Trans*versality,a hijra politics of knowledge,and Partition postmemory in Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel

Published in 1956, scarcely a decade after the devastation following the apportioning of the Indian subcontinent, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan can be described, almost unarguably, as one of the most perennial of anglophone representations of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. This slim yet emotionally arresting book depicting the effects of Partition violence on a small fictional village lying at the border between the two newly formed nation-states microcosmically captures the collective trauma that haunts South Asia to this day. While this article does not dwell on this book, whose position in the postcolonial Indian canon remains uncontested, ¹ it discusses another, less studied, novel by Singh published almost four decades after Train to Pakistan, which, while remarkably different from it in terms of historical range, formal ambitions, and sheer length, shares some of its aesthetic concerns in its sparse yet resonant depiction of Partition violence.

Published in 1990, Delhi: A Novel (henceforth Delhi) was a highly anticipated book, hailed in its blurb as Singh’s magnum opus, and described by M. P. Bheemappa as a “corollary to his earlier novels” (2013: 1). Yet, despite its long gestation period and thematic richness and narrative complexity, it has remained inexplicably neglected by international scholars of Indian literature, ² possibly on account of its non-linear and fractured diachronic structure, but perhaps also due to the long shadow cast by Train to Pakistan. Delhi is a sprawling historical book featuring a multitude of narrators. As Halina Marlewicz helpfully summarizes, “[v]arious first-person presences in the book epitomize different historical and imaginary figures, such as Tamerlane, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the Persian king Nadir Shah, the Urdu poet Meer Taqi Meer and Bhagmati, the mistress of the main character of the book” (2016: 160). While real historical figures abound in the book, the recurring sections set in postcolonial Delhi are narrated by an ageing Sikh journalist (a fictional yet thinly disguised version of the author) and are titled — even when the character does not feature in them — after his lover Bhagmati, a fictional hijra, ³ who seemingly fortuitously enters into a decades-long emotional and sexual relationship with the diegetic narrator. It is telling of Singh’s trans*versal literary vision that he chooses two religious-minority and gender-diverse fictional focalizers as his main representatives of Delhi, a centrifugal gesture indicating his critical distance from majoritarian (that is, Hindu) and minor-majoritarian (that is, Muslim) discourses on India’s national identity, while also indexing India’s gender and sexual diversity.

This article firstly argues that the nameless Sikh narrator and his hijra lover cement Singh’s trans*versal vision of Delhi, and of India by extension. The narrator renders Bhagmati a metonym for Delhi: a bold choice by the author, since Bhagmati remains religiously eclectic, while her discursively mordant yet politically inclusive commentary on post-Partition Indian history is steeped in a “hijra politics of knowledge” (Lal, 1999). It then observes that despite the fact Delhi does not shy away from depicting the bloody complexity of Hindu, Muslim, and British colonial violence in the city’s history, the violence of the Partition is restricted to one brief chapter late in the book which does not involve either the Sikh protagonist or Bhagmati. It further proposes, via Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s (2015) lucid discussion of postmemory in Partition Indian literature in English, that the book’s seemingly scant dealings with the Partition reveal the lingering trauma of this fateful episode in the subcontinent’s history, and that the anti-Sikh violence following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, which directly involves the contemporary Sikh narrator and his hijra lover here, becomes a manifestation and revisitation of violence linked to the unresolved trauma of the Partition.

Singh’s vision in this book is defined as trans*versal because of its lateral articulation across identity categories in a narrative witnessing the experiences of subjects exceeding cisnormativity. Originally a mathematical principle, transversality was mobilized by Félix Guattari to propose a new dynamic of social organization across axes: “[t]ransversality is a dimension that tries to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is a maximum communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings” (2015: 113). Guattari’s emphasis is on lateral action and its consequence is a proliferation of meanings created by the meeting of multidirectional lines of flight. His concept has been recently reconfigured by Abraham Weil to denote new forms of race and gender liberation in light of the conjoined Black Lives Matter and Black Trans Lives Matter movements:

