Performing Piety in Pakistan's Transgender Rights Movement

Abstract

Pakistani hijra/khwaja siras make up structured communities of feminine-identified gender-variant persons who have long but marginalized traditions of performing religious-cultural roles. Supreme Court rulings in 2009, promising rights to marginalized khwaja siras, have led to increased backlash against these performances and the community structures on which they rest. This article explores these traditional performance practices, within the Sufi shrine and in homes, as well as in explicit activism as khwaja siras contested their place in the national 2013 elections. These assertions of piety, drawn creatively from Sufi and Shi'a modes and often performed on the fringes or lower rungs of developmental activism, offer an embodied outlet for negotiating multiple axes of exclusion. While recent scholarship has claimed that in the context of reformist Islamic movements khwaja siras are turning away from the spaces of legitimacy that Sufism once offered and toward the liberal language of human rights to make claims for recognition, the author argues that these pious performances continue to provide a potent force for transgender activism in Pakistan.

In 2009 outside the Taxila police station of the Rawalpindi District of Pakistan, guru (leader) Almas Bobby gathered with over a hundred fellow hijras/khwaja siras in vibrant protest against persistent police violence, after an incident in which police looted, stripped, and arrested khwaja siras dancers entertaining at a wedding party.¹ Along with clapping and chanting (Pamment 2019), the protestors zealously beat their heads and chests with their hands, like the rhythmic matam of Shi'a Muharram rituals (Khan 2015)—a performance of piety that laments the brutal killings of Imam Hussain and other male members of the Prophet's family at the Battle of Karbala (AD 680)—while agitating against contemporary policing of khwaja siras dancing bodies. Muharram rituals are thought to have been initiated by Imam Hussain's female relatives mourning the loss of their menfolk (Nakash 1993), and the beating of the head continues to be a gesture of wailing widows. These contemporary khwaja sira protestors, with their femininity degraded by the police, beat themselves, as if calling to the society as well as to God: “Who is left to protect us?” While police brutality had been premised on accusations of the dancers' immorality and vulgarity, the protestors challenged binaries of the sacred and profane and religio-moral inclusion and exclusion, reclaiming that which had been denied—the expressive and collective feminine performing body in public space.² As this article argues, such sacred Islamic gestures are deeply imbricated in khwaja sira community values and belief systems, and they constitute affective performatives for accessing the dominant public and political sphere amid continuing systemic exclusions, even in the context of official state recognition and protections.

This protest, as I have discussed elsewhere (Pamment 2019), carried considerable power, prompting the release of the dancers and capturing the attention of jurist Aslam Khaki and the chief justice of Pakistan, who within weeks of the protest held a landmark human rights hearing in the Supreme Court pertaining to the violations against this vulnerable population. The “paradox”—as described of hijra/kothi/trans feminine rights that have unfolded across South Asia in the last decade (Dutta 2013; Hossain 2017)—was the exclusionary nature of this libertarian project. Not only were the protestors not invited to the initial hearings,³ but the court decision led to backlash against community structures and the performances sustained by them—the very mechanisms that brought rights violations into the court's purview. Khaki's petition, while drawing attention to the fact that fundamental rights of inheritance, education, and employment are being violated by the society and the government, stated that this community's (problematically denoted as “eunuchs,” “shemales,” “people of the middlesex”) “rights to respect have also been violated in that they are forced to dance and also for begging by the ‘Gurus.’”⁴ While heads of khwaja sira families, known as gurus, have often provided refuge to students or chelas, who, in departing from normative gender expectations are invariably cast out by their natal families, the court described the chelas' situation differently: “Their right for movement is also restricted as they are enslaved by the Gurus” (Supreme Court 2009a).⁵ The new elite gatekeepers, committed to an assimilationist top-down model to “put these individuals in the mainstream of life” (Supreme Court 2009a) and make khwaja siras into “good citizens” (Dawn2009), promoted a politics of respectability, morality, and normative citizenship. Vanja Hamzić (2016: 150–51) summarizes the ruling: “‘Fundamental rights’ go in hand with their ‘fundamental obligations’ [whereby] state protection is guaranteed only to moral citizens.” Moral citizenship was here defined at the expense of hypervisible public performance and guru-chela lineages.

