SALMNAN RUSHDIE INVESTIGATES INDIA'S HIJRAS

FROM THE LONDON TIMES:

Salman Rushdie investigates India's transsexual underworld
In his contribution to Aids Sutra, a collection of essays about the HIV/Aids problem in India, Salman Rushdie reports on the culture of the hijra



ACCORDING TO GREEK mythology, Hermaphroditus, the child of Hermes and Aphrodite, fell so passionately in love with a nymph named Salmacis that they beseeched Zeus to unite them for all time, and were joined in a single body in which both sexes remained manifest.

The Hindu tradition contains, if anything, a more powerful version of this story, elevated to the very summit of the Hindu pantheon, and glorifying not merely the beauty of the physical union of the sexes but the union of the male and female principles in the Universe, a metaphor reaching far beyond biology. In a cave on Elephanta Island in Bombay harbour is a sculpture of the deity named Ardhanari or Ardhanarishvara, a name composed of three elements: ardha - half, nari - woman, ishvara - god; thus Ardhanarishvara, the half-woman god.

One side of the Elephanta carving is male, the other female, and it represents the coming together of Shiva and Shakti, the forces of Being and Doing, the fire and the heat, in the body of a third, double-gendered deity. A cultural history so rich in the mighty possibilities of sexual admixture ought by rights to find it easy to understand and accept not only biological hermaphrodites but also such contemporary gender-benders as the hijra community. Yet hijras have always been, and still are, treated with a mixture of fascination, revulsion, and fear.

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