Troubled Twilight World

[JesusA (imported)]

Once or twice upon a time they were charged with important affairs of state. More often still they guarded harems, taught the ladies music and dance, and learned the loyalty of their lords through unbroken and unthreatening service. That they were unsexed to begin with gave them such an indefinite niche in the social order that many of their number slipped easily into position as janissaries, chamberlains, generals, admirals and even unofficial chancellors of state. But if their name is hardly a household word today, it is not because eunuchs haven’t survived. When their courtly universe crumbled with the rude advent of republicanism, the Indian fraternity, at least, sought refuge in their own cult, sustained by centuries of tradition. Now, however, the twilight sexual world of eunuchry is facing its most severe test of public tolerance since the reform-minded British raj booted away its underpinnings of royal patronage. If nothing else, the scandal that has surfaced in the far-western state of Gujarat — birthplace of the apostle of freedom and non-violence, Mahatma Gandhi — has left Indians wondering just how free and non-violent eunuchs really are.

The explosive tale began to erupt on a lazy afternoon in July when a 15-year-old boy with a pretty face and a sari draped somewhat awkwardly around him walked into a police station in Chhota Udepur, a small town about 60 kms. east of Baroda, the state capital. Before the bewildered police officers and his father, who accompanied the boy, Mohamed Hanif Vora broke down uncontrollably and, through incoherent words and bouts of sobs, narrated the story of his gruesome transformation at the forcible hands of a cult of eunuchs who had befriended him in Baroda. Though not without holes, the lad’s recital, which led to several arrests and prosecutions, furnished an account of a macabre castration ceremony and opened a rare window on the ways in which eunuchs renew their ranks.

The son of a poor labourer named Musabhai Vora, Mohamed ran away from home after a family quarrel one day early this year and drifted to the nearby capital. After a few days of wandering, he landed a job as errand boy for a cinema house — a source of entertainment that was to become his daily diversion until a more real-life melodrama intruded. His short stint running errands soon gave way to a second job as a water carrier, though in the alien city he continued to haunt the late-night movies. One night, as Mohamed told it, as he was returning from one such late show he was waylaid by a man who demanded sexual favours. The frightened boy, however, was saved by two eunuchs who happened along and chased away the sodomist.

One of the rescuers, named Anu Masi alias Anup Kumar alias Noor Mohamed Malik, offered shelter for the night to the runaway and took him to “her” (eunuchs customarily adopt feminine names and attire) hut near the railway station. Next day, Anu Masi and her cultmate, Sarla Kanwar (alias Raghunath Krishnanath Shirke) took Mohamed to a crowded quarter in another part of the city with the promise of a better job. Here the boy was introduced to a sizeable congregation of eunuchs who shared lodging in an akhada, or commune for the castrated. The communal nayak (leader), one Kanta Kanwar alias Kantilal Ranchodbhai Patel, then asked her disciples to strip the foundling and dress him in women’s clothes, after which Mohamed was sent out with the others on begging rounds.

From the outset, the boy was forced to conduct himself in standard eunuch style — walking seductively, dishing out abusive language and greeting with the patented hand-clap performed with a twist of the body and a lubricious slap of palms. According to what he told the police, Mohamed feared he had no resort but to follow them, suspecting that any attempt at flight would mean death. After a few days of initiation, he was removed once more, this time to a hideout owned by a senior eunuch, Lilade Sitade Pawaiyya (alias Atmaram Thakore), where he was locked up for three fearful days. Then, on the fateful night of April 8 — which on the Hindu calendar is the auspicious day of Chaitra Punima, or the full moon of the last month — the eunuch “surgeon” Hirabhai Masaji Thakore, 65, and the community priest, Shankar Budhaji Thakore, 48, were summoned by the nayak.

All the while, said Mohamed, he remained in solitary confinement, sweating in the grip of anxiety. He was put through a “purification” ceremony, and as the arranged hour neared he was made to lie on the floor with Shankar covering his mouth and hands and Kanta Kanwar, the nayak, spread-eagling his legs. Hirabhai, wielding a sharp dagger, then moved in and performed the critical chop with one swift slash. To mask the boy’s screams, a cassette recorder was played at full volume.

Mohamed passed out and remained unconscious for the next two days. After a month-long treatment at Hirabhai’s den, the teenager, now a eunuch renamed Jyoti Kanwar (most of the local eunuchs style themselves thus after Hansmukh Kanwar, a 19th –century eunuch prince of Baroda’s ruling Gaekwar family under the Maratha confederacy), was sent back to the akhada. Kanta Kanwar assigned him/her a regular begging beat and, before he was set loose with his companions, warned, in Mohamed’s words to police, that he would be “burnt alive” if he so much as whispered a word about his mutation. As he tells it, Mohamed a.k.a. Jyoti Kanwar then went about his duties and in a few days raked in for his “guru” as much as Rs. 5,000 (US$425), a princely sum for his country and station.

