Anjali Arondekar

speaker

496 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 1 May

Anjali Arondekar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Sex Work in Colonial India · 1 May 2026 podcast

Which is both damned and restored, right?

We want to bring them back.

We want to make them big and bad.

But hijras don't tell only one small part of the story of non-binary people, right?

In the past.

And Hijras were attached to families.

And if you talk to any Hijra community, they do not define themselves by their embodied form.

They define themselves by their attachment to a community, to a God, to respect, right?

So I think that's one of the biggest, I think, damages that the colonial sort of divide and rule thing did is that they made Hijras these kind of figures of evil and disruption in a way that they were not.

And I think that has continued today, right?

But also, hijras don't describe all of the trans.

Most people in India who are trans are not hijras.

Quite.

And in Pakistan, they are called the Khwaja Sirah.

So I think when you say colonial India, it's important for us to include Pakistan because there was no India before 1947, right?

So if you use the word colonial, one must talk about Pakistan.

So in Pakistan, a country that I have been to and I have enormous respect for, in fact, the first queer conference was held in South Asia, was held in Pakistan in Lahore.

And I was the only Indian there and I gave the keynote.

So when people say there's no queer studies in Pakistan, they are wrong.

So the Khwaja Sira in Pakistan, in a country where homosexuality is criminalized, are held with enormous respect.

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