While khwaja siras were finally invited to these legal conversations, the legislators went further in constructing a legitimate third gender identity.⁶ Attempting to make legible the bodies on which new rights should apply, in November 2009 the court determined that rights would be endowed to those with a “gender disorder,” comparable to legal recognition in Bangladesh premised on “disability” (Hossain 2017), and sought to delineate the real from “fake unix”: “It is informed that in the name of unix some male and female who are otherwise have no gender disorder in their bodies have adopted this status and commit crimes on account of which a bad name is brought to unix. This aspect is to be checked by the police of the area where such like people are operating” (Supreme Court 2009b). Advancing a biological, essentialist understanding of gender, while suggesting deviation from this as counterfeit and criminally compelled, the court proposed that through mechanisms of police surveillance and medical tests they would protect the “real” from these “fake unix,” removing a “bad name” and therefore restoring “real unix” to a status of respectability. Similar to what Aniruddha Dutta and Raina Roy (2014: 330) describe as the kothi-hijra spectrum, khwaja sira encompass the hierarchically stratified but overlapping hijra-pun, denoting those who have undertaken ritual castration (nirban, a spiritual awakening, separation from the worldly) and those who have not, zenana-pun (also akhwa, or kothi). Both are affiliated with structured communities of guru-chelas and often participate in shared professions and rituals. As Adnan Hossain (2012: 497) argues of Bangladeshi hijras, it is through the successful participation of such occupations or “hijragiri that one becomes, and is publicly recognised as, a hijra, regardless of one's genital status.” Positing a genitalia-based definition of khwaja sira reinforced inter- and intracommunity tensions and ran counter to the community's heterogeneous composition. Medical tests were ultimately struck down after demonstrators protested between 2010 and 2011, led by Karachi-based guru Bindiya Rana and transgender woman Sarah Gill,⁷ during which time debates about khwaja sira legitimacy were carried into the public sphere by mainstream media.

In the first phase of these televisual treatments, religious authorities were called to give their judgments on khwaja siras. For example, in January 2010 a televised conversation took place between guru Almas Bobby (of the Taxila police protest) and Maulana Allama Ibtisam Elahi Zaheer, Islamic scholar and secretary of the Saudi-sponsored Jamiat Ahle Hadith Islamic political party, a movement that characterizes adherence to Sufi shrines and saints as shirk or un-Islamic. The scholar announces that Allah has made two gender categories, and while there are physical imperfections or “abnormalities,” khwaja siras should conform to the behaviors of men or women, giving up “abnormal activities” that he links to homosexuality, officially illegal in Pakistan. He notes that these practices may be normal in other countries like America, but here they should be punishable according to Sharia law. Bobby protests that they are incomplete women, having the ruh (soul) of a woman. This notion of a spiritualized interior, which as I later show draws creatively from Sufi thought and works to challenge essentialist gender definitions, is sharply condemned by the Maulana, with his Wahhabi ideologies, as a “spiritual disease” (Dunya News2010).

This framing of khwaja siras as gay men was concurrent with a rise of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) working with khwaja siras, often through HIV/AIDS projects and covert transnational LGBTQI networks from 2010. On the one hand this created further backlash, a tightening of the nation's moral compass as khwaja siras were publicly associated with homosexuality, and on the other khwaja sira rights began to expand under the umbrella of “transgender rights.” For some khwaja sira and trans people, NGOs have offered life-saving provisions, jobs, solidarities beyond divisive class structures, and avenues of identity beyond the guru-chela discipleship of hijra structures or professions. At the same time, similar to Dutta and Roy's (2014: 322) critique of the hierarchical and “developmentalist uses of the transgender rubric” in East India, it is important to recognize that not all hijras/khwaja siras have access to the language of transgender rights, and the jobs and possibilities for upward mobility that it promises. Anna Morcom (2013) further warns of other limitations of developmentalist narratives in reference to Mumbai kothis, who are now rarely discussed through the lens of performance—their traditional occupation—but increasingly seen as problems and victims, associated with HIV/AIDS, gender, sexuality, and prostitution, risking further marginalization.⁸ These associations have had particular ramifications for khwaja sira dancers, beggars, and sex workers, wherein class ideals interact with dominant morality, to reify a privatized conception of gender and sexuality. An episode of Aab Tak's television crime show Khufia that aired on December 15, 2013, illustrates the traps of this new visibility. Here the female host forcibly interrogates khwaja siras, both on the streets and by barging into their homes, and demands that they admit to being gay men, sex workers, and agents of disease, while allowing the police to beat and arrest them (Zem TV2013). The affective dimensions of these televised treatments incur high risk for those implicated by turning public feelings to disgust and legitimizing violence against abject “fake khwaja siras.”

