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many of the Europeans’ travel accounts, the hijras exist somewhere between the categories of man and beast, of man and woman, a liminality captured in Manuccis morę direct categorizations of the eunuch as “that sort of brute.” Be-cause of their neutered status, many Mughal eunuchs served as protectors of the pałace women; indeed, in many cases they were the only “nonwomen” allowed into the women s quarters. But their association with feminine secrets won them si-multaneous notoriety as court gossips, and cruel ones at that. Bemier, later in his travelogue, describes the procession of the seraglio in Agra and Delhi, in which the participating women were protected on all sides by eunuchs: “Woe to any un-lucky cavalier, however exalted in rank, who, meeting the procession, is found too near. Nothing can exceed the insolence of the tribes of eunuchs and footmen which he has to encounter, and they eagerly avail themselves of any such opportu-nity to beat a man in the most unmerciful manner” (373).⁹The authors repeated uses of the term insolence (formed from the Latin in ‘not’ +solere ‘to be accustomed to’) serves to characterize the hijra as someone who is ‘out of the usual’, in voice as well as deed. As in the descriptions quoted here, travel reports of the court eunuch frequendy confłate verbal insolence with physical cruelty, portraying the eunuch as inhumanely adept at both.