In the narrowest sense, trans* (as it has become associated with the body) allows for an understanding that there is more than either/or. A broader understanding of trans* as a pollination, or murmur, provides a useful addition particularly in the framework of animality. Implementing the asterisk (trans*versality) offers a way of thinking about the molecular possibilities, in politics and across species, not mediated strictly through normative protocols, capitalism, or the corpus. (2017: 196)

I am most specifically invested here in the implications of the asterisk in trans*versality as a wilful dissolving of binaries activated through the vindication of trans* lives of colour. Weil suggests that “the prefix ‘trans*’ can itself become a methodology” (2017: 196), an approach incepted through queerness that works across fixed identity categories, as well as worldviews. I argue that Singh’s vision in Delhi is trans*versal because he thinks across hermetic gender identity categories and belief systems while giving embodiment — across his own Sikh ethno-religious perspective — to a religiously syncretic trans* subject (that is, the hijra Bhagmati) who remains radically different from himself, yet whose plight enables a plural envisioning of Delhi effectively resisting a singular prescriptive narrative of the nation.

Thinking trans*versally usually involves thinking outside one’s comfort zone. Singh’s narrator is often perturbed by Bhagmati’s unconventional femininity, placed as it is at an angle from cisnormative versions of womanhood, yet he is irresistibly drawn to her wit and sensual charms. As he asserts, “I cannot fix any labels to this diminutive yet strong, sexless yet bawdy woman” (Singh, 1990: 21). ⁴ He continues to build up her ambiguity and ineffability, stating “Bhagmati is not a woman like other women” (28), that she was born intersex and was adopted by a “troupe of hijdas” (29) upon them finding out her rare anatomical configuration. He explains further:

There are as many kinds of hijdas as there are kinds of men and women. Some are almost entirely male, some almost entirely female. Others have the male and female mixed up in different proportions — it is difficult to tell which sex they have more of in their makeup. The reason why they prefer to wear women’s clothes is because it being a man’s world every deviation from accepted standards of masculinity [is] regarded as unmanly. Women are more generous. (29)

According to this description most hijras could be deemed transfeminine, while their reproductive anatomical features are usually placed in a sliding scale between maleness and femaleness. It fits with Vinay Lal’s description of India’s ancient hijra community, which is comprised of people “described variously in scholarly and popular literature alike as eunuchs, transvestites, homosexuals, bisexuals, hermaphrodites, androgynes, transsexuals, and gynemimetics” (1999: 119). Despite the diverse gender and sexual configuration of India’s hijra community, Lal further explains, “[t]he hijras themselves most often distinguish between those who are born hijras — that is, with ambiguous genitals — and those, an undoubtedly much larger number, who are made such through castration” (1999: 119). Bhagmati seems to fit the “classical” image of the so-called “born” hijra: an intersex person who, while partaking of male and female reproductive organs, chooses to embrace her feminine side, and which kindles the desire of cisheterosexual men such as the protagonist of the book.

It is remarkably transgressive that an intersex hijra, a member of a third-gender community that has been as much mythologized as it has been denigrated by India’s cisheteropatriarchal society, should become Singh’s emblem for Delhi. ⁵ The book opens with the following words by the narrator:

I return to Delhi as I return to my mistress Bhagmati when I have had my fill of whoring in foreign lands. Delhi and Bhagmati have a lot in common. Having been long misused by rough people they have learnt to conceal their seductive charms under a mask of repulsive ugliness. […] To the stranger Delhi may appear like a gangrenous accretion of noisy bazaars and mean-looking hovels growing round a few tumble-down forts and mosques along a dead river. […] It is the same with Bhagmati. Those who do not know her find her unattractive. She is dark and has pock-marks on her face. […] Her clothes are loud, her voice louder; her speech bawdy and her manners worse.