Amid competing national and transnational epistemologies, if the subaltern khwaja sira was largely spoken for in the early period of the rights movement, between 2017 and 2018, a collaborative effort between lawmakers and trans and khwaja sira communities offered a deliberate intervention to the practices of regulatory gatekeeping (Jameel 2018),⁹ in formulating the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act. The act, passed into law in May 2018, gives transgender people (whether “intersex or khunsa,” “eunuch,” “transgender man, transgender woman or khwaja sira or any person whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from the social norms and cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at the time of their birth”) access to rights and protection according to their own self-identification (National Assembly of Pakistan 2018). However, in keeping with the backlash throughout the rights movement, the legislation faced objections on religio-moral grounds. In January 2018, the Council of Islamic Ideology ruled against the passing of the bill, wanting to enforce medical tests (Wasif 2018). A coalition of feminist trans and khwaja sira activists in turn held a meeting with the council where they presented research from Islamic sources—including the Hadith, the Quran itself, and Muslim inheritance law—to show that transgender was not a new incursion from outside (as accusations of homosexuality have implied) but a recognized part of Muslim culture. Jannat Ali, a khwaja sira and trans activist who participated in these negotiations, explains that they included liberal equal rights discourses and religious humanitarianism in their appeal, citing the tragic case of Alisha, who had been shot in Peshawar in May 2016 (Akbar 2016), ultimately bleeding to death outside the hospital ward when health officials refused to offer treatment. Jannat Ali asserts that the plea to these religious authorities was, “When you kill one human, you kill all of humanity, where is Islam then?”¹⁰ The council finally agreed to the bill without imposing medical tests or other forms of gatekeeping.

With the passing of the bill into law, however, notions of a spurious identity have again been on the increase in mainstream media. In response, Bubbli Malik, a khwaja sira and trans activist of the NGO Wajood, also part of the making of the new Transgender Protection Act, was interviewed on the state channel, Pakistan Television (Cafe News2018). Bubbli Malik translated the new act and its transnational transgender terms into distinct Sufi hermeneutics familiar within hijra/khwaja sira lineages, referring to a physical reality (zahir) that is discrepant with an inner self (batin) or the soul (ruh). These religious lexicons, cultivated through the community, call our attention to the everyday circulations of khwaja sira spirituality. Similar to the activists meeting with the Council of Islamic Ideology, they remind publics that khwaja siras are religiously and culturally embedded—while pushing for further inclusion.

Khwaja Siras and Sufi Islam

Pakistani khwaja siras encompass a wide range of subjectivities, as they do religious beliefs. I focus on Sufi Islam, since it proves integral to group ritual and social reception of Pakistani khwaja sira performances of badhai—rituals of blessing at births, weddings, and other celebratory occasions.¹¹ As Hamzić (2016: 155) notes of Sufi practices in general, they “do not necessarily belong to a single religious community. In the pluralistic context of the Indian subcontinent, they can be simultaneously performed by nominally Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian and various other communities.” Despite the centrality of Islam to hijra/khwaja sira practices across South Asia, this remains an undernourished area of research, and studies have focused largely on Indian hijras' Hindu beliefs and practices (Nanda 1999),¹² reflecting Hossain's (2018: 321) critique of the “India-centricity in hijra studies [which] works to circumscribe new epistemological and analytical possibilities in terms of how the hijras are conceived and interpreted.”

