Gender Hauntings at the Border: Qissa ’s Narration of Partition Through the Trans Body

Abstract

Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (Anup Singh, 2013) narrates the story of the family of Umber Singh, a Sikh patriarch dislocated during the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Possessed by a desire for a son, Umber imposes a regime of masculinity upon his daughter, Kanwar. Through ruptures of regional, national and gender identifications, the film thematises displacements and borders via the trans body. As male ghosts ‘possess’ female bodies and vice versa, Qissa’s spiral structure produces a shape-shifting, folkloric understanding of gender that is mythic, fluid and responsive to the Partition’s effects on gender identification and expression. Through meandering mobilities and destabilising hauntings, this transnational, queer diasporic text meditates on the transitivity of gender, nation and genre. In my discussions of Qissa in the US academic context, some interlocutors have expressed difficulty in reading Kanwar as a legible trans protagonist. Nael Bhanji asks, ‘Who is the correct and proper citizen that gets to speak in the name of a transsexual subjectivity?’ Diasporic and regionally attuned feminisms provide a counter fluency that parses gender and sexuality in dialogue with regional publics. Through a range of transgender and transborder identities, the film explores the transversal folds of trauma, longing and desire.