There is little reason to trust the colonial court's account of Bhoorah's death, but it does tie the global trans panic to a murder. At the trial of Ali Buksh, the court decided he had killed Bhoorah out of jealousy after she left him for another man. Witnesses described the pair as having quarreled in the street on the night of her death. But the court also declared that Bhoorah had been a prostitute. The judge used his verdict to pronounce a moral sermon alerting colonial officials to what he considered an immoral hijra underground about which something had to be done. Judge Unwin's statement, as historian Jessica Hinchy explains, treated Bhoorah's death as the tip of the iceberg of a mysterious "eunuch problem." (British officials rarely used the term hijra.)
"The sickening details of this case," wrote Unwin, "involve the disgusting exposure of an abominable trade in prostitution carried on by eunuchs dressed as women, whom they resemble also in shape, with vested rights to contributions at weddings, &c. in certain villages allotted to one or more of them under a sort of acknowledged internal government." "They have in fact a King," warned the judge, "according to some residents in Delhi, others say at Furruckabad.”
Judge Unwin was wrong about most of what he claimed. Hijras were not predominately sex workers, nor did they have a king. But it was a compelling story, one that incited a trans panic in the colonial bureaucracy. The immorality of hijras who trespassed the boundary between men and women by British standards became in Unwin's hands a concrete threat to be put down. The court sexualized hijra gender transgression by calling it prostitution, making it concrete in an era when a central British alibi for empire was ending the global sex trade. Sexual immorality was, crucially, interpreted as a political threat to colonial rule. As Hinchy explains, "What the British didn't know drove the hijra panic." Precisely because the British did not understand what it meant to be a hijra, they invented a story they could understand and that served imperial interests. The idea that hijras were male prostitutes with a secret government became the pretext for a statewide campaign to secure moral order by exterminating them.
In 1865 the NWP adopted an official policy to "reduce" the number of hijras through measures that would "gradually lead to their extinction. Since there was no hijra king to depose, the state aimed to disrupt their livelihoods by breaking up their discipleship system and criminalizing their presence in public.
In 1871 the colonial government passed the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), the second half of which set out procedures targer-ing hijras. Castration was already illegal, which, along with the allegation of prostitution, made hijras easy targets for the police. But the CTA specifically mandated that hijras submit to a police registry. Not only did the police collect intelligence and personal information, making it easier to identify and subject hijras to surveillance, the registry also took an inventory of their property. The CTA outlawed property inheritance in hijra households, impoverishing them by disrupting their lineages. The law also restricted hijras from traveling outside their local districts, which they often did to attend marriages and births. Combined with the criminalization of dancing in public and wearing women's clothing, their entire way of life was now illegal.'
In the nineteenth century, the British empire generally opted for repressive taxation or forced labor over genocide in trying to put down Indigenous populations outside of white settler colonies like Canada and Australia. The Criminal Tribes Act's first half reflected that preference. Using an old North Indian concept of thags (thugs), the law allowed the state to label any population standing in its way a criminal gang. The CTA was intended to pacify these so-called criminal tribes to avoid future rebellion. Preventing them from roaming the country-side, this crackdown on their mobility would force them into work that kept them closer to their homes, disconnected from one another and less of a threat to colonial sovereignty. What made hijras different, requiring a separate section under the law, was that the British felt they could never be reformed. Hard labor would not make them into men; rather, hijras were so feminine they were regarded as ungovernable. Cloaked in the homophobia, misogyny, and racism of British attitudes toward "sodomy," sex work, and disease, colonial officials treated hijras as a kind of "doomed race" destined to die out. o Although the British labeled them prostitutes, hijras were treated differently from Indian sex workers, who were also registered by the police and often imprisoned on public health grounds—a difference that starts to explain what constitutes trans panic. Unlike women sex workers, colonial observers considered hijras to be engaged in "professional sodomy," adding a loaded moral outrage to the accusation of sex work. But the British concept of sodomy was also famously vague. The Christian emphasis on not describing the immoral sexual act made criminal conviction for sodomy almost impossible. Since sex left behind no obvious evidence, what could prove sodomy if witnesses would not disclose what they had seen? At the end of the century, the crime of sodomy would be memorialized as "the love that dare not speak its name" at Oscar Wilde's trial. But decades earlier, cross-dressing was used as its practical proof. In 1870, the English press erupted when two "men" in women's clothing were arrested in London and charged as sodomites. They hadn't been caught having sex; they were arrested simply because of the clothes they were wearing. The Boulton and Park case helped cement the link between wearing women's clothes and sodomy. In India, colonial officials adopted the same approach, arguing that the women's clothes hijras wore seduced men into sodomy. The threat of hijras dressed as women in public was treated as so morally severe-and politically dangerous to the colonial state— that nothing less than the total eradication of all hijras could squash it.
As Hinchy's invaluable research on the hijra panic shows, the CTA was not very successful. Although many hijras were registered in some districts in the NWP, others registered very few. Most hijras were able to outwit the police in everyday life because there were too few officers to consistently enforce the law. Some petitioned the colonial government protesting their registration, and a few were even "deregistered." The law manifestly failed in its extreme goal of exterminating the population, and its implementation withered by the end of the century. But the assault on the hijra way of life did have lasting consequences. For one, the law led to an escalation in police violence wherever it was applied. In one NWP district, a police officer reported that he would seek out hijras in public, cut their hair, strip them of their clothes and jewelry, and then force them into men's clothing. The loss of income from singing, dancing, and badhai likewise proved lasting. *3 This had less to do with the CTA, which was not applied much beyond the NWP, and more to do with the staggering impoverishment of the Indian population under British rule. Hijras were one of many social groups of Indians whose public lives were criminalized as "nuisances," but the economic disruption of their way of life under colonialism was devastating. When it came to the division of public and private labor, British society was organized around a strict separate-spheres ideology. Women were ideally consigned to the home, while labor and public life were intended for men—a division that hijras transgressed simply by going about their daily lives.
Although hijras survived the British trans panic that sought to eradicate them, they were forever changed by the criminalization of that transgression and its disruption of their way life, including their means of making money. For one thing, today hijras often are sex workers. In a present-day ethnography in the Indian province of Odisha, Vaibhav Saria explains that the local hijra population experiences poverty as a structural consequence of their ascetic role in the community having merged symbolically with low pay."4 Although the intervening history is too complex to reduce to any one cause, the British trans panic in the colonial era seems to have played a lasting role in sexualizing hijras and actually pushing them toward sex work by criminalizing their previous way of life. Thus, through the policing and economic disruption brought about by trans panic, what began as an accusation and a British fiction became the condition of many hijras.
