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A similar sentiment is expressed in Moses Manoharan’s (1984: 27) brief introduction to the hijras in New Delhi: ‘They dress in saris, have exotic hairstyles and wear heavy make-up, but their voices give them away - theyTe India’s eunuchs. Now the eunuchs are raising their voices for a better deal after centuries as a despised and downtrodden community’ [emphasis ours].

8.    Throughout this chapter, we have used the transliteration system adopted by Snęli and Weightman (1989: 7). The superscripted ‘f* and ‘m’ represent feminine and masculine morphological marking, respec-tively.

9.    While both men and women participate in nautanki, all of the actors performing in satig are men. The women who do participate in nautanki, however, are freąuently stereotyped as prostitutes, and women viewers are normally not welcomed in the audience. For morę infor-mation on the Nautanki theatre in northern India, see Hansen (1992).

10.    We have considerably simplified the complexity of gender marking in Hindi for the purposes of this chapter.

11.    One of the hijras we spoke with, in order to indicate that three-fourths of all hijras have had operations, explained that ‘rupaya m£ barah ana’ [‘in one rupee 12 annas’]. (In Indian currency, 16 annas make up one rupee.) This estimate suggests that only a minority of hijras are actually intersexed in the way Epstein (1990) and Kessler (1990) describe when they discuss the surgical reconstruction of new-born infants in America and Europę.

12.    To preserve the hijras’ anonymity, we have chosen pseudonyms for all of the hijras appearing in this chapter and have avoided giving the names of the four hijra communities we visited.

13.    We have tried to transcribe each of the Hindi passages as spoken, maintaining any anomalies in gender agreement which occurred in the