Hijra, Khasua. [155]--The class of eunuchs, who form a separate
community, recruited by the admission of persons born with this
deformity or reduced to the like condition by amputation. In Saugor
it is said that the Khasuas are natural and the Hijras artificial
eunuchs, and the Khasuas deny that they admit Hijras into their
society. They may be either Hindus or Muhammadans by birth, but all
become Muhammadans. Children born in the condition of eunuchs are
usually made over to the Khasuas by their parents. The caste are
beggars, and also sing and dance at weddings and at the births of
male children, and obtain presents of grain from the cultivators
at seedtime and harvest. They wear female clothes and ornaments and
assume the names of women. They are admitted to mosques, but have to
stand behind the women, and in Saugor they have their own mosque. They
observe Muhammadan rites and festivals generally, and are permitted
to smoke from the huqqas of other Muhammadans. They are governed by a
caste panchayat or committee, which imposes fines but does not expel
any member from the community. Each Khasua has a beat or locality
reserved to him for begging and no other may infringe on it, violations
of this rule being punished by the committee. Sometimes a well-to-do
Khasua adopts an orphan and celebrates the child's marriage with as
much expense and display as he can afford, and the Kazi officiates
at the ceremony.
The Hijras form apparently a separate group, and the following
account of them is mainly taken from the Bombay Gazetteer. [156]
In Gujarat they are the emasculated male votaries of the goddess
Bouchera or Behechra, a sister of Devi. She is the spirit of a
martyred Charan or Bhat woman. Some Charan women were travelling
from Sulkhunpur in Gujarat when they were attacked and plundered by
Kolis. One of the women, of the name of Bouchera, snatched a sword
from a boy who attended her and with it cut off both her breasts. She
immediately perished, and was deified and worshipped as a form of
Devi in the Chunwal. [157] The Hijras usually mutilate themselves in
the performance of a religious vow, sometimes taken by the mother as
a means of obtaining children, and in rare cases by the boy himself
to obtain recovery by the favour of the goddess from a dangerous
illness. [158] Hence it is clear that they worship Boucheraji on
the ground that she obtained divine honours by self-mutilation and
should enable her votaries to do the same. But the real reason for
the Charan woman cutting off her breasts was no doubt that her ghost
might haunt and destroy the Koli robbers, in accordance with the
usual practice of the Charans. [159] As a further fulfilment of their
vow the Hijras pull out the hair of their beards and moustaches,
bore their ears and noses for female ornaments, and affect female
speech and manners. The meaning of the vow would appear to be that
the mother sacrifices her great blessing of a boy child and transforms
him after a fashion into a girl, at the same time devoting him to the
service of the goddess. Similarly, as a much milder form of the same
idea, a mother whose sons have died will sometimes bore the nose of a
later-born son and put a small nose-ring in it to make believe he is
a girl. But in this case the aim is also partly to cheat the goddess
or the evil spirits who cause the death of children, and make them
think the boy is a girl and therefore not worth taking.
The rite of mutilation is described by Mr. Faridi as follows: "The
initiation takes place at the temple of the goddess Behechra about 60
miles from Ahmadabad, where the neophyte repairs under the guardianship
or adoption of some older member of the brotherhood. The lad is called
the daughter of the old Hijra his guardian. The emasculation is a
secret rite and takes place under the direction of the chief Hijra
priest of Behechra. It is said that the operation and initiation
are held in a house with closed doors, where all the Hijras meet
in holiday dress. A special dish of fried pastry is cooked, and
the neophyte is bathed, dressed in red female attire, decked with
flower-garlands and seated on a stool in the middle of the room,
while the others sing to the accompaniment of a small drum and copper
cymbals. Another room is prepared for the operation, soft ashes being
spread on the floor and piled in a heap in the centre. When the time
for the operation approaches, the neophyte is led to the room and
is made to lie on his back on the ash-heap. The operator approaches
chewing betel-leaf. The hands and legs of the neophyte are firmly
held by some one of the fraternity, and the operator, carelessly
standing near with an unconcerned air, when he finds the attention
of his patient otherwise occupied, with great dexterity and with one
stroke completely cuts off the genital organs. He spits betel and
areca juice on the wound and staunches the bleeding with a handful
of the ashes of the babul. [160] The operation is dangerous and not
uncommonly fatal." Another method is to hold the organs in a cleft
bamboo and slice them off. The Hijras are beggars like the Khasuas,
and sometimes become very importunate. Soon after the birth of a
child in Gujarat the hated Hijras or eunuchs crowd round the house for
gifts. If the demand of one of them is refused the whole rank and file
of the local fraternity besiege the house with indecent clamour and
gesture. Their claim to alms rests, as with other religious mendicants,
in the sacred character which attaches to them. In Bombay there is
also a belief that the god Hanuman cries out once in twelve years,
and that those men who hear him are transformed into eunuchs. [161]
Some of them make money by allowing spectators to look at the mutilated
part of their body, and also by the practice of pederasty.
Homosexual practices are believed to be distinctly rare among Hindus,
and not common among Muhammadans of the Central Provinces. For this the
early age of marriage may probably be considered a principal cause. The
Hindu sacred books, however, do not attach severe penalties to this
offence. "According to the Laws of Manu, a twice-born man who commits
an unnatural offence with a male, or has intercourse with a female in
a cart drawn by oxen, in water or in the daytime, shall bathe, dressed
in his clothes; and all these are reckoned as minor offences." [162]
In his Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas Dr. Westermarck shows
that, apart from the genuine cases of sexual perversion, as to the
frequency of which opinions differ, homosexual love frequently arises
in three conditions of society. These are, when women are actually
scarce, as among the Australian aborigines and other primitive races;
when the men are frequently engaged in war or in predatory expeditions
and are separated from their wives for long periods, a condition
which accounts for its prevalence among the Sikhs and Pathans;
and lastly, when women are secluded and uneducated and hence their
society affords little intellectual pleasure to men. This was the
case in ancient Greece where women received no education and had no
place at the public spectacles which were the chief means of culture;
[163] and the same reason probably accounts for the frequency of the
vice among the Persians and modern Egyptians. "So also it seems that
the ignorance and dulness of Muhammadan women, which is a result of
their total lack of education and their secluded life, is a cause of
homosexual practices; Moors are sometimes heard to defend pederasty
on the plea that the company of boys, who have always news to tell,
is so much more entertaining than the company of women." [164]
The Christian Church in this as in other respects has set a very
high standard of sexual morality. Unnatural crimes were regarded with
peculiar horror in the Middle Ages, and the punishments for them in
English law were burying and burning alive, though these were probably
seldom or never enforced. [165] The attitude of the Church, which
was reflected in the civil law, was partly inherited from the Jews of
the Old Testament, and reinforced by similar conditions in mediaeval
society. In both cases this crime was especially associated with
the heathen and heretics, as shown in Dr. Westermarck's interesting
account: [166]
"According to Genesis, unnatural vice was the sin of a people who
were not the Lord's people, and the Levitical legislation represents
Canaanitish abominations as the chief reason why the Canaanites
were exterminated. Now we know that sodomy entered as an element in
their religion. Besides kedeshoth, or female prostitutes, there were
kedeshim or male prostitutes, attached to their temples. The word
kadesh, translated 'Sodomite,' properly denotes a man dedicated
to a deity; and it appears that such men were consecrated to the
mother of the gods, the famous Dea Syria, whose priests or devotees
they were considered to be. The male devotees of this and other
goddesses were probably in a position analogous to that occupied
by the female devotees of certain gods, who also, as we have seen,
have developed into libertines; and the sodomitic acts committed with
these temple prostitutes may, like the connections with priestesses,
have had in view to transfer blessings to the worshippers. In Morocco
supernatural benefits are expected not only from heterosexual, but
also from homosexual intercourse with a holy person. The kedeshim are
frequently alluded to in the Old Testament, especially in the period
of the monarchy, when rites of foreign origin made their way into
both Israel and Judah. And it is natural that the Yahveh worshipper
should regard their practices with the utmost horror as forming part
of an idolatrous cult.
"The Hebrew conception of homosexual love to some extent affected
Muhammadanism, and passed into Christianity. The notion that it
is a form of sacrilege was here strengthened by the habits of the
Gentiles. St. Paul found the abominations of Sodom prevalent among
nations who had 'changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped
and served the creature more than the creator.' During the Middle Ages
heretics were accused of unnatural vice as a matter of course. Indeed,
so closely was sodomy associated with heresy that the same name was
applied to both. In La Coutume de Touraine-Anjou the word hérite,
which is the ancient form of hérétique, seems to be used in the
sense of 'sodomite'; and the French bougre (from the Latin Bulgarus,
Bulgarian), as also its English synonym, was originally a name given
to a sect of heretics who came from Bulgaria in the eleventh century
and was afterwards applied to other heretics, but at the same time
it became the regular expression for a person guilty of unnatural
intercourse. In mediaeval laws sodomy was also repeatedly mentioned
together with heresy, and the punishment was the same for both. It
thus remained a religious offence of the first order. It was not only
a 'vitium nefandum et super omnia detestandum,' but it was one of
the four 'clamantia peccata,' or crying sins, a 'crime de Majestie,
vers le Roy celestre.' Very naturally, therefore, it has come to be
regarded with somewhat greater leniency by law and public opinion
in proportion as they have emancipated themselves from theological
doctrines. And the fresh light which the scientific study of the sexual
impulse has lately thrown upon the subject of homosexuality must also
necessarily influence the moral ideas relating to it, in so far as no
scrutinising judge can fail to take into account the pressure which
a powerful non-volitional desire exercises upon an agent's will."