Queering Assamese Bihu Festival Performance

Assamese queer expression

As Bihu music and dance have been positioned to represent Assamese identity on the world stage, heteronormative narratives of desire have obscured the ways in which queer performance has played a role in the festival. In 2011, I witnessed a village Bihu performance that centred around a cisgender man performing as nasoni, dressed in mekhela sador (the customary Assamese feminine dress: stitched blouse and sari-like upper draped cloth wrapped around a stitched skirt). His wrists were adorned with silver kharu bracelets, and his head was wrapped in a gamusa cloth tied at the nape of his neck like a khupa (nasoni’s bun). Although no one reacted in a way to signal that this was unusual, the practice of cross-dressing in association with Bihu performance was never mentioned to me during the subsequent seven years of research. ⁴ During a 2018 interview with an activist from rural Assam who identifies as a lesbian, I asked if she had ever heard about or seen a man dressing up as nasoni and dancing Bihu. ‘No’, she replied. ‘I know about Bhaona … and [in] Bihar they also have launda naach’, ⁵ she said, drawing connections between practices of cross-dressing in different regions of India. I showed her a picture I had taken during the 2011 performance and told her the story of that encounter. ‘Oh!’, she exclaimed, ‘I’ve seen this in our village also. In a men’s group. Some feminine men in our village. They do this. They dress up as women and dance’. Curious, I followed up by asking, ‘So, before you said you’d never seen it, and now you just all of a sudden remembered?’. Without skipping a beat, she replied, ‘Yeah because I was quite young, I was quite small, and I suddenly saw this image and I remembered someone dancing like this in our village’.

She shared with me that one of her uncles who she described as ‘very effeminate’ once dressed up as a woman and danced Bihu, but she had been discouraged from asking questions about it as a child and only just remembered this after the picture jogged her memory. She mused that cross-dressing in Bhaona and to a certain extent in Bihu may have contributed to how effeminate men ‘survived in a village space which was very patriarchal, very masculine’ and revealed her own fear of engaging her village community in conversations around these issues, saying, ‘I’m very scared to ask these questions to people back there. They will start questioning my identity so I don’t ask’. These fears present significant barriers to queer activists who are working to change government policies and broader-scale institutional practices. Activists like my interviewee may be reluctant to address issues at the community level where their interventions can potentially make a greater impact but also put them at even greater risk.

In urban Guwahati, however, openly expressing queer identity through Bihu may be less fraught, especially during collective gatherings of queer activists from across the Northeast. During the 2018 Guwahati Pride March, Abhijit Ghosh held a sign that proclaimed ‘I’m gay, hobo de’ (‘I’m gay, let it be’) above a drawing of a man holding a double-reed buffalo horn pepa pressed to his lips, head tilted back in the customary way. Abhijit told me that he chose the pepa because it is one of the most symbolic musical instruments used in Bihu. He said, ‘I’m making a declaration, so it makes sense to use a symbol which is connected with sound’. He spoke about the importance of incorporating local cultural symbols into the movement, since, as he put it, ‘the concept of Pride Marches is very Western-centric. And when you say that you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer or like you’re non-heterosexual, or unconventional gender identity, then it is always assumed that it comes from a Western influence’. He went on to explain that when building a movement and ‘creating awareness that we exist, we have to do it in a language … which people can understand’.

In an article titled ‘Can Bihu be queer?’ (2015), published in Xukia’s inaugural issue of The Forbidden zine, transmasculine queer feminist researcher and activist Ditilekha Sharma cites the practice of cross-dressing as a primary example of the transgressive potential in Bihu performance. Sharma’s (ibid., p. 10) prose is peppered with double negatives and questions rather than declarations of queer history, suggesting, for example, that ‘it is not an unknown fact that at a certain point of time men dressed up as women and performed’, and asking, ‘Would this not be considered as homoerotic expressions of sexuality?’. The tentative quality of Sharma’s approach opens up a space for naming and claiming the continuity of queer history in Bihu. Queer theory, such as Judith Butler’s (1990) concept of performativity, becomes apparent through Sharma’s argument that in Bihu, ‘cross dressing can be considered as subversive and queer, because in cross dressing there is a disparity between the anatomical sex, gender identity and the gender performance of the individual’. Sharma quotes one song from the women-only Jeng Bihu repertoire, noting how it acknowledges the existence of ‘masculine’ women and the social tensions surrounding love between individuals with non-normative identities:

The steep flow of the river will slip and fall, you won’t be able to catch the flow,

Don’t look at the face of a boyish girl, she will give hope and make you hopeless.

(cited in Sharma, 2015, p. 10) ⁶

Sharma writes, ‘Exclusively women’s spaces where the woman’s body is performed in a highly sexualised manner has been articulated as inundated with the queer gaze. Could the Jeng Bihu space also be seen as a space where queer gaze operates?’ (ibid.). Sharma’s queer analysis of Bihu song texts and performance practices frames Bihu as an important cultural arena in which ‘non-normativity is sanctioned’, while recognising how queer expression is rendered invisible by Assamese society at large. Sharma’s research, the activists interviewed above and the examples I analyse below suggest that the textual, visual, sonic and embodied language of Bihu is being mobilised as a vehicle to reveal a long history of Assamese queer expression that is woven into the fabric of Assamese culture.

