25 must read books - XV


The Invisibles 
A tale of the eunuchs of India

Zia Jaffrey, the author of of this book is the daughter of the famous Indian food author, Madhur Jaffrey.  She has written cover stories, features, and book reviews for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Elle, where she was a contributing editor. She has covered the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, Pakistan, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In 1984, Zia Jaffrey travelled to Delhi. There she came across a group of cross-dressing men who walked, uninvited and unannounced, into a wedding. They sang out of tune, hurled insults at the guests, and were finally paid to leave.

She learnt that these often-castrated, elusive figures were eunuchs better known as hijras in India. They existed in thousands in every major city in clusters. They were reviled and generally considered as nuisance. People avoided meeting them because of their foul mouth. The contradiction is that they are thought to bring good luck to newlyweds and newborns.

This book is Jaffrey's journey to understand the forces of caste, poverty, sexual ambiguity, and the tradition itself that had allowed the hijras to persist into the modern age.

In this spellbinding investigative work she meets journalists, police commissioners, detectives, and doctors and tries to trace the hijras' traditions. She is drawn into a labyrinthine network of connections, cover ups, and contradictions as mysterious as India itself.

This is the best read that I have come across on this subject.

Namaste

Prabir