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Tamil counterparts kojja and pottai, is “rarely used” as a derogatory term in Hindi; in fact, its employment as such has been well recorded sińce the 1940s, when Mehta (1945-1946: 52) wrote that “timid people are often abused as ‘Hljada’ in Gujarat.” Mitra (1983: 25) implies that the term is used throughout India in ref-erence to morę “effeminate” men, in a way that is perhaps comparable to the use offaggotyfairy, or even sissy in contemporary American slang (i.e., “Even before turning into a eunuch, a passive homosexual in Gujarat would be referred to as a hijra. This is also true of the rest of India”). Alyssa Ayres (1992), who also notes the prevalence of this epithet in her research among hijras in Gujarat,²¹ suggests that the term is used among nonhijra men as part of a “male-bonding” ritual, in a manner that approximates the use of homo among the American heterosexual men discussed by James Armstrong (this volume).

The use of hijra as a derogatory epithet is affirmed by the hijras I spoke with in Banaras, who explained how they were repeatedly dubbed hijra when young be-cause of their fondness for dolls and other girls’ games. In the commentary repro-duced here, Sulekha, a thirty-eight-year-old hijra who now lives with a małe partner in a smali village outside of Banaras, recalls how her childhood peers rejected her with the label hijra, refusing to allow her into their gendered playgroups: