say it suggests that probably public nuisance laws are really important. And it's difficult to to research that because it's often at this level of policing where there weren't a lot of records.
JY 24:48
That survived, at least.
Jessica 24:50
Yeah, but so there's a lot of references to the policing of the Hijra community but also a number of other groups who didn't fit in within a binary understanding of gender. Or who were theatrical or ritual cross dressers in India being policed under public nuisance laws. So the British were always like, should we bring these people under the anti-Hijra law? And then like, no, it's fine. We can use the public nuisance laws we are already using. But then we don't have a lot of actual records for the use of those public nuisance laws. So I would say, first of all, thinking about how gender and sexuality were policed through the everyday policing ofpublic space is really important. And being on the lookout for those sources.
In terms of sexuality, I think section 377 also raises the question of how different types of sex crimes were policed. Because section 377 was really against unnatural sex. Of course, that was the law that could be used to police non-consensual sexual acts that were not procreative sex, right? And so actually, there's this, overlap between the policing of rape and the policing of so-called unnatural crimes. And that position the sodomite, so called, as a rapist, which is hugely problematic and has a lot of post-colonial repercussions. But I think that's another aspect of the history of Section 377. And that is really important. This is also overlapping with the policing of sexual violence in really, really tricky ways. So I think actually moving beyond section 377 probably goes in both those directions. How is gender and sexuality nonconformity policed through a whole set of laws, particularly in public space? How can we unpack the relationship between the policing of same-sex sexual behaviors? How was that then collapsed together with non-consensual sex and its policing?
JY 27:18
That's just something that I think is under-explored right now, both in the historical debate and the public debate. So what do you think this history can teach us about modern-day debates around gender and sexuality?
Jessica 27:35
It raises the question of why post-colonial nations have kept these colonial laws on the books. So just to clarify the that law that I look at in the book, part two of the 1871 Criminal Tribes Act—it was repealed in 1911. I show in the postscript, though, that aspects of it have been reintroduced into law, both in the princely states that were under indirect colonial rule, and in the post-colonial Indian state, and in a number of state governments. So you have two things. You have revivals of colonial laws that have been repealed, and then sort of get reiterated in different ways. And you have actual colonial laws still being on the books. And I think this is often thought of in terms of a colonial inheritance or legacy. But I think those concepts over-simplify things.
For a start, there's the question of why post-colonial nations keep these laws on the books, right? Why are they significant politically to post-colonial governments? And the argument I make in the book is that, in the case of the Hijra community, they have continued to be seen as ungovernable people, in multiple ways. And so it's perhaps less about inheriting colonial laws and more about how gender and sexuality are wrapped up with state visions of what a governable population will look like. And that people who don't fit within a binary understanding of gender in particular are seen as being unknowable, ungovernable, problematic.
So I think thinking about what are the politics of the use of these laws, and how does that change over time is really important. And as we were talking about: looking beyond section 377, to really local, provincial or state government-level campaigns. So I've talked about some city-level campaigns against Hijra, against begging at traffic lights, which has become a source of livelihood for many Hijra. So once again we see the use of public nuisance laws, obscenity laws. And this is all happening at the city level, right? It's not at a national level. So I think looking beyond those national level debates to think about how police commissioners might launch a Hijra campaign or a campaign against immorality in a city to shore up their legitimacy or to intersect with political debates going on at that time.
JY 30:38
History prompts us rethink our assumptions, about present-day debates about the scale or instruments of regulation.
Jessica 30:52
What I suspect from India anyway, is that a lot of this regulation of non-normative gender and sexuality, is happening not through, as you said, prosecutions under Section 377. But rather under that sort of, everyday interactions with the police. And so then that does raise questions. You know, I'm not an LGBT activist, but that means that once you decriminalize homosexuality, same-sex practices, there's so much more to do after that. .
JY 31:31
So speaking of that,what if, any do you think is the relationship between your scholarship and activism within the wider public sphere?
Jessica 31:40
Well, I hope that this book will be useful to activists in India and, and South Asia, perhaps more broadly. And I also hope that it opens up, or it highlights an archive that others can go back to, possibly to question some of my conclusions as well. And to follow up threads of this that I wasn't able to do in the book. So you know, I really do hope that both at the level of activism, but also of scholarship produced by South Asian, transgender people. That this opens up the discussion and highlights certain sources that they might be able to use . In terms of my own activism, that's mostly feminist sort of activism. I don't know if activism is really the right term.
