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Verbal abominations: The hijra in colonialist narratives

The historical connection between the khwaja of the Mughal courts and the hijra of contemporary India is unclear. During the early 1800s, the status allotted to the court eunuch was mapped linguistically onto the “natural” hijra; that is, the term khoja, a derivative of khwaja, came to represent “hermaphrodites” in addition to court eunuchs, and both were defined in opposition to the morę vulgar, artificially created hijra (see Ebden 1855: 522; Russel, Bahadur, and Lal 1916: 206).¹⁰ Later in the same century, the morę prestigious term khoja was, for the most part, lost on Hindi-speaking society, and natural eunuchs as well as castrated eunuchs were conflated under the single term hijra. But the perception of the emasculated or-phan as “insolent” remained constant, continuing through reports madę by British colonialists in the 1800s, who systematically objected to the hijras’ vulgar manner of acąuiring alms at births and weddings. Indeed, Lawrence W. Preston (1987), in his revealing discussion of the role of British colonialists in the oppression of the hijras in the nineteenth century, explains that the vulgarity associated with the hijras’ begging techniques, particularly their predilection for verbal obscenity and genital exposure, led the Collector at Punę to direct an edict against its real-ization. The Bombay Presidency ultimately denied the Collector s request for leg-islation on the grounds that education, not law, would eventually solve the problem, but it nevertheless declared itself in support of the sentiment behind the request: “No doubt... the evil will soon be mitigated, as far as it is susceptible of remedy in the present State of society, and that it will ere long altogether cease to exist, even in respect of the infatuated victims themselves, as other abominations have done under the advantages of education, and under a Government which will not tolerate them” (Webb 1837, quoted in Preston 1977: 379).