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Mehta’s equivalence of the hijras’ behaviour with a theatrical performance is a revealing simile. While acknowledging the creative naturę of the hijra’s gait, speech and mannerisms by designating them as a kind of performance, Mehta simultaneously reduces these performances to a prescripted role-playing, thereby denying his social actors any ‘essentiaP femininity. In the folk-dramas men-tioned by Mehta, which most likely approximate what is currently referred to in Hindi as sang (travelling dramas predominantly per-formed in rural areas) or nautanki (trayelling dramas predominantly performed in urban areas), women’s roles are fre-ąuently played by young boys, whose higher voices and smaller statures make them morę suita ble than older men to the performance of female characters.⁹

The connection between linguistic performance and effeminate behaviour is madę explicit by Sinha in his psychological analysis of why a child might decide to join the hijra community. Sinha, who notes that over 20 per cent of the hijras he studied had performed nautanki in childhood, understands divergent linguistic behaviour to be a precursor to divergent sexuality. Sinha has definitive ideas of what kinds of behaviours constitute femininity and what kinds masculinity, not the least of which are linguistic in naturę: