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7.    Burton also explains in his artide “How to Deal with the Slave Scandal in Egypt” (recorded in Wright 1906, v. 2,195-210) that castration increased the value of the slave by anywhere from five to eighty pounds, depending on the age of the boy in question.

8.    Ayres (1992) and Preston (1987) attribute this loss of status to British colonialists, who launched morał and political campaigns against the hijras during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

9.    This passage points to an additional association of the eunuch with physical cruelty, which probably developed in response to the fact that they were often assigned the un-pleasant task of inflicting royal punishments on offending persons. The eunuchs’ penchant for physical cruelty was recorded even in the nineteenth century; William Knighton, for in-stance, comments that they carried out this task with ^ugusto and appetite”: “Whether it was that I felt an antipathy to the dass, or was prejudiced against them by the accounts I heard, I can not now tell; but my impression is, that the greater part of the cruelty practised in the native harems is to be attributed to the influence and suggestions of the eunuchs. They were usually the inflicters of punishment on the delinąuents; and this punishment, whether flog-ging or torturing, they seemed to inflict with a certain degree of gusto and appetite for the employment” (1855:161).

10.    True hermaphrodites (or those thought to be so) were apparently considered morę deserving of respect than castrated hijras, and so Edward Balfour s Enclopaedia Asiatica de-fines khoja as a “corruption of Khaja, a respectable man, a respectable term for a eunuch,” apparently in opposition to terms that were perhaps not so “respectable” (1976, v.5, 564). John Shortt (1873:404), however, reverses the semantics of hijra and khoja in his article on the “kojahs” of Southern India (which is later quoted extensively by Thurston 1901 in Castes and Tribes of Southern India) and identifies the “artifidally created” eunuch as kojah and the “natural” eunuch as hi gra. Ibbetson, MacLagan, and Rosę (1911, v. 2,331) delineate the lin-guistic distinction between court eunuchs and hijras as follows: “a eunuch, also called khunsa, khoja, khusrd, mukhannas, or, if a dancing eunuch dressed in womans clothes, zankhd. Formerly employed by chiefs and people of rank to acts as custodians of their female apartments and known as khwaja-sara, nawdb or nazir, they are still found in Rajputana in this capacity. In the Punjab the hijra is usually a deradar, i.e., attached to a dera? W. Crooke (1896: 495) identifies the term khoja (or rather, “khwaja”) as a Muslim subclass of hijra, a distinction that further points to an association of the khoja with Muslim courts.

11.    “They go about the bazaars in groups of half-a-dozen or morę singing songs with the hope of receiving a trifle. They are not only persistent but impudent beggars, rude and vulgar in the extreme, singing filthy, obscene, and abusive songs to compel the bazaarmen to give them something. Should they not succeed they would create a fire and throw in a lot of chillies, the suffocating and irritative smoke producing violent coughing, etc., so that the bazaarmen are compelled to yield to their importunity and give them a trifle to get rid of their annoyance, as they are not only unable to retain their seats in the bazaars, but cus-tomers are prevented from coming to them in consequence. With the douceur they get they will move off to the next baza ar to resume the trick” (Shortt 1873: 406).

12.    “At Ahmedabad not only the Hijdas but some of the Bhawayyas, or strolling play-ers, daim presents on the birth of a boy with a pertinacity that is not satisfied till the whole of their demand is paid. The person claiming the gift is generally the clown or fool of the troop. He does not dance or sing, but by his obstreperous sallies of witty abuse tries to make