Globalising through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras, and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India

Since the 1990s, LGBTQ movements in India have gained visibility and some degree of state recognition and rights. This talk explores how this process has resulted in constrained forms of representation and upward mobility for non-elite, non-metropolitan communities such as kothis and hijras, a spectrum of trans feminine people typically assigned male at birth. Drawing on my book Globalising through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras, and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India (Bloomsbury 2024), I will outline how these communities facilitate the transregional expansion of queer politics but remain irreducible to emerging identity categories and become subordinated through linguistic and scalar hierarchies that reinforce inequities of class and caste. The book analyses this process through the framework of 'vernacularisation,' retheorising it as not the local adaptation or translation of global/transnational discourses but as the positioning of non-elite communities and discourses as local or vernacular. The talk will touch upon how vernacularisation erases the role of non-elite communities in (trans)national LGBTQ movements and delegitimises kothi-hijra discourses and practices that contravene dominant forms of LGBTQ+ identity politics aligned with transnational capitalism, liberalism, caste, and/or nationalism. Simultaneously, it will explore how such communities rearticulate LGBTQ+ discourses in potentially liberatory ways.

Date and Time: 30th July, 2025

Venue: HSS Committee Room (MS610), Humanities and Social Sciences Dept., Fifth Floor, Main Building, IIT Delhi.