This is, as I say, only on the surface […]. What you have to do for things to appear different is to cultivate a sense of belonging to Delhi and an attachment to someone like Bhagmati. (1)

In the narrator’s candid account, the fates of both his hijra lover and the city are intimately and inexorably intertwined, thus inviting a metonymic interpretation. Delhi has been misused by the violent agents of history, similarly to Bhagmati’s abuse by the cisgender biases of Indian society. The narrator thus creates a recurring metonym declaring, “As I have said before I have two passions in my life; my city Delhi and Bhagmati. They have two things in common: they are lots of fun. And they are sterile” (30). The barrenness complementing the fascination can be linked to Bhagmati’s intersexness and to the city’s traumatic history, of which the Partition will turn out to be an important watershed. He extols, “All my life I have been tormented by ghosts. Since Delhi has more ghosts than any other city in the world, life in Delhi can be one long nightmare” (164). While he admits he does not believe in supernatural apparitions, he remains haunted by the lingering presences of the city’s dead, explored through the numerous first-person historical narratives deployed in the book. Meanwhile, Delhi and Bhagmati are rendered physical and metaphysical embodiments of India’s insoluble complexities, trans*versally cutting across politically opposed and hermetic identity categories.

In fact, Bhagmati comes to represent Delhi’s plurality through her spiritual syncretism, which cannot be subsumed to any single ethno-religious narrative of the nation. On welcoming her into his home after she was found beaten up on the street, the narrator records her clamouring:

“In the name of Rama! Do not throw me out! I am too sick to go back to work. If you let me spend this one night here, I swear to Allah I will cause you no further embarrassment. For the sake of your Guru, please!” (How she mouthed the names of Gods — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh!) She looked up at me with tears in her eyes. (36)

He initially makes it sound as though Bhagmati is histrionically enumerating all possible sacred names for the sake of eliciting sympathy, yet her liberality with India’s multiple deities fits the ethno-religious syncretism of the hijra community. While in the Mughal era the hijras were assimilated into the Islamic gender-segregated court — whereby, like other eunuchs in the Islamic world, “they were used as bodyguards for royalty and as guards for holy buildings” (Diehl et al., 2017: 390) — Sarah Newport informs us that hijras have been historically linked to Hinduism: they have traditionally sustained themselves through the practice of badhai, using their fertility powers bestowed upon them by Bahuchara Mata (a Hindu goddess worshipped also by Muslim hijras) to confer remunerated blessings. Newport also stresses their “multi-religious traditions which include, but are not limited to, Hinduism” (2017: 90). Hence, Bhagmati may at first glance seem too discursively eclectic, carelessly throwing about deities’ names. She goes as far as casually invoking Hindu and Muslim gods as she walks through the city, exclaiming “Hai Ramji … Ya Allah” (38; emphasis in original). Yet Bhagmati’s spiritual polyvalence goes beyond playful verbal posturing and is politically significant: it ensures Singh’s metonym for Delhi is impervious to the ethnocentric and religious exclusivism of Indian communalism. ⁶

Furthermore, Bhagmati’s long-lasting sexual and sentimental connection with the Sikh narrator — which she passionately pledges when she states “[a]s Allah is my witness, hereafter you will be the only one. You have been kind to me. I will be forever indebted to you” (42) — circumvents the familiar Hindu/Muslim dichotomy of Indian macropolitics, while invoking the Islamic God before a Sikh man. To her syncretic consciousness there is no inconsistency in mixing the gods of different religions. It would then seem that to Bhagmati’s hijra sensibility the error would be in ascribing India’s identity to any single religious community, or in defending a singular grand narrative of the nation. While such casually bandied-about religious liberality may seem merely performative, it nonetheless constitutes a prominent symptom of Singh’s trans*versal vision: it allows for India’s spiritual polymorphy as articulated by a gender-diverse character who defies communalist religious exclusivism.

