Abstract
Eva Illouz, whilst discussing her text Manufacturing Happy Citizens in an interview, points out that happiness in a neoliberal economy has become a way to measure our self-worth especially as it is individualised. Being happy, thus, means to be able to strive despite the odds and yet be optimistic: to be happy in a neoliberal setup is to be resilient. Indeed, resilience means bouncing back and putting your best foot forward in the gravest of circumstances, showing strength when things are against you: to be happy despite the odds. Keeping this aspect of resilience in mind, this essay is interested in broaching a more specific question: what happens when a structurally marginalised group is called resilient—when value of the group is solely located in its capacity to bounce back and remain within and not resist status-quo? The structurally marginalised group I will be referring to is the hijra community in India and I will discuss the idea of happiness in a video produced by Y films, the youth division of one of India’s biggest film production houses: Yash Raj films. The music video produced in 2016 is named ‘Hum Hain Happy (We are happy)’, a Hindi rendition of Pharrell William’s famous song of the same name, features six hijra community members from the city of Mumbai. The essay here offers a ‘friendly critique’ of the video’s efforts towards mainstreaming trans inclusion in representational practices which romanticise the struggle of the marginalised by valorising resilience as an inspirational response to systemic inequality. My critique, thus, does not invalidate representational practices in total but calls for looking at the dominant logics through which such representation is rendered possible. In so doing, I look at how the video’s narrative serves to quell collective resistance by translating individual resilience within status quo as happiness. On one hand, the makers of the video see the oppressed as valuable and respectable only in term of their resilient happiness and relatedly, by pedestalising this resilience as inspirational, essentialise/naturalise systemic inequalities and conditions of struggle. Anything that deters from this pedestal then is naturally seen as a negative response and not aspirational/inspirational. The essay first contextualises the video in the contemporary conditions of transgender rights in India and then proceeds to analyse its content regarding the narrative of resilience which obscures the conditions of transgender struggles in India, while elevating their positive attitude as inspirational, effectively obscuring the realities and possibilities of righteous rage and resistance.
If trans visibility is indeed becoming valuable, one must ask the perennial question, ‘for whom and in whose interests’?
Emmanuel David (2017)
Eva Illouz, whilst discussing her text Manufacturing Happy Citizens in an interview, points out that happiness in a neoliberal economy has become a way to measure our self-worth especially as it is individualised (Broder 2019). Being happy thus means to be able to strive despite the odds and yet be optimistic: to be happy in a neoliberal setup is to be resilient. Indeed, resilience means bouncing back and putting your best foot forward in the gravest of circumstances, showing strength when things are against you: to be happy despite the odds. Keeping this aspect of resilience in mind, this essay is interested in broaching a more specific question: what happens when a structurally marginalised group is called resilient—when value of the group is solely located in its capacity to bounce back and remain within and not resist status-quo? The structurally marginalised group I will be referring to is the hijra community in India and I will discuss the idea of happiness in a video produced by Y films, the youth division of one of India’s biggest film production houses: Yash Raj films. The music video produced in 2016 is named ‘Hum Hain Happy (We are happy)’, a Hindi rendition of Pharrell William’s famous song of the same name, features six hijra community members from the city of Mumbai. The essay here offers a ‘friendly critique’ of the video’s efforts towards mainstreaming trans inclusion in representational practices which romanticise the struggle of the marginalised by valorising resilience as an inspirational response to systemic inequality. My critique, thus, does not invalidate representational practices in total but calls for looking at the dominant logics through which such representation is rendered possible. In so doing, I look at how the video’s narrative serves to quell collective resistance by translating individual resilience within status quo as happiness. On one hand, the makers of the video see the oppressed as valuable and respectable only in term of their resilient happiness and relatedly, by pedestalising this resilience as inspirational, essentialise/naturalise systemic inequalities and conditions of struggle. Anything that deters from this pedestal then is naturally seen as a negative response and not aspirational/inspirational. The essay first contextualises the video in the contemporary conditions of transgender rights in India and then proceeds to analyse its content regarding the narrative of resilience which obscures the conditions of transgender struggles in India, while elevating their positive attitude as inspirational, effectively obscuring the realities and possibilities of righteous rage and resistance.
