Transgender Narratives in Postcolonial India: Intersections and Divergences A Study of Select Autobiographies.

Abstract

India has more than 200 years of colonial past. Colonization shattered the psyche of Indians in particular; the transgenders were occluded from Mughal courts. They were also dangerously insulted, marginalized and criminalized by the British. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 was the final nail in the coffin. This Act spread complete myths about the transgender community. Even to this day, the existing transgender have been eking out a living dependent either on begging or prostitution. Living in the peripheral, the transgenders took up writing to articulate their ordeal of fire and inner angst against the Indian society. The ‘Body Politics’ plays a major role in the transgender narratives. They are not just trapped biological beings with a thrusted gender on them. Transgender is also a sociological being, a cultural representative, political participant, a spiritual element, an emotional soul and a patriotic Indian. I am Vidhya, an autobiography by Living Smile Vidhya, who is not just a transgender but a Dalit-transgender from Tamil Nadu, suffered the dual discrimination based on caste and gender identity. In contrast, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi’s autobiography, Me Hijda, Me Laxmi,is a narrative of a trans person born into a Maharashtrian Brahmin family. A Gift of Goddess Laxmi, yet another autobiography of Manabi Bandyopadhyay, a Bengali Trans person who went ahead to become the first transgender Indian to get a PhD degree.