JY 32:42
Advocacy?
Jessica 32:43
Well so I volunteer for AWARE. But that's really in service provision. But I guess that's my attempt to sort of, in some small way connect the feminist aims of my research to what I do in practice. That's more on a personal level, I guess.
JY 33:06
What is the relationship between theory and empirical study in your work? Because one of the things as I read your book, was I realized how committed you were to creating a highly grounded study of this community. So much of literature around gender and sexuality has been vastly theoretical, especially in the last few decades. How do you see that relationship?
Jessica 33:34
So I think theory is important in terms of framing your questions, or sometimes crystallizing your analysis. But I think to a lot of historians, I seem to be way too interested in queer and feminist theory and use far too much jargon. And then to a lot of people who position more within Queer Studies, within feminist theory, I probably appear very empiricist . But I think it's actually productive trying to straddle those two things. I mean, I'm certainly an empirical historian. And the archive is where you start as a historian. You have questions, obviously, coming from both theoretical concerns, and in my case, more feminist politics. I think where gender historians and historians of sexuality do differ from other aspects of gender studies, queer studies, sexuality studies is our empiricism . And as we were talking about, there're problems with that too. Because you're using highly stigmatizing, highly criminalizing official records. But I think it's important to unpack those.
JY 35:07
At NTU, you teach a couple of classes, including on the issue of feminism and gender history more broadly. So what has that been like, working with Singaporean students on these issues?
Jessica 35:20
I teach quite small classes,. So I can't say that I have, you know, a broad cross section necessarily, of young Singaporeans views in my classes, because I've got a small sample size. But yeah, I found teaching gender and sexuality here really interesting. And I think it's also been a great experience for me, as a white woman who works on colonial Asia, really have to think about what is my position as a person who's claiming to be an authority on this subject. And entering into conversations with my students on occasion about that. Particularly in my history of feminism course, which I taught for the first time last semester, we spent a lot of time talking about our position in relation to the subject of the history of feminism, because, of course, we were talking about intersectionality, we were talking about global feminist movements, and who has the authority to speak and advocate on particular issues. And so when, inevitably, it came up within the classroom, I was very happy and very glad that we had that conversation. I would say that in terms of enriching my teaching, teaching gender history and the history of feminism in Asia as a white woman—and having to really confront what is my position in relation to this subject—and also teaching the history of colonialism in a post-colonial nation in Asia as well—that always means that my position in relation to my subject is very much front and center. And, of course, should be, for instance, in an Australian context as well. And I hope it would be.
JY 37:24
But it accentuates it, when you are in a different context.
Jessica 37:29
Exactly. And to get my students take on that I think, is really valuable as well. You know, we had a lot of jokes in my feminism course about me being a hegemonic white feminist. It has sort of become a bit of a running joke.
JY 37:50
So one final question, what do you think you'd be working on in 10 years time, now that the book is out?
Jessica 37:56
So the short answer is, I have no idea. But I am interested in gender, sexuality, and race and how that plays into the history of colonialism. So I'm certain I will be working on those areas. I'm interested in how gender and sexuality play into colonial governance, at a very localized and everyday level. So I'm interested in the criminal tribes. These are low caste and socially marginalized groups who were criminalized under British colonial rule. So at the moment, I'm working on how gender and sexuality plays into that project. And this seems to be a project to control mobile and socially marginalized peoples who are viewed as being criminal. Ostensibly, it has very little to do with gender and sexuality. And yet people's interactions with police, with the colonial state were so structured by gender. Sexuality comes up constantly in the colonial discussions about these groups. So I'm interested, in short, in how, in some ways, gender and sexuality are not just regulated, but how they constitute part of colonialism in contexts that seem to not be overtly gendered or sexual. So not about non-normative forms of gender and sexuality in the way that for instance, the history of the Hijra community appears today. But actually, we see very, very similar things. So I'm interested in that and I'm also very interested in the history of sexual violence. And that is something that—as I became more engaged with some gender-based organizations in Singapore—I became more aware of the colonial imprint on two laws surrounding sexual violence.
JY 39:58
The Evidence Act?
Jessica 40:01
And outrages against modesty, and so on. And thinking about post-colonial law and sexual violence. But that's very early stages of thinking. Yeah.
JY 40:15
Thank you so much for being with us today. Jessica. That was Jessica Hinchey, Assistant Professor of History at NTU. Thanks for being with us this episode and see you next time.