Gayatri Reddy (2005) suggests that Islam offers Indian hijras an authentic form of subaltern citizenship in the context of Hindu nationalism. A different set of considerations arise within the dominant Sunni-Muslim framework of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Here Sufism, one might argue, is a subaltern (if not illegitimate) stream in the eyes of conservative Wahhabi and extremist factions such as the Salafi and (the aforementioned) Ahle Hadith (see Jaffer 2017), who have attacked Sufi shrines. Nonetheless Sufism is widely considered part of Islam and supported by elite state institutions.¹³ Sufi shrines (built over the grave of a saint) provide many of their adherents a more direct contact with the divine, offering a space of meditation and sensoriness. Depending on the order, the shrine features oil, fire, incense, touching/kissing the tomb of a saint, praying, reciting the Quran, singing Sufi poetry and naats (devotional poetry praising the Prophet), zikr chanting, dancing (in certain shrines), eating food cooked in the honor of the saint, and talking and sharing, with possibilities for transcending socially exclusive hierarchies.

One Lahori khwaja sira, Neeli, compares her experience of the mosque to that of the shrine. In the mosque, “the maulvi [Islamic cleric] tells us remove your nail polish and cut your hair . . . he wants us to go in an ugly state in front of Allah.” At the shrine, “we appear before our Allah in a more beautiful state!”¹⁴ The space of the shrine allows the release of the soul. This mystical lexicon of the inner life (batin) is a central Sufi concept and pervades South Asian Sufi poetry, often sung by khwaja siras, wherein the soul of the devotee, invariably given feminine qualities, seeks reunion with her lover, God. This is exemplified by the sixteenth-century Sufi saint Shah Hussain, who was thought to have had a male lover—the Hindu Madho Lal—and who, several khwaja siras explain, “perhaps was one of us.”¹⁵ The persona of the seeking woman and gender fluidity is a prominent trope in Hussein's poetry: “Go wherever dwells my sweetheart . . . I undid my braids, wrapped them around the neck . . . I turned a wandering woman” (Hussein 2016; see also Kugle 2007).

In the context of the complex networks of power in which Sufi institutions are embedded, Amen Jaffer (2017) warns against seeing Sufism and its institutions of shrines as a “subaltern counterpublic” for hijra/khwaja sira communities. Rather, he argues, the “creative appropriation of Sufi discourses, practices and organisational forms deployed by hijras [enables them to] construct a spiritual gender identity for themselves,” endowing a legitimacy that “challenge[s] dominant perspectives of their gender that tend to focus on the abnormality of their bodies and sexuality” (184). As Jaffer suggests, these spiritual identities enable contact across group boundaries and the possibility for accessing power. However, in the context of reformist Islamic movements, in which Sufism no longer guarantees legitimacy as it once did, Jaffer asserts that “Hijras . . . have to seek alternative models of recognition, which explains why some are increasingly turning to the liberal language of human rights to make claims for recognition” (193). The collaborative work of activists on the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act and Bubbli Malik's redeployment of Sufi idioms in translating transnational transgender terms to television publics suggest that such pious performatives are enriching, rather than being replaced by, the liberal language of human rights. This thesis is advanced by Scott Kugle (2010: 262) in his reading of same-sex love among Sufi saints:

I am not going to give a reading of premodern same-sex love or gender transgression in the Islamicate. Many scholars, including Kugle (2007, 2010), Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (2010), and Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (2008) are already doing this important work. Instead, I foreground how Sufi Islam shapes contemporary khwaja sira performance practices in Sufi shrines, neighborhoods, and explicit political activism. In the context of rights movements, I argue that these performances of piety continue to foster community and facilitate important interventions in public and political spheres.

Devotion in the Shrine

Over several months in 2015, I accompanied groups of khwaja siras to various shrines in Lahore, as they often put it, “wherever the calling” took them. While these particular khwaja siras were not bound to a particular shrine or tariqat (Sufi order), they share the antinomian qualities of the qalandriya—a tradition of highly independent, socially disruptive ascetic dervishes known as faqirs (Jaffer 2017), often described as a nonorder. Ahmet T. Karamustafa (1994), who studies this movement in its heyday of the medieval period, describes the qalandriya as practicing a deviant social renunciation, entailing provocation and social scorn–seeking tendencies, with a belief that adherence to social norms, reproduction, ritual boundaries, and legal rules is an obstacle to spiritual pursuits and to God. Like other marginalized performance groups in Pakistan (Pamment 2017), khwaja siras similarly describe themselves as faqirs—indeed in southern Pakistan they are known by this name. The departure from the dominant and privileged sphere of masculinity and adoption of a socially degraded femininity invariably invite social scorn, forcing relinquishment from family, inheritance, and normative worldly ties. This is often explained by khwaja siras as a means to God, an act of supplication that brings them closer to the divine:

Jaffer (2017: 184) elaborates: “The concept of faqir is especially appealing for legitimising alternative lifestyles and communities cut off from society . . . [and] enables hijras to make sense of their social position in spiritual terms.”

Particularly significant is the urs (lit. wedding), a festival commemorating the death of the saint and his or her sacred union with the beloved, God. I will proceed to foreground the urs of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar—the thirteenth-century wandering ecstatic dervish who migrated from Iran to Sehwan in Sind (presently southern Pakistan)—whose shrine is a popular site for khwaja sira devotion and gathering of community.¹⁷ He is believed to be a descendent of ‘Ali, the first Shia imam (Kasmani 2012: 440). Lal Shahbaz, known as the “red falcon,” was a qalandar, or holy fool, and “an unruly friend of God” (Karamustafa 1994: 125). It is said that he lived in the prostitutes’ quarters and invited the opprobrium of the religious authorities, while encouraging his followers to dance their way to God. Just as there was opposition from orthodox religious custodians in the premodern past, so too in the present. Subject to Wahhabi condemnation, the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar was the site of a bomb attack in February 2017 (claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant of the Khorasan Province), which killed over eighty devotees (Al Jazeera2017), yet Lal Qalandar remains the most celebrated and charismatic Sufi in Pakistan (Jaffer 2018). His urs was reported to attract 1.5 million devotees in the summer of 2015, which I attended with a khwaja sira friend, Saima Butt. Saima has worked variously as a dancer in functions, and at the time of this visit was a fieldworker for sexual health at the Khwaja Sira Society, a community-based organization (CBO) in Lahore. While not engaged in badhai performance, Saima describes herself as belonging to the lines of “both zenana-pun and khusra [i.e., hijra]-pun,” and she draws on badhai performatives in her social interactions.¹⁸

On the journey to the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, we (myself a white cis woman, a Pakistani cis woman, and Saima) face persistent snickers, bullying, sexual intimidation, and harassment from security forces and passers-by, and yet the trauma of the world outside dramatically fades as we enter the inner sanctity of the shrine. Amid frenzied circumambulations (for many the pilgrimage to Shahbaz Qalandar's shrine is a substitute for the hajj, the sacred pilgrimage to Kaaba), paths literally part to allow Saima to touch the coffin, and shrine custodians give her flowers to garland the shrine and the space to kiss it. As a faqir, she is seen to embody the barakat or charisma of the saint, as a wali, or a friend of God. This privilege connects to the long history of “eunuch guards” in Islam's holiest places, including at Prophet Mohammad's tomb in Medina and the Kaaba in Mecca (Marmon 1995).¹⁹ Even in shrines that have recently restricted access to men only (under the government's control), khwaja siras have special rights of entrance (haq) and are fondly referred to by shrine custodians as “God's sparrows.” Likewise, shrines that allow only women access, such as Bibi Pak Daman in Lahore, invariably welcome khwaja siras.

Saima steps to a quiet corner to pray and give her devotion (hazri). Within minutes, women, men, and families gravitate toward her to ask for prayers. Lal Shahbaz Qalandar is considered to be particularly generous in granting blessings to his devotees. Saima is held in reverence as a mediator for the divine; through her, one devotee tells me, “prayers will fly faster.” The devotee knows it, for after giving birth to three daughters, she didn't have a son until a khwaja sira in her village prayed for her. Now she wants two more, so she asks Saima to deliver her prayers. Another woman tells that her son is weak and to please pray for him to be healthy. Still others ask for Saima's prayers: a young man with diabetes, a devotee whose son is not good at studying, and a man who needs to find his daughter a groom. They all ask for Saima's prayers. At the end of the day I ask what Saima had prayed for, and she replies that she “prayed for everyone, then I prayed I might have some respect in this world.” Her statement reminds us that the reverence she finds inside the shrine is often very different from the reception she meets in the world outside it.

