Progress will involve not just drawing on country’s pre-colonial past but challenging it too, say backers of anti-discrimination bill

It was a prized job in urban India: manning a phone at a corporate call centre. Getting hired took three interviews, and then there was 10 days’ training.

At each stage, Tona Chettri Chauhan would discreetly approach the interviewers or the trainers with a message. “I’m transgender,” she would say. “If that’s a problem, I can leave right now.”



Most shrugged that it was not an issue. But she recognised the expression in one of the men training her. “I felt he was taken aback,” she said. “I said again: ‘I have an appointment letter, but if you’re not comfortable, I’ll leave.’”

Chauhan got the job, but four days later, she resigned.

“It was torture,” said the 23-year-old, as she stood under a whirring fan in the offices of the Mitr Trust, a Delhi-based LGBT charity where she now works as a counsellor.

“There were around 400 people working on the same floor, and maybe a quarter had no problem with me. But the rest did. They were continuously staring, talking in groups, openly laughing.

“My family was going through problems and I needed the money,” Chauhan said. “But I couldn’t stay somewhere with so much mental pressure.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tona Chettri Chauhan says when she got a job in a call centre three-quarters of her co-workers had a problem with her being transgender. Photograph: Michael Safi/The Guardian

Her experience captures the uneven progress of India’s trans community, three years since a landmark supreme court judgment forced the state to acknowledge that people such as Chauhan officially exist.



Though enforcement of the decision has been patchy, officially at least, transgender Indians no longer need to declare they are men or women when applying for jobs, being admitted to hospital, or enrolling in degrees. Quotas exist for universities and government jobs. National profiles have been bestowed on pioneers, such as India’s first trans police officer in Tamil Nadu and the country’s first trans headteacher at a school in West Bengal.

This month, an advertising campaign from cough and cold brand Vicks has been acclaimed for featuring the true story of Gayatri, an orphan who found a loving mother – revealed to be the Mumbai-based transgender activist Gauri Sawant.

Now, legislation under review by the Indian parliament aims to extend the rights of transgender Indians and other minorities, by introducing the country’s first national anti-discrimination law.

Hearts might be slow to change, said the bill’s sponsor, MP Shashi Tharoor, but robust legal protection would leave transgender people such as Chauhan less vulnerable to the attitudes of landlords, bureaucrats or co-workers.

“Intolerance in India is on the rise,” Tharoor said, and while piecemeal laws already protect women and poorer castes, “people such as sexual minorities have fallen through the cracks”.

The writer and former UN diplomat has previously moved legislation to abolish discriminatory laws such as Section 377, an order criminalising sex “against the order of nature” that is regularly deployed against India’s LGBT community.

To garner support for this latest bill he is drawing on another of his passions: exposing the sins and ongoing corrosive effects of British imperialism on the subcontinent.

“Transgender people were certainly made an ‘other’ by the British,” Tharoor said. “The same with homosexuals. Homosexuality was accepted and understood in Indian civilisation for 1,000 years, as were transgender [people].”

He points to the depictions of sex – some of it between the same gender – that adorn Hindu temples across India, and the existence in Hindu literature of figures such as Shikhandi, who was born a woman but raised a man.

“All of these things were accepted in our culture until the British came along,” Tharoor said.

His framing is not beyond dispute. But it also happens to be politically savvy in a country increasingly reaching for the myths of its past to define a present buffeted by economic upheaval and unprecedented migration into cities.

“It is colonial,” says Rudrani Chettri, the head of the Mitr Trust who last year established the country’s first transgender modelling agency.

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Chettri identifies as a “hijra”, a position traditionally carved out for eunuchs, intersex or transgender people in south Asian society, that pushes the community back with one arm, while embracing them with the other.

“Transphobia is universal, but in south Asia we have this cultural acceptance,” Chettri said. “Hijras had such an important position before the British came to India. Not only singing and dancing, but also guarding the harem, and as advisers to the Mughal court.”

An 1897 colonial law declared all eunuchs criminals, forcing them to the fringes, where some still make a living blessing weddings and babies, but many turn to prostitution and begging.



“[Narendra] Modi I think is fine with transgender,” Chettri said, referring to India’s prime minister, a staunch Hindu revivalist. “It’s just an English translation for hijras, who are seen as goddesses. And anybody who is a god or goddess, like cows or monkeys, Indians have huge respect for.

“If we we do our advocacy on a religious basis, it helps,” she added.

But activists are aware the hijra tradition constrains as much as it liberates. People such as Chettri can be accepted by society, but only within a narrow role. “People think of hijra as someone with ambiguous genitals – intersex, a hermaphrodite,” she said.

“They don’t know that I was born biologically male and went through transitions and hormone therapy. The government just sees me as an asexual person who has the power to bless.

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“If people come to know I was born with one set of genitalia and changed it because I felt like a female, they’d say: ‘Oh god, you’ve screwed up your life, why should I help you?’”

Progress will involve not just drawing on a past that was submerged by colonialism, but challenging it too, Chettri said. “The hijra community wants to keep it a secret, but it cannot continue forever like this. Being pitied, seen as alien, excluded from the mainstream: it won’t work. People want to get educated, get a proper job.”

“There are enormous hurdles,” Tharoor said of the new anti-discrimination bill, which would also cover religious and caste prejudice. The MP has tried to cover as many social groups as possible. “This can no longer be characterised as a bill about homosexual sex,” he said.

Even if the bill stagnates in parliament, it has spurred a wider conversation that was barely imaginable a decade ago. “It’s out there now,” Tharoor said. “It’s part of the discourse.”