“Listen, I am not diseased. I consider myself a woman, but I possessed the form of a man. I wanted to rid myself of that form and live as a complete woman. How can that be wrong?”
The question sounds straightforward and the answer simple when A. Revathi asks. But a hijra who is gawked at as a freak every time she steps into public space and encounters brutality every step of the way knows that it is often the simplest questions that elude answers.
Revathi's autobiography, “The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story” (Penguin, Rs. 299), is an attempt to pose this question and draw the readers into a discussion by laying bare her experiences of 50-odd years, which often seem to cross the borders of human endurance.
Starting with her childhood in a village near Namakkal in Tamil Nadu, where she was born Doraisamy, the book takes the reader through her long and treacherous emotional and physical journey seeking a life of dignity.
To be able to live as a woman, to escape the constant violence by her family and community, Revathi ran away to Delhi and later to Bombay to join communes of hijras. She eventually found her calling as an activist of the community in Bangalore, where she now works for the organisation Sangama.
The book also offers a rare peek into the complex and closed community of hijras which follows a unique set of customs that borrow from Hindu and Islamic faiths. Centred around the strictly hierarchical guru-chela relationship between a senior hijra and a new entrant to the community, it provides an alternative family. But again, this structure can also be stiflingly authoritarian.
In her tiny house in Ulsoor area, where she is called “aunty” by children in the neighbourhood, Revathi is able to look back at her traumatic life with a surprising degree of equanimity. She has today also established a cordial relationship with her family back in Tamil Nadu.
Not settling any scores here
“I have not written this book to express bitterness or settle scores. I am just telling my story as it happened and hoping people would understand someone like me better,” she smiles. In her book, Revathi is able to narrate even the most horrific stories of harassment at the hands of police and rowdies or the trauma of a clandestine sex change surgery in a matter-of-fact style.
She hopes that the autobiography will be as educative for the next generation of transgender people. “A young hijra discovering her sexuality should also know what awaits her in the world.” Her first collection of hijra narratives in Tamil, “Unarvum, Uruvamum”, won much acclaim and set a precedent for such writings.
Revathi is happy to have seen things change for the better at least to a limited extent in her own lifetime. Thanks to mobilisation and awareness creation within the community, police harassment is no longer an accepted way of life. Reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code a year ago, which de-criminalised “unnatural sex”, has been a major victory for the sexuality minority community.
“People always argue that hijras should behave in a way that is acceptable to society and should not indulge in begging and sex work. But tell me, what alternatives do they have? How many people would accept them for what they are in a school or employ them in an office?” she asks.
She grows pensive and teary-eyed as she adds: “Everybody says hirjas misbehave. But nobody gives a thought to how society misbehaves towards them.” Real change will come, she feels, only when people can accept that “there can be maleness in female body and femaleness in a male body.”
Famila forever
Her eyes well up again as she remembers Famila, her favourite chela and a fiery activist who committed suicide some years ago. “She was a big support to me at my worst moments of crisis. I can't believe to this day that she went like that,” says Revathi, looking fondly at the picture of Famila she has hung on the wall. The death, she adds, reflects how deep-seated insecurities can defeat the best of spirits in the community.
In one of her poems in Tamil, Revathi sums up this sense of alienation: “In the garden of love/ Was planted the seed of grace./ Watered with goodness/ A plant sprouted/ tender, caring flower – a flower/ That does not adorn/ Sacred sites and prayer rooms.”