Much has been said about hijra marginality as a source of their power to curse (badua) and give blessings (dua), which, as Serena Nanda (1999: 32) explains, “transform[s] their impotent maleness and its associated lack of status into generative power.” Nanda's preoccupation with emasculation is questionable, reinforcing a genitalia definition of hijraness (Cohen 1995; Hossain 2012). When the trope of impotency is used by khwaja siras in public forums, it is often to underscore a severance with worldly ties, of being “cut off” from biological families and mainstream society. In this sense, the Lahori guru Ashee Butt attributes her powers to bless to social ostracization: “We have special powers to heal because we are buried in living graveyards, our lives are living graveyards. . . . We are separate from other people, and therefore we can give badua and dua.”²⁰

Khwaja siras flock to Qalandar's shrine to perform the dhamaal—the ecstatic devotional dance often analogized to the Mevlevi dervishes of Konya in Turkey, but the dhamaal entails wilder corporealities. The devotees explain that dhamaal is a prayer led by he who plays the dhol, that is, the dholi or imam, who offers a path (tar) that leads the devotee to God. One dholi explains, “It's very individualistic for everyone; for some the soul goes in this direction, for others that way.”²¹ The khwaja sira Majo explains, “It tunes our body within, we come to be in peace within ourselves. We never care about the world. We are happy with ourselves.”²² Dance itself (sacred and/or secular) is often attributed to an existential dimension by the community: “Our souls make us dance.”²³ Dance offers a means through which the female soul can be realized, transcending the world's dictates on the body. Dhamaal is particularly significant to the shrine of Shahbaz Qalandar. Legend has it that the King of Multan imprisoned the saint for challenging his authority, and when Shahbaz Qalandar started to dance, the chains melted, the prison collapsed, and he broke free. At night as the doors of the inner shrine close, in the courtyard thousands whirl to reach the divine to the vigorous beat of the dhol. As opposed to some other shrines that limit the participation of dhamaal to particular (often male) devotees—here everyone can participate: men, women, and khwaja siras. While attempting to take a picture of one whirling khwaja sira devotee, I was stopped by one of the shrine custodians—her body is a vessel for the divine, not to be taken out of momentum by my camera, and is given the same respect as other bodies in the space. By contrast, later in the evening in the same courtyard, khwaja siras also had a more staged arena in the courtyard, accompanied by stage lights and a sound system, blurring the lines between entertainment and devotion, where cisgender guests took photos and showered money on the performers/devotees.

The Multan-based khwaja sira guru Hajji Nargis, whom I will discuss more extensively later, draws on dhamaal in her badhai repertoire. For her dhamaal is Maula Ali's prayer (the Prophet's son-in-law, revered in Shi'a Islam and a central figure to most Sufi orders). The frenzy of the feet jumping on the earth offers a (re)embodiment of the battle of Karbala—which I briefly introduced at the start of this article—where Ali's son Hassan and other members of the Prophet's family in their uprising against established power were massacred by Yazeed's army in attempting to secure the Caliphate (one of the most important events in the history of Sunni-Shi'a struggles). Stamping her feet, Nargis says the women relatives would raise their feet from the burning sand hot with blood and call out to Ali and to God in a prayer of protest.²⁴ Dhamaal may be seen through these various spiritual lenses as a means of flight for the khwaja siras—from the limitations of the body, the troubled and bloody land, the shackles of the worldly lords, from Muslim orthodoxy, and from daily persecution.

To Streets and Homes

Khwaja sira displays of piety and the powers to bestow blessings and curses do not stay in the sanctity of the shrine; they are invoked in badhai, the performances that confer fertility blessings, health, and social prosperity, usually at births and weddings, that spill out onto the streets and into homes, usually in lower-income areas. Khwaja siras have their own allocated areas for badhai, usually in their own residential areas, creating networks of solidarity and respect for the khwaja siras. They walk door to door in groups with musicians (often men, but sometimes khwaja siras), locating a birth, wedding, or some other cause for collecting alms and showering blessings. Usually, doors open to welcome khwaja siras—and if they don't, the khwaja siras make raucous noise in the street until they do—similar to tactics deployed by Almas Bobby and fellow protestors outside the Taxila police station in 2009.