The unorthodox blending of religious references in fact parallels the fluidity of South Asia’s hijras, which explains their ability to flout any form of essentialism, going even beyond the notion of the “third gender” enshrined in the Indian law. ⁷ Lal suggests:

While it is possible to sympathize with those readings that project the hijras as fulfilling a “third gender” role that transcends sexual dimorphism, epistemological binarism, and ontological dualism, I have suggested that even the “third gender” designation does not convey the full promise hidden in the term hijras. We shall have to venture, however tentatively, into a zone that might yield what I would describe not merely as a politics of knowledge of hijras, but as a hijra politics of knowledge. (1999: 133)

This hijra politics of knowledge is an epistemic mode resisting easy gender categorization and, by extension, ontological exclusivism. Lal argues that “[t]here is something deeply transgressive about the life choices made by hijras, just as there is a deep anxiety about their identity, since they do not fall within the paradigms of classification and enumeration that are dominant in modern knowledge systems” (1999: 134–35). The hijras’ transgressive politics of knowledge exceeds modern cisnormative understandings of gender and embraces new forms of survival, however precarious (such as sex work), when modernity makes their traditional occupation of badhai untenable; it also resists a singular understanding of India’s religious identity through their assimilation into several faith systems and their religious syncretism; and all through a discursive idiom that is mordant, bawdy, and seemingly — but only seemingly — blasé.

After confronting the narrator’s friend Budh Singh, who disapproves of her, Bhagmati reports:

Arre, son of Budhoo Singh! The great Bhagwan who lives up in the heavens can perform many miracles. He can make a Bhangi (sweeper) into a Brahmin. He can turn a timid Bania (shopkeeper) into a Kshatriya (warrior). He can make a poor hijda into a man or a woman. But even Bhagwan cannot put sense into the skull of a budhoo like you. (122; emphasis in original)

Bhagmati articulates a hijra politics of knowledge through her irreverence towards Indian social mores (such as the caste system), using humorously deployed religious discourse to disarm her opponent, who is clearly prejudiced against hijras, like most of Indian society. Bhaghmati’s hijra wit is sharp as steel here, irreverently mobilizing the discourses of several Indian religions to take on Budh Singh’s cisnormativity.

The mordant discourses underpinning a hijra politics of knowledge end up colouring Singh’s depiction, through Bhagmati’s voice, of the changes to Delhi’s human tapestry in the wake of the Partition:

Bhagmati is very disappointed with me. “All these Punjabis came to Delhi without a penny in their pockets. And look at them now! They own the whole city. They have made palaces for themselves. They live on tandoori chicken and drink whisky. They take their fat wives out to eat the Delhi air in imported motor cars. And look at you! The same little flat, the same Rhat-khatee old motor every part of which makes a noise except its horn. Why even those fellows who came from your village only a few years ago own half of New Delhi and live like krorepaties. What do you get out of killing flies on paper all day long? You haven’t bought me a sari or a bangle for many years.” (314)

Bhagmati’s portrayal of Punjabis who sought refuge in Delhi during the communalist violence of the Partition paints them as social climbers. Yet, instead of turning them into undesirable immigrants or unwelcome usurpers, neither their social mobility nor their citizenship of Delhi is anywhere problematized. While Bhagmati uses the Punjabis as a point of comparison with her financially precarious Sikh lover, her tacit acceptance of them reveals a deep understanding of the city’s ethno-religious diversity. She may be using her hijra wit to accuse her lover of material neglect, yet the socially inclusive ideology underpinning her irreverence reveals a democratic ideal making no distinction between Delhi’s citizens. It is symptomatic of her hijra politics of knowledge that she accepts diversity and fluidity in terms of these identities, offering an aesthetically mordant yet tacitly inclusive view of Delhi as a sanctuary following the Partition.

