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The
Transformation of Eunuchs’ Lives & Livelihoods in 19th
century North India
Mario
D’Penha
History
Department,
Rutgers
University,
(Estados
Unidos/India)
The year 1871 saw the
first comprehensive piece of legislation targeting people
with third gender expressions in colonial north India. In
this paper I will look at the social tensions, anxieties
and pressures that produced an increasing clamour for the
criminalization of people who were called ‘Eunuchs’ or
understood to be ‘Hermaphrodites’ by British
administrators of the time. They were known by several
other names in Indian languages however and were part of
heterogeneous communities, often with distinct cultural
practices.
The official British understanding of people with
third gender expressions was to assume that these
‘men’, who did not quite look, behave or live like men
were castrated. Castration and the anxieties it produced
thus became the key to the British understanding of gender
difference. The castration anxiety of the colonial state
was symbolic of the British anxiety over their lack of
control over native bodies. The nineteenth century saw a
British discouragement of bodily dismemberment and instead
its disciplining and control through the law. British
anxieties about eunuchs also became heightened in efforts
to strengthen the colonial state after the Indian Uprising
of 1857, as they were itinerant not only in occupation,
but also in their gender identity and autonomous in their
lifestyle.
The intensification of idealized masculine notions of
community/ethnicity/nation meant that Indian middle-class
patriarchs now began to assert a greater control over the
sphere of the ‘home’, fearing assaults on its
integrity by people who began to be seen as being outside
its framework, namely eunuchs and prostitutes. Both
British administrators and Indian middle-class patriarchs
also participated in a condemnation of eunuchs and
prostitutes keeping children, and the anxiety over the
rape of boys in the custody of eunuchs whipped up fervour
for the criminalization of eunuchs.
The criminalization of eunuchs can also be seen as
part of the history of colonial surveillance which
emphasized the registration of eunuchs and thereby their
control through colonial knowledge. For the eunuchs
themselves, government injunctions and popular support for
these meant their marginalization in public space. A
minority however also argued in favour of their liberty.
This paper will therefore look at how eunuchs’ lives and
livelihoods were shaped by the encounter of various modern
discourses, some of which emphasized control, and others
which introduced the ideas of
subjectivity and personal
liberty.
About Mario D’Penha
Mario D’Penha was
educated at St. Xavier’s College and Jawaharlal Nehru
University in India and is currently pursuing graduate
studies in History at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He
is a queer feminist activist and is part of Nigah, a queer
collective that uses film and the arts to incite
discussions on sexuality in India.
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