I focus here on an episode of badhai led by Lahore khwaja sira Reema and her chela Sana. Reema had recently returned to badhai work at the time of this 2014 performance, after spending several years away from the community. She had been a dancer in the Lucky Rani Circus, the popular Punjabi theater in Multan, and in bars in Muscat, and she spent a short period as a wife until she left her husband, explaining that she was anxious that his family might one day discover she was not a “real” woman. Now balancing badhai with dance performances at “functions” (often male-only sexually charged events), and living with both her biological sister's family and her chela, she felt that the guru-chela economy granted more freedoms than available within normative gender expectations in the broader society.

In Reema's house, amid makeup and cigarettes, Reema and Sana warm up with a group of accompanying male mirasi musicians who play the dholki drum and metal tongs (chimta) and sing “Red One, may I always have your protection,” invoking the great Sufi saint Shahbaz Qalandar. The frenzy of the music summons a neighbor who calls from down the street, inviting the group to their house, where a male child has recently been born. As we enter a courtyard area, mostly women, but also men, and children from the joint-family household begin to congregate, and others from the neighborhood casually spill in during the routine, forming an audience. The routine begins with all of the performers singing a devotional lullaby in praise of Hazrat Halima, who had raised the Prophet. It is said that Halima's milk had dried up and she could not raise children of her own, but when the infant Prophet came into her house, milk flowed in abundance. The newborn is handed over to Reema, who gently rocks the child while singing. This song, coupled with the act of holding the newborn, has special resonance for khwaja siras who, in projecting their inability to bear children, mark their legitimacy through analogy with revered religious personages.

The child is passed between Sana and Reema, who take turns capturing the center of their makeshift arena with dance and song. They slip between popular film and folk songs, ranging from the erotic Punjabi lyrics sung by Nasibo Lal, “The pain her lover feels at night because her lover is not there,” to more mystical items, “In the name of God, no matter what the world says, he is my beloved,” to folk songs that express the agony of a woman's married life and separation from her parents. The overall routine enacts a woman's rite of passage and ranges from full-bodied licentious and lively dance to more sedate episodes evoking sorrow, only to be dissipated by the final act, a comic repartee about breast-feeding and powerful army generals. It ends in Reema and Sana chasing the little boys in the audience and cheekily reaching for their genitals as if to “test” their manhood. The women in the audience laugh and seem to revel in the khwaja siras's simultaneous dis/ordering of normative gender constraints, especially in the full-bodied licentious dance routines and comic slapstick, but midway through the routine many of them are physically distraught and weeping, prompting Reema to extend comfort, reaching out and touching their heads. In these moments of laughter, tears, and touch, a deeply felt emotional bond is created between the khwaja sira performers and their neighbors, an affective solidarity. Through badhai, the khwaja siras make affective connections with their neighborhood communities, participating in their celebrations, their joys, and their pains, and are engaged in their day-to-day life.²⁵

In National Politics

Hajji Syed Nargis, a senior guru from Multan, drew on badhai performances in contesting a seat in the 2013 national elections in which she reaped over a thousand votes, evidencing popular support. She asserts, “We go to every house and we know what people's problems are. But those politicians; say for example, the one from this constituency does not know that this mother has lost her son, and the child is in the world without his father, but we do.”²⁶ The elderly woman of the household who has lost her son and has invited Nargis for badhai to celebrate her grandson after the customary period of mourning tells us that she has known Hajji Nargis since she was a child: “She is like my mother and my father. She participates in our weddings, funerals. Hajji sahib is different from the others . . . who come and meet people only to get votes. Hajji sahib . . . is a part of our lives.” Hajji Nargis established a madrassa, a school for girls, gives alms to the aged, and was active in flood relief efforts, activities that have helped build up her own political party (engaging men, women, and khwaja siras)—which has taken the Sufi spiritual name “The Darvesh of Pakistan.”