Delhi’s narrative gradually builds up to this watershed in South Asian history, yet it initially appears as if the book were skirting around the subject. At first glance, the absence of the Partition from most of the book as well as its apparent lack of impact on its main protagonists seems symptomatic of what Kabir terms the Partition’s post-amnesia:

[T]he Indian novel in English is handcuffed to the history of Partition in two ways. It is shaped by the politics that resulted in Partition and that created a specific post-Partition subject, exemplified by the Indian Muslim as minority figure; and it is shaped by the ways in which Partition has been remembered, forgotten and re-remembered by successive generations of writers. (2015: 120)

Although Singh’s main post-Partition subject in Delhi is a Sikh, he is still a member of a religious minority in India, and the book appears at first to evade depicting the Partition in an explicit manner, all of which fits Kabir’s compelling rationale. As a historical fiction writer, however, Singh understands that such a key moment cannot be staved off indefinitely. Bhagmati’s veiled allusions to the Partition generate readerly anticipation, while managing to befit its traumatic nature: the repressed memory of its violence lurks under the surface of the text with premonition.

The events following the Partition are chiefly contained in the chapter titled “The Dispossessed”, narrated by Ram Rakha, from Hadali, in the then-new country of West Pakistan. Singh’s curious choice of a one-off focalizer, which is different from his usual Sikh diegetic narrator, to witness the violence of the Partition may be interpreted as symptomatic of Partition trauma: Singh can only approach Partition violence indirectly, through the eyes of a character not directly aligned with himself, and who affords him a view by proxy of the tragedy as it unfolds. Class differences are the first thing that Ram Rakha notices:

We Hindus and Sikhs lived in brick-built houses and had buffaloes in our courtyards. The Mussalmans lived in mud-huts and looked after our cattle in exchange for a pot of milk a day. We looked down upon them because they were poor. They looked down upon us because we were few and not as big-built as they. (349)

The character seems to rationalize the structural inequalities which must have contributed to the communal resentment leading to the Partition’s uncontainable violence. By the time the dam of communalist violence bursts, inter-faith animosities are not restricted to any single religious group. Due to structural bias against Hindus and Sikhs in the newly born Pakistan, Ram’s family decides to flee to India; the narrative sparsely describes the horrors encountered along the way: “We crossed the Indo-Pakistan border. There were many more corpses along the road. From the shape of their penises I could tell they were Mussalmans. There were lots of women and children among the dead” (352). With chilling economy, Singh’s text does not apportion blame, soberingly charting instead the most material effects of the devastating communalist violence.

Following a stay in a refugee camp in Kurukshetra, the Rakhas settle in New Delhi, where Ram becomes somewhat transfixed by Mahatma Gandhi’s message of interfaith tolerance while being groomed by a clandestine group violently targeting Muslims. The chapter culminates with Gandhi’s assassination and Ram’s instantaneous retaliation on his murderer: “A fit of madness comes over me. I jump on the man and bring him down. I tear the hair off his scalp; I bash his head on the ground and call him all kinds of names: mother-fucker, dog, bastard, son of a pig” (374). Disoriented and traumatized by his own act of violence, Ram ends up weeping and accusing himself of killing his “bap” (374; emphasis in original). In this moment of personal and collective crisis, Ram accuses himself of bringing about Gandhi’s death. The chapter encapsulates the desperation and trauma assailing Partition violence: Ram’s precarious journey from Pakistan to India, his ambivalent reverence towards Gandhi and his suspicion of Muslims, clinched by his lethal battering of Gandhi’s murderer — all point to the violence of the Partition as being a self-fulfilling prophecy. The text suggests that any violence meted out on an-other ethno-religious group presently falls back into one’s own community. Although Ram may be traumatically dissociating when he asserts that “I killed [my father] with my own hands” (374), Singh’s gesture is politically significant, for we know Gandhi was killed not by a Muslim, but by a Hindu, ⁸ who clearly disapproved of his message of inter-religious tolerance encouraging acceptance of Indian Muslims. In a nutshell, this is not just a matter of opposed religious communities at war with each other, but of members of the same religious community — in this case India’s Hindus — turning on each other with the form of murderous violence often reserved for the religious “other”.