Context
Before I proceed, a discussion on the video calls for contextualisation of hijra communities itself, especially regarding their social location, occupation, and histories of occupying social space in India, and their relationship with the term ‘transgender’. Hijra communities in India are a heterogeneous group that has historically situated itself outside the strict gender/sex binaries and the structures predicated upon the system of caste and religion. Gayathri Reddy’s definition of hijra communities briefly summarises and introduces their complex story:
Hijras are commonly referred to as the ‘third sex’ of India. For the most part, they are ‘men’ who wear women’s clothes and sacrifice their genitalia in return for the power to confer fertility on others ritually. Hijras have long been social pariahs, stigmatized and set apart based on their transgressive gender identification and their location beyond the domain of procreative sexuality…. From the perspective of mainstream, middle-class society, hijras, defined as they are by and through their lack of a ‘normal’ procreative body and their subsequent lack of potential for shame, are among the most recognizably marginalized figures in Indian society, indelibly located in the sexual margin as physically, socially, and morally stigmatized bodies. (Reddy 2006, 255)
Hijras traditionally perform the labour of begging, blessing newborns and newlyweds, and practising the profession of sex work. These are highly stigmatised professions and also precarious sectors of work; thus, hijra communities often find themselves struggling financially and are simultaneously socio-culturally ostracised. Through the lens of recent legal reforms and related discourse in India, the term hijra has been interchangeably used with transgender whilst Hijra itself does not connote a gender identity and has more to do with ‘a specific group of people (which could include transfeminine individuals, kothis and women) with specific religious and linguistic practices’ (Bhattacharya 2019, 11). Moreover, Hijra has often be seen as the translation of transgender itself in India, given how collective imagination of the term transgender is associated with non-normative gender expressions and how hijra communities have been exemplary of socio-culturally defined heterogeneous gendered dissidence. One can locate a reason for this in how hijra communities have historically been entrenched in the social fabric through colonial regulations of sexuality, gender and related mechanisms of controlling so-called ‘deviant’ groups in the public place. Jessica Hinchy notes how hijras were classified as an ‘ungovernable population’; thereby, a constant regulation of gender non-conformity was essential to the colonial control of spaces and subsequent demarcation of normalcy and deviance (Hinchy 2019, 44).
Hijras are, thus, deeply imbricated in India’s social imaginary through how they have been marginalised due to their sexual lives and how they occupy space through stigmatised occupations, consequently getting inscribed in our vocabulary and imagination via registers of criminality. This imagination of trans as Hijra and vice versa is true for most media representations in India. Sayan Bhattacharya notes this briefly in their article ‘Transgender Nation: Many lives of Law’ wherein they point out how the assignation of ‘third gender’ to hijra communities and simultaneous interchangeable usage of Hijra with transgender often leads to a collective imagination of trans as always outside the gender-binary and, thus, takes away/undermines rights of self-determination of gender. They also briefly attend to how this is also a more palatable way of understanding gender non-conformity given how Hindu scriptures talk of thirdness of gender (Bhattacharya 2019, 12). Such a translation then allows for what Semmalar has noted as a ‘saffronisation’ of gender non-conforming communities, wherein many heterogeneously formed communities are validated through Hindu scriptures to essentialise their origins via Hindu sanctions, and not as ‘western imports’ (Semmalar 2014b). This obviously obfuscates the complex religious formations of not only the hijra communities but other regionally specific trans 1 identities that the NALSA judgement of 2014 recognises. 2
This essay’s analysis does not unilaterally conflate trans as Hijra but acknowledges that no matter the linguistic origins of the term, the term Transgender is used in myriad ways in India to access legal rights, and thus comes with hierarchical baggage of recognition in those terms. I take the line of theorists like Saffo Papantonopoulou who do not consider Transgender as a ‘gift’ from the West which the East is obliged to continually refer to or defer to—I do not consider this linguistic attachment to origins important for both theoretical and political actions (Papantonopoulou 2014). I, however, am interested in understanding how the term gets fit into the social order which is available in India—and that as authors like Ani Dutta have already told us, is through caste-class hierarchies in which the term Transgender seeps into a caste-coloniality of power (Dutta 2014). In that, I see Trans and Hijra as not opposites, nor as similar or same, but see that the history of hijra communities, when translated as the history of trans in India, comes within the caste Hindu hierarchies that have come to characterise and define the dominant workings of the Indian state, Indian political economy and post-colonial modernity (Upadhyay 2018). In this translation, we see how hijra communities have claimed respectability in allying themselves to Hinduism and gaining rights to be elected as varied officials (Reddy 2003). We have also witnessed how other trans communities discursively have painstakingly differentiated themselves from hijras to claim respectable, middle-class Hindu womanhood via appellation as trans women who do not practice sex work or begging (Mount 2020). Thus, it is not really the term transgender which is inherently contentious, but the strategies to claim the term trans expresses for us the available hierarchies under which it gets moulded and becomes aspirational in modern day India. This essay does not have the space to go into the nitty-gritty of these translative turns, but my emphasis is in the specific practices of ‘turning respectable’ within transgender representations—and this video, I argue, does so by turning the hijra community into a perennially happy and inspirationally resilient one for the dominant social order, or simply, those who are seen as the vanguards of conferring recognition and visibility. And the work of Gayatri Reddy, Liz Mount and Ani Dutta amongst others have shown us is that this status-quo is nothing but the maintenance of Hindu hegemony, corporate and privatisation interests backed by a neoliberal turn in the economy. My essay does not seek to prove any of these material realities, but indeed asks a specific question: how do these cultural products employ/deploy the hijra-transgender community to preach and emanate status-quoist happiness? What gets justified and romanticised in this process? Simply put, I want us to listen to this imperative to be happy closely, and see what it really asks us to accept about the struggles that render lives unliveable for many, including those of the hijra communities themselves.
Making of the Inspirationally Happy Figure
The turning of living. breathing and resisting communities like that of hijras into passive figures of resilient happiness is not a new phenomenon or peculiar to this video or to India. Benavente and Gill-Peterson in their article ‘The Promise of Trans Critique’ point out for us, through reviewing some essential transgender representation in theory, that there is a rampant inclination towards reducing trans people to allegories and sites of trouble and subversion. Transgender persons often end up ‘serving as figures for a kind of anti-binary subversion of gender that left sexual subjectivity off the hook for accounting for itself as a default cis category’ (Benavente and Gill-Peterson 2019, 23). This turning or reducing real people into symbolic figures for something profound or anti-systemic/anti-normative, is true of media representations as well which are also important communicative practices about what it is to be/what it takes to be trans. The essay’s endeavour is to tease out the content of the video’s lyrics and positioning of the hijra community members in the video’s plot to make a point about mainstreaming hijras through rendering them as resilient and hence respectable subjects of trans visibility in the video. The essay is, thus, not about scrutinising vagaries of hijra communities—the marginalisation and pain of hijra communities as systemically criminalised and oppressed is held as a constant in my critique. Instead, I focus on how the dominant cultural production responds to the emergent movements for transgender equality and rights. What are codes of expectations from the marginalised regarding the display of strength, resilience, and happiness in our representational mainstreaming of their lives and what it means to see them as happy—this is the question I broach further in my subsequent analysis of the song—lyrics and plot development of the video.
The song presents us with six hijra singers dancing to an adapted Hindi version of Pharrell William’s song ‘Happy’. Written and directed by Shameer Tandon and Ashish Patil, the song is performed by six hijra identifying persons who are Asha Jagtap, Bhavika Patil, Chandni Suvarnakar, Fida Khan, Komal Jagtap and Ravina Jagtap. The making-of video starts with Ashish Patil proclaiming how he had this ‘mad’ idea of having ‘6 hijras’ on screen and took this to the head ‘madman’ Aditya Chopra: the head of Yash Raj Films. The video cuts into various shots of the hijra persons dancing in different locations, with Nishant Nayak talking about the rationale behind their presence: ‘We thought we will try and set context to who they are as a people, they’re great performers in general, so we thought we would put them in different locations, and just have fun!’ (Y Film 2016b). With a brand name attached to the band’s name, the intention of the production company is primarily advertisement oriented and of strategising selling their brand through what they deem as ‘crazy’: to put hijras on screen.
Using transgender figures in order to brand one’s product is a part of the political economy of visibility which functions through corporatising identities in order to profit from the labour involved in maintaining those identities. Here, I echo Emmanuel David’s understanding of commodification of transgender struggles. We are seeing burgeoning in India and around the world wherein we have to be careful of these visibility projects which are selling specific ways of being trans in order to cash into the ‘cultural turn to transgender’ (David 2017, 30). This of course, does not mean that we place our critique onto the specific trans individuals participating in the process, but be wary of what these logics of incorporation mean for those who are still vulnerable, economically impoverished and rendered unrecognisable in the mainstreaming process. This also means we acknowledge that while trans identities are commodified, as David suggests, not all ways of being trans are commodifiable and valuable. As authors like Aren Aizura and Dan Irving in the contexts of North American representational practices of transgender communities have suggested, the value extracted from being trans has to indeed, be profitable for the political economy of the times, and thus, in these processes of commodification, we see that specific ways of being trans: being white and heteronormative, presenting oneself as feminine enough, being productive for certain kind of industrious labour, medically transitioning and being ‘authentic’ to one’s claims is seen as having more value and more worthy of being recognised as respectably trans (Aizura 2018; Irving 2008). They add that such claims to legitimacy, in media and other kinds of communicative practices, are often made through narratives of the productive, industrious, strong, respectable trans figure. Keeping this predominant tendency of rendering respectable in mind, my argument through analysing the content of the video will suggest that it is the resilient and happy hijra is rendered as the viable social subject who is worthy of respect and visibility and that this resilience is in accepting status quo—which in India supports Hindu, caste-based authoritarianism backed by corporate interests. How the video proffers this resilient road to respectability strategically through its lyrics and video component, is the main content of the subsequent parts of the essay.
After showing the dancers in colourful sarees and impeccable makeup through close-up shots, the scene moves into an introductory montage of the performers looking directly at the audience and meeting their gaze. The six performers come together and laugh in unison as a commentary captures their movement on-screen. Voiced by the Bollywood actor Anushka Sharma, this dialogue aims to emotionally charge the sensibilities of the audience via words that evoke pity and sympathy: ‘The Third Gender. Ignored by most. Tolerated by Some. Misunderstood by All. In India, the hijras are a community almost in exile’ (Y Film 2016a). These sentences framed with smiling community members visually evoke feelings of sympathy for their ostracisation. However, the video immediately pushes the community onto the category of the ‘other’ and hierarchises them as a community at the mercy of a homogeneous ‘us’: ‘Standing out in traffic signals after failing to blend in. Knocking on our windows. In the hope of some kindness, or perhaps—a smile’ (Y Film 2016a). This exposition of the community shows them as always stigmatised given their existence is defined through failure, wherein blending in is impossible for a community in exile: they stand out not because they are different, but because their difference is not accommodated.
These lines evoke a feeling of pity without reflection on what ostracises the community in the first place: it mystifies stigmatising processes as natural, unalterable societal givens. Such a scene of suffering-spectatorship, which does not strike at the root of suffering but takes it as a natural occurrence, is what Lauren Berlant calls a sign of privilege dressed up as compassion: ‘In operation, compassion is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there. You, the compassionate one, have a resource that would alleviate someone else’s suffering’ (Berlant 2004, 4). There is no call for a change in thought or transformation of systemic differences in the video, but a mere change in our affective response to it: thereby treating systemic inequalities as how natural and unchangeable oppressive conditions are. The compassionate hierarchy of the pitiable and the one who pities is posited right in the beginning of the video, wherein this song of happiness is an ignoble gift to the community who suffers and knocks on our doors for recognition. The clear binary of them and us reflects the hierarchy of those who represent (the producers, the video-makers) and those who are being represented. 3 With taking a self-proclaimed role of the compassionate people with doors to knock onto, the video-makers do not imagine or anticipate a future with the hijra community members as equals by any measure; they render them as naturally pitiable and hence see them through the lens of high-handed compassion throughout the video. Hijra communities who are often seen as nuisance and criminals and even legally policed in those terms, are rendered acceptable only when they perform a respectability which is digestible and comfortable for those around them—by not being loud or ambiguous but by being understated and singing-dancing peacefully (see Dutta 2012 for more on respectability politics in transgender rights movements). Thus, the only way their presence on screen is normalised is when they pass as people who are only up to good—that they are not a nuisance but respectable interlocuters of happiness.
The video, thus, follows what Michalinos Zemblyas calls the ‘sentimental discourse of suffering that evokes pity for the sufferers, rather than compassionate action’ (Zembylas 2013, 505). The makers posit themselves in a morally superior position where the best they can hand out to the hijras is pity—they incite the hijra community’s vulnerability only to situate themselves as compassionate. Indeed, the construction of the paternalistic and benevolent oppressor always goes hand in hand with the construction of the happily oppressed figure. This is because the happiness of the oppressed relies on the benevolence of the oppressor, and thus obligates them to their dominance for any and all upliftment and emancipation—it solely makes happiness an object which is conferred upon, and not claimed as one’s own. This reliance on the oppressor for a happy life has been studied by theorists via figures like that of the happy housewife and the happy slave. What do these figures imply or stand for: this has been of interest to theoreticians like Sara Ahmed who have worked on the genealogy, phenomenology, and politics of emotions. Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness talks about the categories of the happy housewife and happy slave and points out that the term happy is more than a mere descriptor or adjective: it is a ‘script’ that is attributed to particular persons in order to ‘secure social relations instrumentally’ (Ahmed 2010, 59). Happiness, Ahmed argues, is ‘conditional’ and maintained through orders of ‘reciprocity’ and return of investment: one must perform happiness to ensure the happiness of others. Ahmed cites parental happiness in the happiness of their children as defying the lines between ‘duty’ and ‘desire’: a parent wanting their child to be happy in order to be happy themselves ensures that the child is now obligated to perform acts of happiness: not only for their own happiness but finding their happiness in the fulfilment of their parents’. Thus, it becomes unclear to the child as to which happiness is being accomplished: their own, their parents’ or are these two one and the same? Ahmed goes into the categories of those who dare be unhappy and express this unhappiness, and talks of how unhappiness is, indeed, a ‘deviation’, an unnecessary complication that only leads to frustration of goals that are accomplished through happiness and its ritualised performance. Thus, happiness becomes being at the mercy and following the rules of engagement of dominant authority, lest one invites their rage and consequent threat to life.
What this also expresses, is that someone else is in charge of what it means to be happy. The video, following the aforementioned logic of happiness, illustrates that the happy hijra is the one who accepts the odds against them as unchangeable. However, this happiness also comes in tandem with obligation to the compassionate others for mercy and respect (that they come knock on our doors). Thus, the video expresses that not only are transgender community members wholly at mercy of someone else to provide respect, recognition and the bare minimum, but that their happiness lies in living passively through such a hierarchical system without complaints—indeed, their happiness is seen as keeping the status-quo and its beneficiaries happy. Not only is this narrative of passive happiness a tactic of obscuring struggles which transgender communities face, but it also puts forward a dangerous narrative that the transgender communities are okay with how things are—that indeed, they have not much to complain about despite being dependent on an unfriendly social order, the existence of which is acknowledged as an always-already and naturally occurring right in the beginning of the video. In the next few moments in the video, this happiness is seen as inspirational and worthy of respect—a narrative that turns the happy hijra figure into an aspirational and respectable figure.
In the video, when hijra performers prove themselves to be happy against odds and productive in terms of giving cis people advice, they are seen as worthwhile recipients of respect. This is reflected in the video when it is only when they start singing the lyrics do the others remove the signs of disgust and disdain from their faces. The respectable hijra, according to this video, is the one who has odds set against them but still smiles, dances and sings. Happiness and eliciting the same is seen as a characteristic of being hijras and living the life as one: if one sees a hijra they do not see non-conformity and a life of survival tactics but myriad ways of being happy that is registered as inspirational, respectable, and thus acceptable. Here, holding them accountable as happy and inspirational figures is also a surveillant tactic, a practice to keep a check on them and contain their possibilities, lest they become deviant, discomfiting and invite ruckus. Sentimentalising their lives to the extent of naturalising this emotion as their identity is tantamount to controlling how they need to live and resist and persist—as unquestionably happy. In other words, the video acknowledges the struggles of hijras only to call them resilient against them, and by turning the resilience into something that provides happiness—they obscure the very violent struggles against which resilience is sought. That hijras can indeed be angry, sad, outraged, and downright dissident—is an impossibility in such a narrative of perennial resilience given it is only through sticking it out does one gain real happiness. And by making hijras exemplary of such a ‘positive’ attitude towards strife, they pedestalise their resilience to quell and deny anything that will stand against such a pedestal. One can simply ask—what if hijras are happy in resisting and defying, and not accepting the odds against them? Will that be inspirational and acceptable?
Accordingly, the subsequent few sentences pedestalise the community as the torchbearers of resilient happiness, and ignore the violent, material conditions of ignorance, unkindness, and lack of any compassion from the normative ‘us’ that is centrally configured in the narrative: ‘In hope for kindness and perhaps, a smile’. When they do not get either, they keep their chin up, and find a way to be, just, ‘happy’. Happiness replaces equality and dignity as a goal. Thus, as Sara Ahmed notes, there is a replacement of social norms with social goods: the daily routine and hassles and adversities are merely things that must be accrued to, adjusted in and be happy with (Ahmed 2010, 2). You must ‘find a way’, like hijras do. Not only does the video mystify unequal social circumstances, but it elevates the survival and resilience of the hijra communities as its central motif of identifying the oppressed following the moral codes of the compassionate, charitable non-hijra normative communities. It is, thus, essential to note that the video uses the resilience of the oppressed as a tool to advocate happiness to others who are not hijras but can do with some resilient feel-goodness. Their value and productivity as happy hijras lie in becoming helpful advisors to those who are comparatively better off than them. The video, then, presents hijras as performing a kind of resilience training for others to learn from and be inspired by.
Resilience training is a term and practice used in positive psychology to refer to the coaching methods that change negative emotions to positive ones by channelling adverse conditions in one’s life into solutionist strategies. Colloquially, one may term this as trying to find the good in the bad. 4 However, when negativity is seen as an incorrect response to marginalisation, it reduces systemic inequalities into ‘challenges’ that the oppressed must fight within one’s ambit. Any resistance to those inequalities becomes a failure to combat challenges and come out as a winner against odds. The valorisation of individual success over collective transformation can be noticed in how lists of ‘firsts’ are celebrated for transgender communities in India and beyond, where personal stories of struggle are applauded precisely because the individual was able to combat systemic challenges and still do the impossible: like get a job, get an education. The romanticisation of the ‘struggle’ naturalises it—fighting these systemically oppressive odds on an individual level becomes cool, inspirational and a marker of ‘success’. Accordingly, a man with a t shirt that says ‘you make your own luck’ dances in the background throughout the video to drive in the neoliberal, ‘success-oriented’ idea of the journey of happiness which is advocated for here. This view of individual freedom and exercising choice to be happy is a marker of neoliberal form of possessive individualism, where people are conditioned to think of themselves as free and as ‘owners of their capacities and feelings…which have nothing to do with the society or context’ (Morgan 2020, 57). Thus, any dissatisfaction or pain or adversity is internalised, and must be dealt with individually. An atomistic view like this, thus, forces affective and emotional responses to be internalised and not seen as part of a ‘collective experience’ of living under an economic and social system that structures social forces and differences (Ferguson 2017, 47). Exercising one’s potential, in this logic, does not mean to demand change from the stakeholders within the societal order but being flexible to whatever requirements systemic and social processes put in front of you, and forever be on the move to pursue ultimate success and happiness. That is, it is to change yourself according to the world’s demands and not question the orders or be dissatisfied with them. To be free, autonomous, and authentic then is to be easy-going and bending for and within the system.
The positive reframing of negativity defines the subsequent lyrics of the song, where the singers intervene in spaces of work of other people or in cars and other transit spaces to tell them that ‘the world isn’t going to cry with you. Clap along and be happy’. The clear distinction of positive and negative emotion is also visible in these lines: dissatisfaction or being distraught with the world’s ways is a negative emotion, and to be happy is to rise above such feelings because the world is not changing. There is a resignation from change, an acceptance of reality, and making hijras the ultimate beacons of such resilience, the video undercuts the possibility of changing the unhappiness stemming from their precarious lives: it undermines their desire to change the system that makes them vulnerable and makes their survival dependent on resilient coping. Instead, by centring resilience within status quo as happiness, it produces hijras as being, in Sarah Bracke’s words, ‘good subjects’ of the society who do not fight the system but instead find ways to be happy within it: ‘resilience is to overcome dissatisfaction and go back to the system: the “good subjects” of neoliberal times are the ones who are able to act, to exercise their agency, in resilient ways’ (Bracke 2016, 62).
In the following few scenes, the video homes in on this resilience as an inherent quality of hijras by co-opting the hijra clap into the clap of happiness. In the original song, through the lines: ‘clap along if you feel happiness is the truth’, ‘clap along’ is used as a phrase of mutual agreement and appreciation—people are encouraged to clap together to the tune of the song in cheerful agreement. However, the hijra clap is far from a clap of agreement—it is precisely the opposite. It is a sign of disagreement with the norms and a very powerful assertion of the non-normative ways of being and living. Jeff Roy and others have noted how the clap of hijras is a distinct marker of their identity, of their pehchan (Roy 2015, 1). It aids in signifying multiple differentiations from the norm of gender, sexuality, denoting their ‘embodied alterity’ and functions as a signature of their community (Reddy 2018, 49). The clap demands attention from the normative society and signifies multiple emotions, and cannot be reduced to mere happiness: Hijra clapping, what Gayatri Reddy (2005, 136) names ‘“troubling” performances’, constitutes an unstable performative that can celebrate as well as it can redress, its affects dependent on the spaces and temporalities upon which it is unleashed (Pamment 2019, 142). By erasing the distinct meaning of their dissident clap and recoding it as the agreeable and acquiescing ‘clapping along’, the video erases hijra identity altogether from the video and co-opts them into a happiness regime wherein their non-normativity gets translated as happily agreeing and going along with the odds stacked against them.
The expressions that the people carry upon seeing the hijras in these spaces are of disbelief and irritation as if conveying that their routine has been disturbed by a deviant group of people. However, this time they are not here to ask for money, but teach you about happiness: it is an acceptable disturbance, a fruitful one. Indeed, with no reservations in employment or education sectors: one may pause and think here about the possibilities available for the hijra community to take up space in the office as equal players of the field. The good, resilient subjects that hijras are, they intervene in office-spaces wherein their message about happiness turns the irritated faces of the officegoers into accepting faces of happiness. The intervention in the space still treats them as a benevolent outsider, who can only enter the space temporarily, and that too within the scripts of respectable, acceptable behaviour. Their entry and exit is much like how they are accepted temporarily, within the boundaries of traditional spaces of marriages and child birth ceremonies in which they come for conferring blessings. And this is what they sing in this temporary intervention:
Agar maa tumhein daatein (if your mom scolds you) Agar boss tumhein kaate (if your boss bites you) Your girlfriend faaltu jhaade (if your girlfriends nags you) Aur mehangai kapde phaade (if there is an inflation) Woh neta bhi chor saare (if the politicians are corrupt) Ya police bhi batua maare (if the police bribes you) Petrol more mehanga than carein (if petrol price hikes) Biwi maange aasman se taare (if wife asks for too much) Khush raho, nacho gaao, milke bajao taali (clap along, be happy, sing and dance). (Y Film 2016a, translation mine)
It is important to note that hijras traditionally sing songs and perform skits that poke fun at the existing social order amongst their other performance pieces which talk of their own community histories, traditional sanctions, and so on. The video seems to take up their gamut of ironical songs and turns them into a translation of William’s Happy. They make light of your issues and give you a solution of being resilient and happy, as if saying these issues are unchangeable, but not your emotions towards them. Serena Nanda’s work on hijra communities mentions how these songs simultaneously diffuse and keep the tensions of systemic dysfunctionality alive:
as outsiders to the social structure because of their ambiguous sex/gender status, the hijras are uniquely able to expose the points of tension in a culture where sex, gender and reproduction are involved. In humorously expressing this tension, the hijras diffuse it, yet at the same time, their very ambiguity of sex and gender keeps the tension around sex, gender and fertility alive. (Nanda 2014, 32)
In the video, even as the song itself does not materialise in an occasion rife with processes and metaphors of sex, gender and fertility, the singers address a male audience invoking stereotypical, patriarchal complaints men have with their wives and girlfriends, alongside systemic problems of corruption and inflation that can be tolerated with a smile, because these things are not going to change anytime soon, or as the song says ‘ye duniya na saath me ronay wali’ (this world would not cry with you). Nanda’s point about how hijra community’s own ambiguity keeps the tensions they humorously demolish alive, works in a similar way here but with this time, the irony strikes at the very root of their marginalised status in the society. Work of corrupt politicians, brutal police forces and economic expenses affect vulnerable communities like that of hijra communities the most, 5 and marginalises them in comparison to the heterosexual men they address here, who seem to afford being worried equally about nagging girlfriends and a corrupt political system at the same time. The conflation of grave systemic issues with stereotypical irks provides for a humorous commentary on how all issues should be equally tolerated with a smile. And yet, for hijra communities to teach this to those who are at much more privileged, comfortable, and less precarious position than them, drives home the irony that the violence of this system they advocate a smile against, is disproportionately harmful for them than the ones merely temporarily irate or dissatisfied by some of its inconveniencing components. The video ends with everyone else dancing with the transgender community—as if perfectly assimilating them with others on the journey of accepting how messy the world is, but nothing that we can do about it than clap along and smile. That this is the condition of coming-together with transgender communities with previously disgusted and disdainful office-goers in the video, is where you can see respectability concealed in the format of passive resilience. Not only does the valorisation of their resilience normalise suffering and coping mechanisms of transgender communities, but the video seems to locate respect in this display of strength and happiness against the odds, making perennial flexibility look aspirational.
Conclusion
Reina Gossett in the Introduction to the text Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and Politics of Visiblity, writes how trans representation comes at a paradoxical moment when visibility is accompanied with increased violence and precarity of the represented:
Representation is said to remedy broader acute social crises ranging from poverty to murder to police violence, particularly when representation is taken up as a ‘teaching tool’ that allows those outside our immediate social worlds and identities to glimpse some notion of a shared humanity. To the degree that anyone might consider such potential to exist within representation, one must also grapple and reckon with radical incongruities—as when, for example, our ‘transgender tipping point’ comes to pass at precisely the same political moment when women of color, and trans women of color in particular, are experiencing markedly increased instances of physical violence. (Gossett 2017, xv)
These radical incongruities are true for the context in India as well. On 5 December 2019, India saw the passing of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, a draconian legislative act that takes away transgender rights to a liveable life while claiming to protect them. Amongst many unhelpful and problematic clauses of the act, one that stands out and affects all other subsequent provisos is the absolute denial of self-determination of gender. The act, going against the NALSA Supreme Court Judgement of 2014 that affirmed right to self-determination, proposes humiliating screening processes for issuing a valid gender certificate. Not only does this remove a previously established right but produces transgender communities as untrustworthy subjects in the eyes of law. In addition to this, it carries no provisions for reservations 6 of seats for transgender persons in either employment or educational sectors and even designates sexual crimes committed against trans communities as petty crimes. In sum, the act undermines transgender personhood and further aggravates their already vulnerable position in the society. Meanwhile, the Anti-Trafficking laws are strengthened which empower the police to convict and incarcerate any and all ‘suspicious’ figures—historically, these have been sexual minorities and begging communities that disproportionately consist of hijra and other gender-variant communities in India. In tandem with this, we are witnessing in India a rise in Hindu authoritarianism and increase in caste-based and communal violence that also affects transgender communities who are lower-caste and Muslim. Relatedly, happiness with the status quo is animating in the form of allyship of certain transgender activist groups with fundamentalist projects of Hindutva precisely because to be happy with the way things is to also actively consent to the machinations of maintaining power-relations as is, to become nationalist figures precisely because of being increasingly governed by the State which also provides for rights and resources (Saria 2019, 22). As they also point out, with regards to specifically hijra communities, that those who resist the modes of governance which marginalise them, like hijras resisting the erosion of their traditional systems of kinship, are seen as disruptive and increasingly, as part of the ‘anti-national’ brigade—people whose resistance to the status quo and ruling government is seen as disruptive and not as inspirational revolt, but as worthy of violent quelling. The only way to be happy, then, in India for transgender communities amongst other marginalised groups is to not resist authoritarian forces and also be obligated to the orders of these forces for ensuring their own survival.
One could revisit and ask Emmanuel David’s question this way: if the resilience of hijras is so inspirational and valuable, whose interest does it serve? And in that, we need to look for who will benefit from the status quo in India—with its erosion of rights of sex-workers, of delegitimising begging, with moves to define citizenship along religious lines and with increased privatisation of public goods, what kind of a hijra subject will remain happy in a status quo? As I have already suggested before, work done by Ani Dutta, Liz Mount, Sayan Bhattacharya amongst others shows that the road to respectability in India for the hijra community and also other transgender communities is often marked by allying with caste-Hindu hegemony and its attendant value systems. If the song tells you that it is best not to question authority and be happy, one might ask—what kind of authorities are being legitimised in such a gesture towards happiness? Indeed, it is beneficial to remember that Y films, is a part of Yash Raj films—a film production company that historically has created films and projects which have embraces Hindu ideals of gender, nationalistic fervour metaphorised through the Hindu family and related norms, values and ways of living (Pugsley and Khorana 2011). Whose interests does it reflect, after all—hijra communities, or the ones who are encashing resilience with this script of happiness?
