Secret or sacred?: a typology of liminal exchange accommodating Mumbai's hijra community

Abstract

The anthropological beginnings of this thesis encapsulates a community considered as part of a third gender within South Asian cities. Their lack-of-place within the heteronormative cisgendered world forces hijras to maintain a secret nature. This response of secretness as a means of survival is a way of coping in a post-colonial India that is rapidly westernizing in which the traditional forms of income generation begin to fade. As the post-colonial world attempts to deconstruct the rigid framework of its colonial past, the hijra community maintains that its pre-colonial roots were already considered equal in terms of their gender identity. Society accepts this in some instances and considers the hijra community sacred, even demigods. However, the same society rejects the hijra community when it comes to finding appropriate work. In this duality of outlook, a society that worships the sacredness within the hijra and also pays for sex-work within the same being maintains a liminal outlook on the liminal being. In this manner, the thesis considers the complexity as well as ambiguity of these societal stances on hijras. In this consideration of ambiguity, a reflection of this outlook is tested when mirrored spatially. But can space reflect liminality in being? Can architecture allow itself to maintain liminal programs as a mirror to liminal beings, particularly in it’s secret and sacredness? This site in which these speculative architectural concepts are tested lie in an abandoned railway yard located in Mumbai, India. Semi-fictional characters that relate back to hijras and the different secret and sacreds are used as tools in which the space is given a program. Ultimately, the recognition and re-empowerment of the hijra community through liminal space is applied in this thesis. Ambiguity and various theoretically justified liminal architectural elements are employed as tools to make place as well as allow hijras to generate an income through a settler perspective