HIJRA SPATIAL LOUDNESS: FROM SACRED PERFORMANCE TO COUNTER-NECROPOLITICAL STRATEGY

Abstract (English)

The Hijra community in India has traversed a long trajectory—from being historically venerated within mythological and sacred frameworks to losing their social standing under colonial and postcolonial regimes. In pre-colonial and pre-independence times, Hijras held symbolic power and spatial legitimacy, performing sacred roles such as blessing births, weddings, and festivals - an indication of how they occupied a significant role in the ritualistic and spiritual life of the subcontinent. However, with the advent of colonial governance and its strict Victorian moral policing, Hijras were branded as criminals under the Criminal Tribes Act, pushing them into the margins spatially and socially. In the post-independence era, modern state apparatuses inherited the same marginalizing logic of the colonial biopower stripping the community of their socio-cultural respectability and recognition, rendering them socially dead.
This paper argues that under colonial and postcolonial regimes, sacred performance gave way to spatial loudness - a series of embodied, sonic, affective, and visual practices that disrupt heteronormative spatial fields. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of socially produced space, hijra spatial loudness can be understood as an assertion of spatial agency to disrupt and transform dominant spatial norms imposed by state and societal power that regulate and control their identity and existence. Their loudness manifests through auditory disruptions (clapping, singing, verbal assertion), visual/aesthetic excess (vibrant attire, stylized makeup), embodied gestures (that provoke discomfort or rupture normative decorum), affective intensities (emotional expressivity, defiant joy, public mourning), and spatial interventions (occupying streets, rituals in heteronormative spaces, pride marches). Hence, the sacred performance transitions to political performativity in order to confront exclusionary power structures, as theorized by Judith Butler.
Analysing these practices within the framework of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, this paper argues that Hijra loudness functions as a counter-necropolitical strategy—a refusal to be silenced, erased, or contained by systems that render them disposable. Loudness becomes not just a performance but - a survival tactic, a political speech of assertion, a refusal to disappear silently, a disruption of normative spatial logics and a declaration of life amid state-sanctioned abandonment and death. It explores how their visibility in pride parades, television shows, advertisements, ritual blessings, kinship structures, and dance-based livelihoods point toward a radical queer vitalism amidst systemic violence.
By tracing the trajectory of Hijra communities from a sacred inclusion to systemic exclusion, this paper contends that Hijras’ spatial loudness—once a sacred and legitimized presence rooted in mythologically grounded narratives—has evolved into a counter-necropolitical strategy. This paper contributes to anthropological sciences by showing how a marginalized gender identity such as the Hijras in India make use of spatial and embodied practices to challenge and resist structural violence and normative production of space.