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In Hindi-speaking Banaras, the genre sometimes referred to as mardana gali ‘mens curses’ is thought to involve mention of sexual violence to women, in oppo-sition to ‘women’s curses’ that generaUy only wish the hearer ill. The curses that Rupa identifies as teri md ki ‘your mother’s..ten bahan ki ‘your sister s..and sala ‘brother-in-law’ are known in Hindi as ma-bahan ki gali ‘mother and sister curses’, and because the speaker who utters them asserts his own sexual prowess with respect to the addressee’s female relatives, women do not tend to use them. Oddly enough, these are precisely the terms that Verma (1971) claims are used by impotent men to make themselves seem morę potent to the rest of society, a facade that is clearly meaningless to hijras, who collectively identify as nonmasculine. Even in the structure of their curses, according to Sulekha, the hijras assert their identity as feminine, employing “softer” curses that focus on either physical defect or sexual immorality, such as chinri ‘loose one’, bucri ‘earless one’, ganji ‘hairless one’, and kanjri‘low-caste loose woman.

Yet in contrast to Rupas claims, the hijras in Banaras do in fact employ mar-danacurses in everyday conversation, as evidenced by Shashis angry employments of the term madarcod ‘mother fucker’ in reference to her birth parents. Shashi, now a seventy-eight-year-old guru of a smali hijra community in Banaras, ran away from home at the age of seven and joined a troupe of bdi, women dancers who are often perceived to be prostitutes: “I renounced my mother; I renounced my father; I renounced everybody!” But what was initially grief later turned into contempt, and Shashi, adamant about the notion that hijras have no ties to the world of men and women, whether of caste, class, or religion, blasphemes her own parents: