Journey to the Secret Temple of India's Sacred Eunuchs
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Journey to the Secret Temple of India's Sacred Eunuchs
In a piece from 2012, Killough remembers a trip twenty years prior in search of the mythical temple to the patron goddess of India's holy transsexuals.
I’m reposting this to offer people a bit of my background as an amateur student of transsexuality around the world. I’ve always considered transsexuals, and hijras in particular, to be the bravest people in the world. Their conviction about being born a certain way is why I still include the T in LGBT, where it means ‘transsexual,’ not transgender, which has been corrupted by the communal narcissists of the gender-queer movement. Many gays, lesbians and bisexuals who are pushing back against the excesses of gender-queer activism have become trans-exclusive — not I, never, ever. I’ll wait until everyone comes to their senses, and dispense electrolytes, Vicodin and Xanax for their hangovers. (Yes, that’s the elusive hangover cure. You’re welcome.)
Our original fight for rights was based on sexuality not being a choice but human nature, something that Marxist feminists in the critical theory movement headed by Judith! Butler have sought to discredit, claiming that both sex and sexuality are constructs. It’s by downgrading what is real to what is imaginary that they validate their own make-believe “toxic nonsense,” as English screenwriter Gareth Roberts calls it.
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A RUNNING SCRIPT MEETING ON JUHU BEACH
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton became the one and only hero I’d ever had around page one hundred of Edward Rice’s superlative best-selling biography, which I read when it first came out in the early 90s. This is the kind of man I would have tried to become had I been a Victorian with the sort of linguistic and scholarly brilliance with which he was blessed. Burton was a character far more extraordinary than his contemporary Rudyard Kipling in many respects; he didn’t just dream of the Indian subcontinent and the British Raj in poems and novels, he lived it, playing the Great Game to the very edge of brinksmanship with a level of chutzpah I aspire to.
With an arsenal of over twenty languages at his disposal, all of which he spoke fluently, Burton started out as a spy reporting to Her Majesty’s government from the badlands of the Hindu Kush in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, regions that are still a thorn in the world’s collective side, and were just as much so back then, except the battle was between Great Britain and Russia, not America and Islam. Because he was swarthy, Burton could pass off as a fair-skinned Central Asian, and to account for his slight accent in various regional dialects he would claim to be from some other place in the Islamic world, and got away with it. For example, when he went on the Hajj to Mecca, a place absolutely forbidden to Westerners at the time on pain of death, he pretended he was an Afghani Pathstun to account for his odd accent in Arabic, praying the whole time he wouldn’t get caught out by other Pashtuns on the pilgrimage.
Burton’s adventures and accomplishments were myriad and above all interesting in the sense that he was immune to taboos and Western social conventions, highly unusual for a Victorian, and it landed him in a whole lot of trouble back home. He translated the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra and introduced them to our culture. He “discovered” the source of the Nile in a hair-raising adventure during which he almost lost his life several times; after getting a short spear thrown in his cheek, he walked with it lodged in place to the nearest village for an entire day.
Burton was also probably gay, or at the very least bisexual. We’ll never really know because his evil wife, the hyper-Catholic Isabel, destroyed much of his work after his death, in particular the last chapters of his translation of Skeikh Newfazi’s The Perfumed Garden, which are thought to have been about the virtues of homosexuality.
In researching that book and other aspects of Eastern sexuality, Burton became fascinated with the eunuchs he encountered in the various Oriental courts. He observed two important phenomena: firstly, despite being fully castrated, meaning minus the penis as well as the testicles, eunuchs were able to transfer their erogenous zones to the anus, and achieve full orgasm; secondly, they tended to become very pious in old age. For some reason these details stuck with me as I became inspired by Rice’s book to continue my research into institutionalized castration in India.
I say ‘continue’ because Burton was not the first to introduce me to Indian eunuchs, a term I use to distinguish them from the modern European/American transsexual, even though they are the same kind of person in spirit, the "T" in LGBT. Despite efforts by grassroots activist groups in India in recent years to make the transitioning process less painful and more sanitary, the traditional hijra doesn’t enjoy the therapy sessions, the hormone treatments, the gradual surgeries that her counterparts in the West enjoy. It is a far more brutal, dangerous, ritualized process, which I’ll describe later in this piece—you should probably think about scanning over that part if you’re squeamish, or at least cross your legs if you’re a man.
When I was in my early twenties, I was contracted by Indian film director Muzaffar Ali to write the biopic of a medieval Kashmiri poetess named Khaba Khatoun. It was supposed to be Doctor Zhivago meets The Last Emperor, which had just come out, and for which Ryuichi Sakamoto had just won the Oscar for Best Musical Score with David Byrne. Being completely smitten with Emperor, as well as with Sakamoto’s music, I contacted him and got him to do the music for our film, too. I’ll blog about my week with him in Tokyo some other time; it was a fun adventure. Two-time Cody Award-winner Mary McFadden was doing the costumes. It promised to be an amazing production.
Shortly after I settled in to write the script in Juhu Beach (‘the Malibu of Mumbai’… yeah, right), Muzaffar and I started doing meetings while he “jogged” on the beach in the evenings, followed by a posse of his retainers. Muzaffar was the crown prince of Kotwara, an ancient principality in north-central India, and as such was accustomed to moving everywhere with a retinue, even to exercise.
One evening while out on one of these group jogs, courtiers in tow, I was right in the middle of an essential thought about some scene or other when we were suddenly surrounded by these very loud young trannies in saris, horrendously made up, clapping their spread open palms together and croaking, “Hai! Hai! Baba! Gimme bakshish, gimme bakshish!” By that time I’d been in India for a month and was an old hand with the rampant beggar issue, but this was a hilarious new twist on it.
While Muzaffar and his retinue clammed up and picked up pace, I burst out laughing. These creatures were ridiculous. Plus, despite being closeted professionally, I was fluent in the International Language of Ghey. If I’d been able to speak proper gutter Hindi, I might have said, Look at what hot messes you girls are. You call that drag? At least pad your bra and wash that sari. Sashay away, bitches!
Instead, I said to Muzaffar, giggling, “What do they need money for? Better nail polish?” That was one thing I noticed: the nail polish on those clapping hands was horribly chipped.
“Shut up,” Muzaffar hissed. “They’re hijras.”
I had no idea what this meant, but I was keen to find out; after all, these were the first Gheys I’d met in India. Muzaffar wouldn’t speak more about it; this wasn’t the sort of conversation a prince had, certainly not in front of his entourage. It was up to one of the production managers to explain it to me later on, after much cajoling on my part; there are a few things Indians are very uncomfortable talking to foreigners about, among them weird phenomena like hijras, or institutionalized transsexuality, and the caste system, or institutionalized genetic engineering.
IN WHICH I’M TOLD A FALSE HIS/HERSTORY
It was explained to me that the hijras were roving bands of hermaphrodites who kidnapped young boys and made them just like them. Shortly after almost every male child is born in India, the mother is visited by the local band of hijras, and a negotiation is struck: for saris and money in exchange for them to bless the child, rather than curse him if demands aren’t met. The eunuchs then agree to show their mutilated genitalia as proof they are real and not masquerading to con the unsuspecting new mother, after which they sing songs and comically reenact the pains of childbirth, and finally bless the child. On specific days of the week, they come out and beg on the streets, threatening to lift their saris and flash drivers stuck in traffic if their demands aren’t met. Prudish Indians often give in, especially those with children on board. A few hijras, usually ones who are not in a group, are prostitutes, but in general that’s frowned upon.
I suspected something was wrong from the start about this “kidnapping” bit, not to mention the fact that hermaphrodites are pretty rare. In fact, Muzaffar’s production manager was avoiding the word “eunuch,” if he knew it at all. Although natural hermaphrodites are held in the highest regard by the hijra community and are the most sacred, the majority are just men. And because their voices are deep, croaky and broken, I had difficulty believing that they were kidnapped and forced to surrender their genitalia.
Just as we Gheys are accused by the ignorant in the West of being pedophiles, the hijras of India are blamed for stealing little boys and perverting them. I suppose that’s one way to make your kid stick by your side in a crowded bazaar on the days these feral trannies are out and about: tell him he’s going to be snatched and have his dick and balls cut off.
After I began my informal study of hijras, it emerged that they don’t kidnap boys at all, of course. With their finely tuned gaydars, they spot effete young men in the bazaars who feel a woman inside them screaming to be free and lure them to join the group. Just as I suspected, the ‘operation,’ if you can call it that, is done willingly; had they been forcibly castrated as children, their voices would have remained high-pitched, like the castrati singers of Baroque Europe.
I was a victim myself of this razor-sharp hijra gaydar a couple of years after my first encounter with them on the beach. By then, the local hijras of Juhu knew me and I knew them. They were aware they had no effect on me, that I was immune to superstitions and as unafraid of them as I would be of trannies in my native New York. I would smile and wave and barked, “Wassup, ladies?” or something like that, clearly mocking them. They stayed well away from the brazen American filmi-writer.
I was on my way to a script meeting with yet another director I was writing for at the time, an unsavory character with the very opposite of Muzaffar’s princely demeanor and lifestyle, when an eighteen-year-old boy caught my eye, one of the most beautiful creatures I’d ever laid eyes on. I was only twenty-five at the time, but I had a beard and I’m tall, so I looked much older. He spotted me coming out of my hotel and strutted ahead down the streets as if he knew exactly the direction I was heading. Now that I think about it, perhaps he did.
On the outskirts of the bazaar, the boy, who was to become my first long-term relationship, crossed in front of me and licked his lips, which unbeknownst to me was the Indian way of cruising, of saying you like a guy and want to have sex. The gesture was so erotic, and I hadn’t had sex in such a long time, that I instantly got hard, from zero to ninety degrees in one second flat. It was hot out, so I was wearing light, voluminous trousers and boxer shorts, which meant my flash arousal was in plain sight and nearly impossible to hide. Luckily, I was able to cover myself with my script pages.
But not in time to have avoided the hawkeyed hijras. The entire group saw the whole episode: the boy cross in front of me, the licking of his lips, my reaction to it. They burst into raucous laughter and screaming, pointing at me and my crotch and making lewd gestures, clapping their hands that way, “Hai! Hai!”
There was nothing lost in translation: their taunting was International Language of Ghey for Oh, snap! Gotcha, bitch.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN ITALY…
Let me backpedal even further down memory lane to the very first time I first became interested in eunuchism; even though, like most men who have no transsexual aspirations, I had an instinctive aversion to it and wanted at the very least to cross my legs when I thought about losing my genitals, or even better don a pair of titanium underpants to protect myself.
That first time coincided with my decision to abandon acting and become a filmmaker at the age of eighteen. I had an older gay mentor at the time, as many young Gheys do, a sort of nonsexual guru who instructed me in the Ways of Ghey—by 'older,' I mean he was twenty-four. He was a classic of his kind: bitchy, funny, great taste, somewhat aristocratic, edgy, Italian. He worked for a while as an assistant to a famous gay journalist for the Village Voice, and one day he threw me a book he’d stolen from his boss’s library called Memoirs of a Castrato by Henry Lyon Young. (He threw things at me a lot, which is probably why we’re no longer in touch.)
“This should be your first film,” he said. “It’s divine.”
Gheys said that word a lot back then. The novel was a fictionalization of several famous castrati singers of the eighteenth century, most notably Farinelli, the Michael Jackson of his day, called Dulcinelli in the book. In terms of prose, Young’s writing wasn’t divine in the least, pretty shitty as I remember, but I wasn’t yet aware of Anne Rice’s A Cry to Heaven on the same subject, which I’ve never read but I hear is pretty good for a historical novel, and captures the essences of that strange period in European history, when deliberately, forcibly castrated orphans were worshipped as the pinnacle of singing.
For someone like me, who came of age listening to glam rock deep under Bowie’s hypnotic spell, the subject of castrati was fascinating in terms of their celebrity and antics as the rock stars of their time. Plus, from a production design standpoint nothing films quite so deliriously as the eighteenth century, that hundred-year-long masquerade ball of men in tall wigs and buckled shoes, women with even grander topiaries on their heads and pavilions of silk for dresses, and both sexes went around in full white pancake makeup with black beauty marks on their cheeks. Truly divine, truly rock and roll.
Knowing what I know now about the filmmaking process, Castrato was a completely unrealistic project for a first-time director, way too expensive and risky in terms of audience; movies are not where you ought to seek to be fully self-expressed. Eventually, a Franco-Italian co-production starring Stefano Dionisi, Farinelli, based on the real singer, was made and released in 1994. It wasn’t very good, too melodramatic, but by then I’d moved on to other ideas and didn’t care that my long-time pet project had been made.
TRUTH IN THE STACKS
A good ten years after my flirtation with making Castrato, and around four after my first encounter with Indian hijras, I found myself in New York lying in bed next to the boy who had seduced me up on the streets in Mumbai. I got to the portion of Edward Rice’s biography when he talks about Burton’s own fascination and study of eunuchs. And my interest was renewed, this time to write my own book, a fictionalized tale set in India about some version of me as the hero, of course, and his misadventures with hijras and other uniquely Indian oddities.
This was the early nineties, just before the dawn of the Internet as we know it, and way before the ascendance of Lord Google the Omniscient. Back then we did research the old-fashioned way: in a library. Off I trotted to the New York Public Library on 42nd Street to find out what I could about those curious creatures I’d met India, who had so embarrassed me the afternoon I met my boyfriend.
I was lucky to find a book that had been published just a few years before, Neither Man nor Woman: the Hijras of India by Serena Nanda, which was eminently readable and set me straight on a number of facts about street eunuchs.
The roving bands that I had met were in fact organized quite rigidly, based on the traditional Indian guru/disciple relationship, very like the ‘houses’ portrayed in the documentary about voguing Paris is Burning. The house mother, or guru-mata, takes in a disciple, or chela, upon payment of a fee, often paid by the disciple’s sponsor — the hijra who befriended the gender-dysphoric young man — to be repaid via future earnings.
The chela then begins an apprenticeship with his hijra group, as in any ashram, by playing instruments to accompany the senior dancers and performers, and begging on the streets on the designated day of the week. This process can take years, during which the disciple has plenty of time to decide if he wants to go through with the final transition process — this was a far cry from the pervasive myth in India that hijras kidnap boys and castrate them against their will, as I’d always suspected.
Indeed, hijras are another example of one of the more admirable aspects of Indian society: every possible iteration of human nature, every avatar we can be, has a functional place in the culture. Schizophrenic? Off to the saddhus you go to grow dreads, smear your body in ash, don a loincloth or nothing at all, and become a holy man, where you can smoke hash and opium, both sacred to Lord Shiva, all day, and have as many psychotic breaks as your mind can hold — you’ll be considered all the holier for them.
Feel you weren’t meant to have a cock and balls, that you must live you life presenting as a woman rather than the norm for men? Go earn your living with the hijras, blessing children, performing outside weddings, or turning the occasional trick when you’re horny; as Burton noted a century and a half before about Ottoman eunuchs, a castrated male’s sexual energy is redirected to the second erogenous area that every man has, his prostate, and turbo-charges it. And quite a good living it is from an Indian point of view: there are a lot of male children born in India; a lot of weddings; a lot of blessings to bestow; a lot of horny men with no access to women who are happy to stimulate your prostate.
Nanda explained that when a disciple feels he’s ready to become a full eunuch, he is taken into seclusion to meditate and pray to the deity sacred to hijras, Bahuchara-mata.
Legend has it that Bahuchara was the daughter of a charan—a semi-divine being—whose caravan was attacked while she was traveling. Rather than be raped, she cut off her breasts and cursed the bandits with impotency, which could only be lifted once they dressed like women and worshipped her as a deity. Most Hindu deities have an animal as a vehicle: Shiva has Nandi the bull; his wife, Durga, travels on a tiger named Dawon; their son, elephant-headed Ganesha, rides a rat named Mooshak, whose temple in Bikaner I took my mother to; Bahuchara sits astride a rooster — the symbolism is fairly clear, especially when the vehicle is considered an aspect of Existence that a deity has dominion over.
When the disciple is ready, his genitalia—the full package, not just the testicles like the European castrati—are bound tightly with string at the base, like a cock ring. With the guru-mata present, the disciple prays and chants while staring at the image of Bahuchara, and when he sees the goddess smile, he knows she is giving the go-ahead, with her blessing. He nods and his genitalia are removed entirely with one slice of a sharp knife. There is no cauterization, no anesthesia. The disciple must experience what the goddess herself felt when she self-mutilated. The blood flows out as the hijra’s first menses, and his masculinity drains away. The goddess enters him, and then he is a she. And the hijras go doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo.