Bihu as soundscape for queer desire

While queer activists and scholars have worked to achieve greater visibility for queer individuals and to reveal the local cultural roots of queer identity, popular media offers an even greater reach for demonstrating Bihu’s queer potential. The feature-length film Jonaki Poruwa (Fireflies) (2019), which has been heralded as the first queer Assamese film, explores the experience of a young transwoman growing into her identity in an Assamese village. I suggest below that the film intentionally incorporates Bihu sounds and symbols in connection with queer desire. The film’s main character, Jahnu, who struggles daily with being assigned a male gender identity, endures physical and emotional abuse from local village boys and men in response to his feminine behaviour. ⁷ After being sexually assaulted by his maths teacher, Jahnu vows to hide who he truly is, until he runs into Palash, a gay farmer from the village who has been living in a remote hut in the fields, far from the prying eyes of the community. Jahnu notices what he calls a nasoni mekhela sador inside Palash’s hut, and Palash proceeds to drape it across Jahnu’s body as they share a tender glance. This moment, marked by the shared practice of putting on a nasoni mekhela sador, the embodiment of femininity on many levels, is a turning point in the film. Jahnu no longer cringes when the other village boys insult him, but instead walks indifferently past them.

Later that evening, Jahnu locks himself in his room, lovestruck from his encounter with Palash, and we hear the music of local Bihu celebrations permeating the walls of his home. As the thunderous sound of the dhol drums and the joyous shouts of the performers invite all within earshot to move their bodies in sync with the iconic, sensual Bihu rhythm, Jahnu caresses his pillow, imagining himself lying with Palash in the sand near the riverbank. Whether the film’s creators intended to position Bihu as a driving force behind the images of Janhu’s imagined intimate encounters with Palash, or merely as an accompaniment to them, the connection between Bihu and desire is clear in this scene. The fact that queer desire is being animated by the sounds of Bihu is significant.

Ultimately, Jahnu seeks out the guidance of Pinky, a hijra ⁸ who lives in the community with her guru Munni and other hijra disciples on the outskirts of Guwahati. Jahnu mentions multiple times during the film that he wants to earn money and undergo an operation to become a woman. Pinky explains that she can’t bend the rules for Jahnu—he must take a guru if he wants the help and protection of the hijra community. During the disciple ordination ceremony, Jahnu receives a new name: Jahnavi. She moves to Mumbai and begins her new life as a transwoman supported by an extensive network of hijra contacts and mentors. Although we don’t see queer individuals performing Bihu in Jonaki Poruwa, the importance of dressing up in nasoni mekhela sador as a turning point in J’s journey, and the sonic presence of Bihu in J’s fantasies, demonstrates how Bihu expresses queer desire. Jonaki Poruwa also raises the complex issue of hijra identity as one that is marginalised within the queer community and exists in tension with transgender rights discourse.

In contrast, the short advocacy film ‘Aami Tritiyo’ (‘We, the Third’) advocates for queer inclusion in Bihu performance by featuring a hijra nasoni and framing her identity as aligned with the struggle for transgender rights. ⁹ ‘Aami Tritiyo’ was released on YouTube in January 2021 by the All Assam Transgender Association (AATA) to draw attention to the continued discrimination against transgender and hijra individuals in Assam. This work is particularly challenging in Assam, where hijra culture is perceived as an import from North India, rather than indigenous to the Northeast region. Advocating, as this film does, for acceptance of a transgender or hijra nasoni into the courtyard of a village home, the ritual space of springtime renewal and blessings for the New Year is a radical call to action. The subtext of the film is that a transwoman is a woman and should be embraced as a nasoni, that most valued embodiment of Assamese femininity.

‘Aami Tritiyo’ opens with Bihu performers dressed in Assamese muga silk walking single file into the courtyard of the village home and circling around their troupe leader with wide smiles. With a loud shout, the drummers launch into a sequence of complex rhythmic patterns that compel anyone within earshot to move their body to the beat. The film cuts to a scene of a woman who, having heard the drum’s call, runs to join the group, but is stopped abruptly by a man who says, ‘You’re not a girl. You’re a hijra’. The Bihu performers continue in joyful abandon as the woman watches tearfully. A few moments later, one of the performers approaches and invites her to join. The whole group surrounds her, and she becomes the central dancer around whom the others circumambulate. The film ends with a call for inclusion in English text: ‘Breaking all the gender stereotype, let us celebrate Bihu together’. The lead role, the nasoni, is played by Bonti Kinner, who was appointed along with the film’s producer and director, judge Swati Bidhan Baruah, as one of the six members of the Transgender Welfare Board established by the Government of Assam in June 2020 (Das, 2020). The close relationship between ‘Aami Tritiyo’’s message and the public activism of the film’s creators participates in an important conversation about the connections and distinctions between hijra and transgender identities (Roy, 2016).

claiming a lineage of Assamese queer expression through Bihu

Rather than focusing on the grand Bihu stages of urban Guwahati neighbourhood celebrations or the weekly episodes of Bihu reality television competitions—sites of pageantry where normative performance expectations are explicitly articulated through the comments made by organising committee members and judges, respectively—Assamese activists, artists and scholars are writing queer history through queer readings of Bihu song texts and village performances, and by incorporating Bihu songs and themes into queer protest movements and cinematic expressions. Claiming continuity between these practices over time demonstrates how queer expression may in fact be central to Bihu’s power as a space for experimenting with and transgressing normative expectations for gender and sexuality through song, dress, dance and erotic encounter. Bihu’s importance to the construction of a normative Assamese identity makes these interventions particularly powerful, as they open up a space to recognise queer subjectivities as not merely present and marginal to Assamese cultural politics, but central to one of its core institutions: the Bihu festival.