But Jyoti Kanwar claimed he never really became a eunuch, at least not in the psychological sense essential for a hijira. He was merely a castrated boy, privately longing to return to his rural village and family. He quickly began to plot his escape, he said, and one day when sent out alone on an errand hopped on a three-wheeled motor-scooter taxi for the railway station. IN the course of the three-hour train journey, he told authorities, he was still in such fear that he hid for the entire trip in a toilet of one of the coaches. Once he was home, it took his parents some time to recognise their fugitive son who had come back with a girl’s painted face, baubles and sari. But as his story unfolded Musabhai Vora lost no time spiriting his son off to the police.

The astonished authorities also sprang into action — and nabbed five of the six suspects, including the “surgeon” Hirabhai. The sixth, the priest Shankar, managed to avoid detention by depositing anticipatory bail allowed by the Gujarat High Court. Yet Mohamed Hanif Vora’s graphic tale, though evoking much horror and sympathy, did not pass unchallenged. In an interview with Asiaweek’s P.P. Balachandran, Anu Masi, the eunuch who had originally befriended Mohamed and now one of the accused, protested that the change the boy underwent was not exactly coerced. By Anu Masi’s telling of it, one day when she was passing the railway station Mohamed approached her lamenting that he had not eaten for three days. Anu says she took pity on him, took him to her house, fed him and provided shelter for the night. The next morning, she insists, he complained he had no place to go and asked to remain. Anu claims she was only too happy to oblige, and over the course of a month their relationship grew into a “mother-son” bond.

By her account, she would take Mohamed on her rounds and buy him little gifts every day. But it all ended one evening, she says, when the lad went out with a can, ostensibly to buy kerosene; he didn’t return. A few days later, she says, Manoo Masi, another eunuch, said that the boy had been accepted into the fold — meaning that he had been castrated. Manoo Masi’s version, however, differed slightly from Anu’s. Her tale was that Mohamed was working the streets long before he joined them, circulating in crowded cinemas and railway stations decorated with a sari and painted face to solicit homosexual customers.

After he met Anu, claims Manoo (the stories admittedly get rather tangled here), he stayed with her for four months until he had a dream featuring Bahucharamata, the Gujarati goddess of eunuchs, who appointed him as her disciple and ordered him to cut off his genitals. Mohamed, so the third version goes, told the eunuchs about the dream, which gave them the green signal for castration. “We never take a boy for castration unless he volunteers, unless Mother casts her shadow on him,” Manoo Masi professed. Police who interrogated the runaway and the accused verified that Mohamed had indeed become a street hustler before he met Anu Masi; he evidently even confessed to homosexual inclinations and to having been sodomised several times before he became a eunuch. Hirabhai admitted that she had performed the “operation,” but also insisted that the boy had volunteered. Nonetheless, the five detainees, all of whom confessed to having attended the castration, according to Baroda Police Commissioner R. Sibal, were charged with attempted murder and attempt to cause grievous injury.

So go the conflicting charges and countercharges. But who, after all, are the eunuchs really? The average Indian knows them as wayward misfits, neither men nor women, whose main occupation seems to be either begging or prostitution. Behind the bizarre facade, however, are genuine social beings with their own morals, code of conduct and diligently respected hierarchy. Though the Hindus and Muslims among them live in separate communities, each akhada (elsewhere in India, as in Bombay, it may be called a gharana) has a nayak who is chosen on the basis of the number of chelas, or disciples, she has inducted during her lifetime. Baroda’s leader, 45-year-old Kanta Kanwar, has fifteen chelas who, on their own account, have 28 others below them. Of the total of 80 hijiras and zenanas (castrated males and hermaphrodites, respectively) in the commune, the majority owe allegiance to Kanta Kanwar.

The nayak holds office for life, and on her death a new one is elected. Despite the strong personal bonds of loyalty between a guru and her disciple, all 80 eunuchs live like members of a common family. The teacher is regarded as “Mother,” while the disciple is treated as “Daughter” (usually, the guru’s name and her own are tattooed on the chela’s arm). Whether Muslim or Hindu, eunuchs share many customs and rituals in common. Their lifestyles may vary from region to region, but north Indian eunuchs are more numerous — and more prosperous.

In Baroda, indeed, some of the flusher eunuchs own taxis and spacious houses: for one, 88-year-old Nanda Kanwar (alias Nanda Lal Yadav), the city’s oldest eunuch and doubtless one of its richest with her two taxis and a house valued in the neighbourhood of US$100,000. At the same time, eunuchs tend to be socialists in their distribution of wealth. Nanda Kanwar, for example, told Asiaweek that after her death her wealth would be shared by all members of the akhada; five of them, in fact, are already sharing her house.

Their main livelihood is dancing, but dancing with a difference. They go in bands of five or six to homes where a child is born (eunuchs maintain strong intelligence networks in hospitals and maternity homes), where a member of the family has just died, or where a wedding is in progress. Considered an auspicious presence, they ply a basic job of blessing, especially of the newborn. They hold the baby in their arms and perform a crude dance set to their own devotional music; a eunuch’s touch is believed to confer strength, long life and, to a female child (paradoxically), fertility. A boy means greater rewards since the baby is held to be a greater blessing to the parents. Special prayers that the next child will be male cost, naturally, extra, and though eunuchs tend to bull their way into some households and refuse to leave, their justification is not baseless. “Okay, if you want to give us a job, we will start work tomorrow,” rejoined one leader to a protesting parent not long ago. “Nobody in this society wants to give us a job.”