Despite the gruesome, risky procedure, this process of sacrificing oneself to become one’s true self is probably the greatest act of bravery I can think of, other than sacrificing your life. This is how I know that transsexuality is as much human nature as sexuality is.
BEDBUGS AND DISAPPOINTMENT
I had to abandon my eunuch book project to do paid work; I was also unsure if I had it in me to be a novelist. My next projects in India were the script for Pamela Rooks’ Miss Beatty Children, and a travelogue art book I art directed and produced, Bharat Tasvir, photographed by Marcus Leatherdale. We journeyed around India in a shuddering, diesel-fueled van for three months photographing my friends and colleagues, and the various cultural curiosities I’d encountered over the years.
This had to include a trip to the Bahuchara Temple, but at that point nobody, not even Serena Nanda, was quite sure where it was — Nanda maintained it was a closely guarded hijra secret. Again, Lord Google-ji, whose vehicle is the computer, had yet to be born; if I type in a query now, pages of information come up about the temple. But back then I was once more forced to do things the old-fashioned way: I had to ask.
It was wedding season in Delhi while I was writing Children and prepping for the Leatherdale trek. Weddings are another hijra haunt. Every time saw a band of them camped outside a wedding shamiana tent I would trot over, much to the horror of other guests, squat by the senior-most hijra and ask, “Bahuchara-mata ka mandir kahan hain?”
I was given a different answer every time: Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Bihar. I loved the puzzle, the idea of finding something that few outsiders had ever been to; it’s the sort of mystery and adventure my hero Richard Burton would have loved, too, I was sure of it. Somehow, finally, I got the truth: It was in the town of Becharaji in Gujarat, a hundred and ten kilometers west of Ahmedabad.
Rather than crossing the Mountains of the Moon with a tribe of Masai warriors like Burton, our dilapidated, once-turquoise diesel van bumped along single-lane monsoon-devastated roads, avoiding potholes when we could, but generally hitting every one of them along the way. It must have taken us four hours to get there from Ahmedabad, and what a sad sight it was when we arrived. I note from recent images of the temple that a fresh coat of paint has been applied since we were there, brightly hued banners strung across the domes; at the time I’d never seen a grayer, dustier Hindu temple, which much like any other I’d been to.
What was I expecting? I guess a Bollywood version of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, set in a zany bazaar full of colorful transsexuals in saris, like the pictures I’ve chosen to illustrate this essay.
There were hijras, however, but not many of them. It filled up during the annual pilgrimage for Bahuchara’s festival, when it became more like what I envisioned it to be when I began the long process of finding where it was, but we’d missed that by months. Just as Burton had observed about eunuchs, they were all elderly, but I’m not sure that it’s hijras in particular who become increasingly pious as they reach the end of life as much as it is Indians in general. Marcus photographed a few of them, but they were decidedly sullen and un-colorful, and the fact he was shooting in black and white didn’t help. The results didn’t make the final cut.
The worst part was our sleeping quarters. There wasn’t even a one-star hotel. The entire team, driver included, had to sleep in a traditional pilgrim’s dharamsala hostel, on a single huge bed made from burlap, stuffed with perhaps cotton, perhaps straw. a traditional pilgrim’s hostel. The sheets were ancient and yellow with grime. The dank walls, swollen and streaked by many monsoons, reminded me of a David Lynch nightmare sequence. But it was the voracious bedbugs I remember most. The whole experience was the worst I have ever been through in all my time in India — that’s saying a lot.
It’s good to know that the once-shunned hijras are now being encouraged to undergo proper gender-reassignment surgery; there are NGO support groups to help them. And in 2007, a British trans person from Tooting in Southwest London, Steven “Pamela” Cooper, was declared an incarnation of Bahuchara-mata, which seems to have added some glamour to the dusty town of Bacharaji itself, where he lives with around eighty hijras.
Formerly unemployed, Pamela now makes a decent living doling out fertility blessings, even though he hasn’t undergone the full operation, much to the understandable wrath of the real eunuchs living at the temple. He describes himself as “both male and female.”
As I’m sure the goddess herself would agree, that’s simply divine.