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Sinha continues this passage by overtly advising parents to keep a strict watch on their child’s mannerisms and to correct any noted linguistic oddities: if necessary, parents should send their sons to the ‘right type’ of school, where they will be forced to interact with other boys, read boys’ books, and engage in boys’ games. Poorer children, according to Sinha, are particularly susceptible to effem-inate behaviours, because their uneducated parents not only fail to realize ‘the grayity of the situation’ (p. 170), but also lack the money needed to finance corrective procedures.

A comparable opinion is voiced morę recently by Patel, who lists ‘speech’ as one of several areas where a child might deviate from the ‘sex-roles, norms, and values’ expected of men in Indian soci-ety (1988: 73). Like Sinha, Patel lists what he calls ‘changing speech’ as one of the stepping-stones to girlishness. In his opinion, a young boy who has suffered repeated taunts of baiylo [‘girlish’] from his peers will ultimately be left with no other choice but to abandon the world of men and women for the hijra community. The notion of vocal deviance, then, although defined rather vaguely in the above articles, is clearly an important concept in the minds of these researchers. The hijra’s inability to produce an accurate feminine vocality (as in Sethi’s narrative when Kumari speaks in a Iow, coarse voice), as well as an accurate masculine vocality (as in Sinha’s and PatePs discussions of the hijra as an effeminate-sound-ing boy), symbolizes her own inability to exist in a gendered world.