Some 15 or so years ago Zia Jaffrey, daughter of cook and writer Madhur Jaffrey, was invited to a cousin's wedding (arranged) in India. She recounts how, as the richly attired guests were assembling, a ragtaggle band of women appeared at the gates "as old as stones and not pretty . . . screeching obscenities in husky voices. Their hands mirror their obscene words."
The young Jaffrey was not only startled, but shocked. These strange sari-ed creatures weren't women at all but hijras: Indian eunuchs. Whether castrated males, hermaphrodites or transvestites - let alone whether they were homosexual - none of her relatives was prepared to tell her. But Zia Jaffrey's imagination was fired and The Invisibles, published this week, is an fascinating exploration of these enigmatic people whose presence in the Indian community, both Moslem and Hindu, is not only tolerated but openly welcomed at marriages and births; yet whose existence goes unrecorded and whose lives are a mystery. Even the concept of a eunoch is barbaric to 20th-century sensibilities. Not to mince words, these are men who've had their genitals cut off. In the West, this practise persisted until the 19th century to preserve a high singing voice. In the East, eunochs were traditionally used to protect harems of women. Now, there are no such excuses.
Indian hijras live in closed, "male"-free communities. They include both Muslims and Hindus, although in death, as in life, they keep their own rituals. They survive on their "earnings" at weddings and births. Is prostitution involved? Possibly, though the hijras themselves deny it. They are shunned by just about everyone. In a culture where caste is all, they are caste-less. Officially, they do not exist at all. But where do the new ones come from? They can't after all, reproduce. Are they kidnapped in childhood? Some have claimed so.
Are they men who in the west would be considered transexuals, who allow themselves to be castrated at an initiation ceremony? Or, as some claim, do the act with a sharp knife themselves? If so, how do they combat infection? Which bits do they cut off and why? And how many are there? As few as 15,000 or as many as a million? For Jaffrey, born in America, ("neither Indian nor American") the search for the reality behind the myth of the hijras became a search for her own identity. When Zia was four, her parents' marriage broke down and mother and three daughters returned to India. Four years later, they went back to New York when Madhur Jaffrey married again, this time an African-American violinist.
From then on, once a year, there would be trips back to India, but Zia always knew she was radically different from her teenage cousins, no matter how sophisticated they appeared. "I would always hang out with the boys. I would always do what the guys were doing, because it seemed to me that most of my girl cousins were not doing much." The contradictions in her own life were mirrored by the contradictions she encountered in her search of the hijras, both literally and metaphorically.
Although many people expressed a willingness to help, it was more likely with anecdote and hearsay than any real evidence or fact. The historical references woven through her narrative, are equally sweetened with the perfume of myth. "It is an ancient Indian tradition, and this is what interests me. Questions like - "why do you outlaw dowries but it still goes on? What kind of identity do you get by belonging to a caste that I as an American don't feel?" I don't feel that this person is unequal, but you feel that. But it (the caste system) also gives you a group identity I don't have. But I'm lucky I have my family there, so I know what that warmth and nurturing is about as well.' Zia Jaffrey uniquely combines the subjectivity of an insider with the objectivity of an outsider and The Invisibles is a labyrinthine journey into the heart of the Indian psyche. Not everyone was convinced this duality would work.
"I was under pressure to objectivise the subject and to leave myself out. But I felt it was a very important part of it." The Invisibles was never intended to be a thesis, she says. "Anthropologically, ethnologically, I mean, who cares? As far as the hijras are concerned, you can't quantify. It's not quantifiable. I took the view that basically I'm not sure this is the truth. But here it is anyway. It worked because we were in a fictional landscape. You are in story telling land and it starts almost like fiction. You are in that timeless world. Where does fiction start and non-fiction end? That is the soul of the book." The American publisher was unhappy with her use of the description Indian English. Jaffrey stuck fast. "The way in which they speak, with all their nuances and contradictions, was important. " She has also been accused of orientalism. Nonsense, says Jaffrey. "When you crash a wedding dressed as a woman, singing, shouting obscenities and basically creating pandemonium and acting as social satirists, it is theatre. And theatre is something one watches. Therefore this kind of gaze, the way you're looking, involves that. It's the exchange. For me, it was a way of looking at the culture, looking at the oral tradition, around a group that had never been studied and never been considered even a subject."
One regret is that only after publication of the book did Jaffrey make significant contact with Indian gay men. "The reason I didn't get access to a lot of gay men in India is that people aren't that open." New York Indian gay men have since told her that "the hijra epithet" was used against all effeminate boys. "They told me `We all felt it was a lower class phenomenon. It was no good for middle class boys: it wasn't a option.' "
Ultimately, The Invisibles is about the journey, not the arrival. The hijras we eventually get to meet are a strange, sad group, illiterate and unwilling witnesses. All they want to do is be left alone. "Castration is interpreted as a huge issue and they resent it that we in the west as its some sort of horrific act. I said, `look most of us don't go through this'. I guess their view is, `look, this is the way that the trans-gender person for aeons has been doing this thing' and we should not to see it as a kind of transformation so much as an experience of finding common identity." When the "guru", the leader, offered to lift up his/her sari and show Jaffrey what was what, she couldn't bring herself to do accept. Only if she could take a photograph, she said. The guru refused.
Zia Jaffrey read English at university and one of her major influences, she says, was Irish literature.
"I never really knew why. But apart from the storytelling tradition and the love of language and myth, I think it's something to do with the colonial relationship. Even though I have never been to Dublin I always felt a kinship between Delhi and Dublin. There's something about the maternal tongue and the paternal tongue or the duality of language and an inner identity that one cherishes that isn't broken by colonialism. A spirit that's not killed. It's still there. But there's also this colonial outlook and I felt that, without having words for these things, that there was a kinship between the two places."