Ram’s violence constitutes a primal form of retaliatory aggression kindled by the well-stoked fire of inter-religious hatred (using the epithet “son of a pig”, which would be particularly offensive to Muslims), yet it may initially perturb the reader that the violence of the Partition is not directly witnessed by the focalizers of Delhi’s postcolonial present, namely the Sikh narrator and Bhagmati. However, this chapter and the anti-Sikh violence following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 both qualify the interpretation of the Partition’s post-amnesia and postmemory in the book. Mobilizing the concept of trauma to address the Partition, Sukeshi Kamra observes:

[W]riting the history of violence comes with its own set of problems. The problem is more severe if we add to it what Cathy Caruth calls “the difficult truth” that this is a history “constituted by the very incomprehensibility of its occurrence”. (2006: 1163)

Caruth’s and Kamra’s term are echoed by Gyanendra Pandey in Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (2001), which, while analysing the report of a civil servant, highlights ‘the incomprehensibility of it all’ (178). Delhi illustrates the incomprehensibility of Partition violence, a key element of its trauma, the haunting ineffability of which is uncannily revisited in India’s subsequent instances of communalist violence.

If the book opens with the narrator’s rescue of Bhagmati after she is found beaten up on the street, the narrative comes full circle with her rescue of the narrator during the anti-Sikh rampage following the then prime minister’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. ⁹ It is an unrecognizable Bhagmati who erupts in the narrator’s flat to warn him of the oncoming onslaught: “Sparse hair daubed with henna. No teeth. Squashed mouth. Hair-bristle about her chin. Is this the same Bhagmati I had lusted after most of my lustful years?” (386). An embodied metonym of the city’s dramatic unravelling, Bhagmati reports this before enquiring after the narrator’s Sikh friend Budh Singh: “They are killing every Sikh they see on the road, burning their taxis, trucks, scooters. Connaught Place is on fire. They are looting every Sikh shop, office, hotel. And you are sitting here waiting for them to come and kill you!” (387). The book ends with an arresting description of Budh Singh’s assassination by a mob of Hindu youths, who begin by cutting his sacrosanct beard and hair, witnessed by the Sikh narrator and his hijra lover:

They get down to serious business. A boy gets a car tyre, fills its inside rim with petrol and lights in. It is a fiery garland. Two boys hold it over Budh Singh and slowly bring it down over his head to his shoulders. Budh Singh screams in agony as he crumples down to the ground. The boys laugh and give him the Sikh call of victory: “Boley So Nihal! Sat Sri Akal.” (391)

The “fiery garland”, a transmutation of the flower garlands commonly associated with Hinduism, accents the murder of the Sikh man. It is not coincidental that the violence conjured in the book’s conclusion recalls most vividly the inter-religious violence following the Partition, offered as an anaphoric form of postmemory, witnessed and recounted by the diegetic narrator. Through its revisitation of past trauma, it can be concluded that this retaliatory communalist aggression is not posited in Delhi as belonging to the long history of South Asia, but as insidiously linked most specifically to the Partition. The trauma of the Partition may be often discursively repressed (as traumas tend to be), and, for most of the book, it would seem that Singh’s narrative suffers from the Partition’s post-amnesia, yet this absence seems instead to be a form of narratological premonition: once the book finally tackles Partition violence in a highly charged and condensed chapter, the narrative reveals how this trauma is cyclically revisited on India’s religious communities. While the book does not explicitly comment on the psychological reasons for such horrific and unbridled violence, its circular structure (best exemplified by the narrator’s rescue of Bhagmati and her subsequent rescue of him), the initial muting of the Partition and its eventual highly-charged depiction, and the cyclical and anaphoric recurrence of communalist violence, support an interpretation of Delhi as symptomatic of — and then antidote to — the Partition’s post-amnesia; a book constructing the Partition as one long nightmare at the heart of modern Indian life. That Singh chooses a diegetic narrator highly resembling himself supports the article’s interpretation of the book as a narratological form of Partition postmemory, while the fact that the Partition is witnessed by a different one-off narrator may reveal the ongoing trauma of Partition in Singh’s own sensibility. In addition, the nameless narrator and his being routinely accompanied by the hijra Bhagmati reveals the importance of marginal and minority subject positions for the trans*versal memorialization of Indian history.