Ahead of elections in a television interview on Samaa TV (2013) featuring several khwaja sira election candidates and a Mufti (Islamic scholar), Nargis, with her white shalwar kameez (the national dress) and heavy scarf over her head, projects her pious personality through her status as a Hajji, having conducted pilgrimage to the holy site of Mecca. The show breaks into a segment during the interview, showing opinions from the general public that on the whole speaks derisively of khwaja siras in politics (“it's not possible” or “they will only bring song and dance”). In the interview, the scholar is asked to judge if the khwaja siras's presence in politics is halal, or legitimate in Islam; only a few months earlier, he had accused the khwaja sira community of being satanic, a statement that came on the heels of the aforementioned “gay hunting” Khufia program. Nargis negotiates these positions by emphasizing the popular belief of khwaja siras's ability to deliver curses with dominant religious imagery of the day of judgment, and troubling the gender binary with deep bellowing tones akin to a maulvi's khutba (sermon) with a veil and purse, to deliver divine wrath on the politics of exclusion: “It is the system of Allah. Where there is no khawaja sira there will be problems. We are part of Pakistan. If we are not there will be earthquakes and floods. We are part of Pakistan. Those who don't think us part of this society and do not accept us, do not accept Allah!” She continues to assert religious legitimacy, reminding her audience of the history of “eunuchs” who have for centuries guarded the sacred Kaaba in Mecca and the Prophet's tomb in Medina. As she later reflected in my interview with her, “See, if Allah can accept a khwaja sira in his house and the Prophet could give the permission to a khwaja sira to be a caretaker, then why don't these politicians let us enter the assemblies.” On the TV show, she successfully silences the Mufti, who nods in agreement and says he would himself vote for Hajji if he were in her constituency. Having opened a space for herself in the dominant religious sphere, she proceeds to beat her chest rhythmically like the matam or sine-zani of Shi'a Moharram rituals, similar to the protesting hijras outside the Taxila police station. She directs protest at the political status quo: “Politicians haven't done anything for the last fifty years except drones and wars, there is no electricity, everyone is fed up. . . . If there is any politician who could answer these questions they should come and sit with me . . . they should come and take answers from me.” In this program, her gender fluidity admonishes the toxic masculinity of the political status quo, as she delivers the faqir's renunciation, the khwaja sira's curse on Pakistani politicians, describing them as agents of destruction and war, greed, and corruption. She further explicates in an interview:

Hajji Nargis here turns the gaze away from the khwaja sira body toward the corrupt body politic. She claims space in the socio-religious sphere and pushes for rights in the national political arena.

At a time when transgender/hijra/khwaja sira rights are being negotiated across South Asia, it is important to revisit the sociocultural and religious license derived from khwaja sira public performances, which have contributed to these communities' identity and survival. From performances of protest outside the Taxila police station, everyday performance in homes and shrines, and electioneering campaigns, to Sufi translations of transnational transgender terms in mainstream media, these pious acts continue to provide a potent force for trans activism in Pakistan, further strengthening access to rights. While the performances and the traditions on which they rest have been undervalued in the rights movement, these assertions of piety, drawing creatively from Sufi and Shi'a modes and performed by khwaja siras often on the fringes or on the lower rungs of developmental activism (viz. NGOs and CBOs), offer an embodied outlet for negotiating multiple axes of exclusion. Jaffer warns, “Spiritual notions of the self can also constrain the possibilities of acting in the world that are available to hijras. They send the message that if hijras want to acquire dignity and recognition in society they have to conform to a particular script.” This is surely true for any identity politics, be it rooted in the scripts of dominant religion or the secular liberal classism of human rights. As I hope to have shown, these particular performances, drawing from Sufi and Shi'a modes, have negotiated spaces between these perceived binaries to push against the dominant moral-religious and developmentalist rationalities that have tried to script legitimate khwaja sira identities in this era of rights.

Acknowledgments

A collaborative project with Shahnaz Khan, supported by funds from the Social Science Humanities and Research Council of Canada helped facilitate the research for this article. I am grateful for the research assistance of Imran Anwar, Nukhbat Malik, and Iram Sana, who accompanied me on various phases of the fieldwork and offered support translating and transcribing material. A fellowship at Yale University's Institute of Sacred Music (2015–16), further supported the development of this work. The 2016 American Society for Theatre Research working group “Positioning Transgender Performance Center-Stage” and the 2018 Association for Asian Studies panel “Impersonation and Gender Performatives in Contemporary South Asia” offered valuable feedback on earlier iterations of this article. Special thanks to the many khwaja sira and trans activists who shared their valuable time and insights. A version of the introductory section of this article, giving background to rights developments, appeared in TDR: The Drama Review (2019).

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