At weddings, eunuchs lead the dancing procession (teasing the bridegroom being their secondary job), and at funerals they act as professional mourners. Besides their hospital connections, they also keep tabs on family events through peons in municipal offices and maidservants in affluent households. At times, they may take note of a pregnant woman and trail her to her home. Their calculations of the pregnancy’s advanced state, and the precise date when delivery may be expected, are generally right on the mark.

In a nation like India, where newborns are scarcely in short supply, eunuchs are never out of a job. On the average, a platoon of five or six can earn nearly Rs. 5,000 a month, leading, in course of time, to material assets on the order of Nanda Kanwar’s. A part of their income is unfailingly kept in reserve for support of the community shrine, which is their lone social and cultural centre. But among their strict work ethics is a territorial imperative forbidding every eunuch detail from working another’s beat. Encroachments have caused frayed tempers and sporadic clashes, but community relations on the whole are cordial. The major method for keeping them that way is the akhada’s insistence on settling its own disputes under its own legal system. Eunuchs never resort to the police.

Still, as in every society, there are black sheep among them. In the lights of respectable members, it is these mavericks who bring disrepute on the clan. The gandwas, or street eunuchs, take to homosexual prostitution to earn their living since they are not accepted as bona fide dancing eunuchs in the community. (Many of the eunuchs in Delhi and Bombay, indeed, are street hookers.) In Bombay, which has the highest eunuch concentration of 5,000-plus in India’s unofficial total of 50,000, and in other big cities, however, eunuchs might be registered voters but few of them have any interest in politics and elections. “Politicians are gandus [another word for eunuchs],” scoffed Noorjehan, 32, one of the accused in the Mohamed Vora case.

Some are politically conscious, on the other hand, and two of them even contested elections to the Madhya Pradesh state assembly in 1962. Though both of them lost, they lavished small fortunes on their campaign expenses, to which all Madhya Pradesh eunuchs generously contributed. Their clannish loyalty at times seems to know no limits. In the Baroda case, the eunuchs have hired two of the city’s most expensive lawyers to fight their case: their nayak claims to have raised Rs. 10,000 (US$850) in just two days.

Yet there are many subtle rank distinctions within the community. Eunuchs, in truth, are some the most caste-conscious people in India, a quality reflected in their divisions of labour: the temple priest (among Hindus) is invariably a Brahmin, for instance. The Hindus, moreover, tend to be rigid vegetarians, in some cases to the extent of refusing to drink water from a Muslim eunuch’s house. “They are meat-eaters, you know,” one Hindu eunuch in Baroda told Correspondent Balachandran.

Every year around September or October, however, eunuchs throughout India unite by convening a national conference of their “sisterhood,” which is attended by delegates from all the states and where they thrash out their salient issues in common. This year’s convention was held last month in, of all inauspicious places, Gujarat, near the major industrial city of Ahmedabad. Though their assemblies are not generally covered by the press, it’s fairly certain that such get-togethers are a kind of festival of hand-clapping, since that is their characteristic greeting. Accomplished with the palms kept hollowed to produce the percussive smack, even while they are talking, the act strikes some as suggestive of the sexual act, for which it may well be a subconscious expression since that is a pleasure most are eternally denied.

Eunuch rituals stem from worship of the Mother Goddess, and they take various forms throughout the country. While in the west-central and southwestern states of Maharashtra and Kerala she is revered as Yellama, in the eastern states she goes under the mantle of the great goddess Kali, or Durga. The cult of self-mutilation, virginity and chastity is more or less the same everywhere in India, however, and the goddess, ironically, is at the same time held to be the bestower of fertility and granter of wishes for male offspring. In the latter case, some worshippers believe that, if the prayer is granted, the son should be offered to the deity. Thus are a few children ceremonially emasculated and dedicated to the next generation of eunuchs.

A eunuch remains different even unto death. According to one Delhi sociologist who has studied the customs of eunuchs, their funerals are among the most secretive affairs in the world. “A eunuch death is tearless,” she reports. The rites take place in the middle of the night with the mourners accompanying the corpse in white robes. The deceased is carried to the burial ground not in a recumbent position but erect, on its two feet. The dead body is tied by ropes with wooden sticks strategically placed to hold the body erect, then covered in white robes to make it indistinguishable from the mourners. Two of them holding the body might appear as if they were merely helping a weak friend struggle with his walking. This element of defiance of the evidence of death — defiance, perhaps, of a society that treated her as dirt in life — may be the eunuchs’ final way of flaunting their difference to the world.

from Asiaweek, November 19, 1962, pages 24 — 30.

[two photographs of Mohamed Vora can be found in The World of Sexual Behavior: Sexwatching by Milton Diamond (New York: Gallery Books, 1984). Page 42 has him/her nude, showing clearly the castration scar, and page 43 has “her” beautifully dressed in a sari. There is also a photo of the group of eunuchs which he joined.]

[Uncle Flo (imported)]

Very interesting. Thank you, Jesus. FLO