9058009548

Since imperatives in Hindi are not marked for gender, Megha’s inclusion of these forms in the above excerpt as examples of femi-nine speech works to support Sulekha’s claim that familiarity is normally associated with women’s language. Her conflation of feminine speech with the use of intimate imperatives is indeed not so surprising given the larger system of honorific address in Hindi. Central to the use of this system is the age and social status of the referent compared to that of the speaker. A speaker’s senior, for instance, is normally addressed with the third-person plural pro-noun ap [‘you’ (3rd person plural)] and referred to with the plural pronoun ve [‘they’ (3rd person plural)] and a plural verb; any de-clinable adjectives or postpositions used in reference to one’s senior will be pluralized. Conversely, close friends, relatives (especially those not senior to the speaker), and those of lower social status (such as servants or rickshaw drivers) are normally addressed with the second-person plural pronoun tum [‘you’ (2nd person plural)] and referred to with the singular pronoun vah [‘he/she/it’ (3rd person singular)] and a singular verb. A third pronoun of address tu [‘you’ (2nd person singular)], which Megha employs twice in excerpt (9), is used for extreme divergences from high honorific reference, whether it be to signal heightened intimacy and infor-mality with the addressee (such as with a deity, a young child, or one’s husband or wife), or, alternatively, to express feelings of con-tempt or disgust. While the hijras’ use of this honorific system is consistent with the larger Hindi-speaking community, they addi-tionally indicate many of these same distinctions through the gender system. By superimposing gender distinctions onto hon-ourific distinctions, the hijras have at their disposal a tool of expression unavailable to the morę rigidly gendered non-hijra world.

Megha usually makes linguistic claims like those in (9), howev-er, only after issuing a stream of assertions which might be said to constitute the hijra ‘party linę’: namely, that hijras never have