Conclusively, one also has to check the definition of resilience as flexibility within status quo for its veracity. My argument has suggested that first, this song might be sung by hijras but indeed, it is not their happiness which is being sung about. Following from this, the happiness which is relayed here is one that of passive acceptance of dominant social order—something which is woefully false about the resisting communities that hijras and other gender-variant communities in India are. Indeed, resilience for the marginalised does not translate to being happy despite the odds, but in fighting and defying them. Here I echo Hilary Malatino, who, in referring to transgender rights activists, writes how the oppressed cultivate resilience not through passive happiness but through ‘rage’, through anger against unliveable circumstances:
Put differently, the desire to live well, to lead a life under conditions that support resilience and flourishing, sometimes manifests as rage. If we understand rage to be an extroverted response to forms of trauma that, when internalized, manifest as depression, this means that rage is closely allied to desire. Rage is a legitimate response to significant existential impediments, to roadblocks that minimize, circumscribe, and reduce one’s possibilities, and it is a response that seeks to transform—and destroy—such impediments. (Malatino 2019, 124)
To be resilient is to not be necessarily flexible against odds, but indeed, it is to be stubbornly persisting to live well even if the culture you live in denies it. Resilience manifests as rage and anger that translates into joy in resistance, not passive happiness with status quo which accepts what is as is. It is in the transformative anger of resilience, of putting up a fight to end the impediments that require the struggle, where the oppressed find their pathways to joy. In that, the oppressed do not bow down to discrimination and will continue to ask more from life to be happy. 7 It is in demanding systemic change, real equality, and transformation through rage-filled solidarity that the marginalised reclaim the centre and find their happiness. It is in imagining other worlds, other possibilities and in other ways of being happy that they come together, survive, and thrive. It is in defiant communities, in alternative family systems, in chosen kinship ties that they find their pursuit of happiness. Perhaps it is in the discomfort of the social order lies the collective happiness of the present world: in imagining the world that changes, and not passively accepts our current, dominant systems and institutions. Perhaps through emboldening transformative desire, and not passive resilience, we can better perceive a trajectory for a just world. This is already true of the very vibrant transgender rights movement in India, wherein the frustration and hatred for the inequalities bestowed on their lives has led for trans communities to lead multiple fights on the streets and come together in unison for a better life, a life that seeks more than mere smile and kindness. Indeed, in such fights they have found sisterhoods, solidarities, and happiness in those struggles, and not despite them. As Gee Semmalar poignantly writes: Trans women in India live, work, and occupy public space together. This is a strategy for survival arrived upon out of a deep understanding of public violence, discrimination, and vulnerability (Semmalar 2014a, 287). The Transgender Rights Movement has also seen strong supporters of the anti-caste movement and many radical transgender and gender variant community organisations have also created connections between the Hindutva-pink-washing of trans identities and the erosion of rights of religious minorities in India (Bhattacharya 2019).
Perhaps now, if we hear the song more closely, we also hear that the hijras never speak about their idea of happiness but speak of the comforts of the dominant social order if one continues to accept them as is—in making them the mouthpiece of the dominant social order, the song makes hijras teachers of happiness which ultimately works to excludes them. The song tells us, and in turn, the hijra community themselves, to look at the ‘bright side’ and be happy about the resilient happiness that itself is a sign of obscured struggle and real joy of rage and resistance. As Sara Ahmed reminds us, to look on the bright side of things is to ‘avoid what might threaten the world as it is’ (Ahmed 2010, 83). It can also be argued that to push the bright side as the way to live and survive onto the oppressed is a very real, visceral threatening tactic by those whose hegemonic aspirations get threatened by new demands of change and transformation.
Is this video a one-off and not representative and expressive of the culture it is produced in? Indeed, this video production by Y films which was at the centre of my argument is in line with many other cultural products featuring transgender individuals allying with status-quoist projects. This includes the productive, nationalist trans communities in the Yathartha video which Sayan Bhattacharya (Bhattacharya 2019) discusses, ‘I am not Hijra’ photo-series campaign which Liz Mount situates her essay on respectability through and the one with disciplined, transgender educators of traffic signals Oishik Sircar problematises (Sircar 2017). All of these cultural products express a dominant tradition of rendering the transgender figure aspiring towards happiness within state of things and presenting oneself as productive, non-disruptive and respectable for fitting into these normative paradigms. One must reformulate, then, Emmanuel David’s question accordingly—whose interests does a search for happiness against and not within the social order defy? The resilient and happy transgender figure is however not simply complacent and status-quoist but resisting and enraged, and their resilience within status quo is often a survival tactic, not the ideal way of living through an unfriendly world. Why, however, is the passive figure inspirational, comfortably respectable, and marketable—is something we can collectively ruminate over and act upon.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.