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While AUahbadia and Shah, for the most part, shy away from answering the ques-tion of “why” other researchers have tackled it head on, including Sumant Mehta, writing half a century ago, who offered a sociołogical explanation for the hijras’ “indecent gestures” and “mincing and inviting gait”: “It is not merely the lewdness which revolts,” he explains, “but the fact that the Indian Society has so degraded and inhumanised these people that, without actuaUy meaning to invite an unnat-ural sex intercourse, these people behave as lewdness-loving people expect them to behave, just in order to earn a pi[e]ce or two” (1945-1946: 47-48).¹⁸

But Mehta goes on to attribute the hijras’ behavior (which he variously iden-tifies as “malevolent,” “unscrupulous,” and “abased”) to both the “inferiority com-plex” and the “resentment complex” (51), a claim morę in sync with contemporary explanations. Satish Kumar Sharma, who conducted extensive research on the hiira community in the 1980s, works from the standpoint of Freudian psychology