Sonia Faleiro

Trapped in the space between traditional gender roles, A. Revathi, hijra writer and activist, is making the voice of her community more distinct.

"In a cramped study doubling as a bedroom and kitchen in a breezy Bangalore hamam, A Revathi, 37, inscribes a landmark autobiography commissioned by Penguin India. The story of one so young wouldn’t normally merit interest, but this will not hold true for the hijra writer and activist whose experiences simultaneously stun, sadden and uplift. As I write this in a study overlooking the Arabian Sea, we are but two writers separated by place.

This was not so towards the close of 2006, when standing under a shivering autumnal tree in Bangalore’s Ulsoor neighbourhood, Revathi had set aside her writing to solicit customers. Sari-clad sex workers, their anklets tinkling with each reluctant step, aren’t an unusual sight in Ulsoor; but one who spent a year traveling across Tamil Nadu inscribing 37 profiles of hijras for her debut book Unarvum Uruvamum (“Feelings of the Entire Body”, Sangama/Adayalam, Rs 65) certainly is. Previously, Revathi had worked with Sangama, a Bangalore-based NGO for sexual minorities. She would organize rights rallies during the day, and after dusk, visit local cruising areas, offering sex workers advice on health and legal issues. Arvind Narain, an activist with Bangalore’s Alternative Law Forum, who worked closely with Revathi on the anthology Because I Have a Voice (Yoda Press, Rs 295), for which she contributed a piece, confirms: “Revathi is one of the most ethical activists I have met. Her work is excellent.”

Then without warning, Revathi was forced back into sex work. She was unemployed and deemed unemployable. When we spoke at the time, she said, “Sometimes I fear my head will burst with the horror of my protest. ‘This is not who I am. I’m a writer. An activist. See that part of me. Not this body I must sell because society won’t give me a chance’.”

Having been privileged to hear the life stories of many members of the hijra community, I see shared themes in their childhood. Confusion and fear, derision from the immediate family, and often, being the victims of sexual abuse. But while young boys in urban India come into contact with hijras easily, it wasn’t so for Revathi, formerly Annadurai, whose only confidantes were vast brown fields under an expanse of hard blue sky, reflecting the emptiness within her.

Born to the owner of a milk delivery lorry, and a housewife in the farming village of Namakkal, Tamil Nadu, Revathi was expected to follow in her father's footsteps. In the ninth grade, she fell in love with a fellow male student. A year later, besotted, she failed her exams, and dropped out of school. Her parents forced her to work as a cleaner on the lorry. Although she felt and behaved like a woman, she was given the chores of a grown man, which she performed to her co-workers’ chorus of pejoratives for hijras—chakka, ali, onbathu. Off duty, her experiences were similarly debilitating. "My parents would often beat me,” she recalls without bitterness during our first meeting, in a café on Bangalore’s bustling MG Road last June. “They would scold, humiliate and question me constantly about my activities. … I would attend weddings and wonder, 'when am I going to marry a man?' I had so many questions, but no one in the village had answers for me."

It was 50 kilometers away; in Erode district, that Revathi would receive the answers she desperately sought. In coming into contact with hijras there, she writes in Because I Have a Voice, “I met people like myself … and learnt of men who had become women. I asked if I too could wear a sari. They said I needed to grow my hair and get my nose and ears pierced. How long would it take for my hair to grow sufficiently long? I would weep silently because I needed to dress like a man until that happened.” Within three months, however, Revathi started wearing women’s clothes. She then left first for Delhi where she acquired a guru with whom she would beg for money and food, and later, to Mumbai, where she began practicing sex work.

The transformation into the hijra Revathi from the man Annadurai was physically painful but emotionally cathartic. It meant that her family, from whom she had run away to Delhi, would be forced to accept that her decision was irreversible. On a previous occasion her brother had beaten her almost to unconsciousness with a cricket bat. She had then been dragged to the local temple where her long hair was tonsured. She sighs, “Their blows did not hurt as much as losing my hair did." After her nirvanam, Revathi felt empowered. “My father said ‘let him be as he wishes,’ but relatives and friends visited me as they would someone who was ill."

It felt as though the air was too thin for the entire family to breathe in. So once again, Revathi left home, this time for Bangalore where she sought her freedom among its 2,000 hijras. Those early days as a sex worker in a city flooded with people eager to cement their fortune, bled with terror. Many sex workers in Bangalore don’t work with pimps in order to be able to keep all their earnings. Instead, they move in pairs. While this may deter civil clients, it is of no consequence to the police, whom one hijra, Snehaprabha, told me, have been known to arrest a female sex worker and rape her through the night without using a condom. Revathi’s experiences confirm the brutality. Once, she was stripped, and beaten for two days in a police station then forced to clean the station floor. Her guru Manjulam, 58, was murdered by extortionists, while exiting a hamam. Violence, Revathi says, is knitted into the fabric of every hijra’s life.

At the time, no one guessed Revathi’s potential. What her chelas did know was that she was progressive, often refusing a cut of their income—traditional in guru-chela relationships. Revathi’s favourite chela was Famila. Intelligent and vocal with striking features, Famila left sex work for activism after meeting a member of Sangama at a cruising area. It was she who led Revathi into the field. She was a poster girl for the city’s hijra community and a media darling featured in the BBC documentary India’s Ladyboys. But 24 years of being beaten down by the anorexia of opportunity that is the life of most hijras, became unbearable. Her suicide in 2004 sent a disquieting message to the community. If Famila couldn’t make it, could they? Over the phone from Bangalore after her enforced return to sex work, Revathi’s voice was heavy with worry: “I spoke out about police violence, and now I’ll be their first target. I tried to integrate into the mainstream and now hijras taunt me, ‘look at you. You’ve returned to the streets.’ I too thought about suicide. Then I rose above those thoughts. It would have been too easy.”

At Sangama, Revathi had fallen in love with and married a colleague. Their relationship soured within the year. She confides, “He lost interest. Even though I never stopped him being with other men. He spoke of feminism in public, but at home I was to play the role of the subservient woman, while he was not answerable to anyone." Unable to continue working with him, Revathi quit her job, but accepted Sangama’s offer to write Unarvum Uruvamum before returning to Namakkal—the unbeloved prodigal come home. She says of her book, “Even if my dreams had to be bundled up into a gunny bag and forgotten, other hijras shouldn't have to go through what I did before I became an activist. For me, that's the only reason to continue what I'm doing."

Six months ago, having run through her savings, and forced to support herself and her ailing parents—her father is a heart patient and her mother is on dialysis—Revathi returned to Bangalore. Her soured relationship with Sangama affected her attempts to find employment in other NGOs and after months of barren searching; she was compelled to return to sex work.

One of three professions permitted in the hijra community, the others being begging (Mangti) and dancing at births and wedding (Badhai), sex work is respected by hijras as a legitimate profession. Revathi’s primary concern about returning to it, therefore, was that it was against her choice. And that despite having proven herself, she wasn’t able to find employment since leaving Sangama. “I’m heartbroken,” she had sobbed over the phone, one evening. The sounds of a customer receiving satisfaction in the next room permeated the telephone line. “I’ve come back to where I started, and now there may not be another beginning.” Mumbai-based hijra activist Laxminarayan Tripathi points out, “The British exploited and marginalised us because of our influence among the Nizams, the Rajputs, as holders of the palace keys, as protectors of the queen’s harems, as members of the advisory committee, even as warriors in the Mahabharata. After India gained Independence, we lost more freedom, became more vulnerable. So what remains? Clapping hands, begging, dancing. Otherwise you sell your body for survival.”

Revathi performed sex work for several months in the hamam where she lived with her guru and eight other hijras. We would talk often on the phone, and when I offered to help out financially or wished to speak to others on her behalf, she would insist, “I don’t want charity. I just want a job.”

This year, Revathi got that, and more. Having read an earlier profile by me on her, Penguin’s representatives met Revathi in Bangalore, and shortly after commissioned her autobiography—the first of its kind from a member of the hijra community. It will be published in 2008, translated, and the possibility of a worldwide release shines bright. She was also offered a job as a community consultant with the Karnataka Health Promotion Trust, and made a bittersweet decision to accept an offer from Sangama to return as a consultant with their Mysore branch. She will not interact with her former husband or colleagues in Bangalore. She is destined for a parallel path. Life is suddenly a whirl of travel, activism, and literature, and there so little time to fit in all she wants that she turned down an invitation to attend the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya this January.

Revathi still lives in the hamam, but will shortly return to Namakkal to concentrate on her book in the solitude of her home. “What good luck!” she beams gratefully one evening, clearly delighted to forgive and forget the dark year that was. “There’s no such thing as luck,” I reply, firmly. I hang up, and so does she. There’s a lot of writing to be done."

Source: Elle, April, 2007. Photograph, Anandi Chawriappa.
An earlier article on Revathi.