Badhai

Description

This is the first book to provide an introduction to badhai that charts its performance throughout South Asia and examines its characteristics and relationship to the differing contexts of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. With its repertoire of devotional prayers, songs, dances, and comic repartee, performed by socially marginalized trans feminine hijra and khwaja sira, badhai has long been recognized as vital to these communities’ identities. For students of theatre and performance, anthropology, religion, gender and cultural studies, the book illuminates an important form of performance, considering its changing status and uncertain future.
Presenting new ethnographic fieldwork from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the authors examine the ways in which performances are shaped by their contexts and communities and are linked to a variety of sites and events, including protest movements, Dalit solidarity circles, HIV/AIDs NGOS, tax collection, pop music, theatre, and electioneering strategies. They reveal a transformative aesthetic practice that challenges, and sometimes reproduces, the boundaries of caste/class, gender, sexuality, religion, the body, self, community, and nation. The authors consider badhai‘s changing status, the accusations of extortion and of polluting public space, and the role of casteist, heteronormative, and nationalist agendas in this, even amid the expanding narrative of transgender rights across South Asia in recent years.

Adnan Hossain is Assistant Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Claire Pamment is Assistant Professor of World Theatre, William & Mary, USA.
Jeff Roy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies, California State Polytechnic University, USA.

Series Preface
List of Figures
Foreword, Gayatri Reddy (University of Illinois, USA)Acknowledgments
Introduction, Adnan Hossain (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), Claire Pamment (William & Mary, USA), and Jeff Roy (California State Polytechnic University, USA)1. Badhai as Dis/ability: Meaning, Context and Community in Bangladesh, Adnan Hossain (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)2. Shifting Orientations: Vadhai in Pakistan, Claire Pamment (William & Mary, USA)3. Movements Through Badhai Sonic Arrangements in India, Jeff Roy (California State Polytechnic University, USA)Further Notes on an Inconclusive Practice…, Adnan Hossain (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), Claire Pamment (William & Mary, USA), and Jeff Roy (California State Polytechnic University, USA)Postscript, Kareem Khubchandani (Tufts University, USA)Glossary
Bibliography
Index

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