queer masculinities

158 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
which the British ultimately undermined the ‘masculine’ women they
found in South Asia – by destroying their sources of income and invalidating
their posts.
Conclusion
Not only did colonialism change gender expectations of men and
women, a determined effort was also made to rid British India of gendervariant
persons. While British colonialism seriously challenged the role
of the hijra, it virtually wiped out the economic framework that supported
women perceived to be masculine by the British. 76 The flourish of
male homoerotic poetry and artwork came to a grinding halt as the
British annexed India for direct rule in the nineteenth century. 77 Sadly,
independence did not stop this process, but only heightened it. 78
I have refrained from using the term ‘queer’ throughout the Mughal
portion of this essay because homoeroticism was often celebrated in text
and art. 79 Though as today, hijras appear to have been marginalized from
their families in precolonial India, they were not outcast from society in
the same manner as the western Sodomite or even as untouchables in
the Hindu caste system. The introduction of European norms of gender
and sexuality, in many ways, ‘queered’ India, and in turn caused the celebration
of male homoeroticism, the support of gender variance, and the
toleration of both to be suppressed in a larger effort to eradicate the same
lost practices which today we historians now try to reclaim by ‘Queering
India’ to borrow Ruth Vanita’s phrase. 80
An article of this scope cannot begin to do justice to this issue, only
to suggest that queer theory must embrace precolonial South Asia and
bring it into a discourse from which it has often been excluded. For
example, is there any resemblance to what we today deem ‘queer’ and
precolonial ‘queerness’ in South Asia? The failed attempts of Akbar and
Islamic fundamentalists to regulate Mughal sexuality complicate the
picture. Sexual acts between Mughal males were technically considered
sinful, but seem to have been largely tolerated and did not destabilize
masculinity unless an adult male took the passive role. The stigmatization
of anal passivity in precolonial South Asia may be said to have a
history of queerness, perhaps more among Hindus than Muslims, more
among adults than youths, but these distinctions are muddled.
Historical hijras have lived, to use the terminology of Carolyn
Dinshaw, in a ‘queer community across time,’ in the sense that they
were marginalized from their families and forced into their own distinct
quasi-caste. 81 Such a ‘community’ connection is not made via