Paper Short Abstract:

We reflect on our process of creating a semi-fictional graphic narrative based on ethnographic research with hijras, an Indian community of transgendered ritual specialists. “Unwriting” academic arguments through illustration, we produced a form relatively easy to circulate outside academia.

Paper Abstract:

Our paper reflects on our process of creating a semi-fictional graphic narrative based on ethnographic research with hijras, an Indian community of transgendered ritual specialists, and on “unwriting” academic theory and archival documents through illustration. Narrativizing queer identities in India is a fraught exercise, often reproducing a landscape of Orientalist tropes. In the colonial period, British anthropologists and police wrote prolifically on hijras, courtesans, thugs, and other supposedly “Criminal Tribes,” in genres ranging from forensic science to sensationalist fiction. Contemporary definitions of sexuality and gender emerge from this colonial legacy, so turning to the colonial archive to “recover lost voices” or publishing “hijra life histories” can inadvertently reproduce the terms of coloniality. Indeed, in recent years, hijra activists and their allies have turned to poetry, fiction, autoethnography and performance, precisely to contest the authority of the foreign “anthropological gaze.”

Inspired by the creative productions of transgender activists in India, as well as the impulse to examine the dialogic relationship between fiction and fact in the colonial archive, we created a graphic narrative about the history of Criminal Tribes legislation. Bringing together historical fragments and using the affordances of the comic genre, we staged hypothetical encounters between East India Company officials, hijras, Mughal emperors and upper-caste elites. Rather than draw directly on archival documents, we imagined the scenes of their production, creating composite characters and humorous dialogue. We are currently translating our 12-page comic into Tamil, exploring how alternative genres can facilitate more co-creation between anthropologists and their interlocutors.