Remembering that Time Pakistani Hijras Successfully Defeated A Military Dictator

This Pride Month

This article is part of the Understanding (the Hijra) Genocide series. Learn more about the British attempt to eradicate indigenous queer people from South Asia on taasha.substack.com.

Recorded stories of Pakistan’s hijra community prior to the mid-2010s are scant. In the absence of any records, the few that are there that aren’t exclusively about the HIV/AIDS pandemic certainly stand out. And among those few, nestled deep in a forgotten corner of the archives, is a story that especially stands apart from the rest.

It is a brief mention of Pakistan’s first post-partition Hijra Panic and how Karachi’s hijra community coalesced to stand strong against a military junta that threatened to criminalize their existence during the very early years of this Republic.

To tell you about this incident, I will have to take you back to the early 1960s, when Karachi was still the Capital, when Nazimabad was the city’s reigning elite suburb, when General Ayub Khan was in power. Pakistan was rapidly industrializing under the pro-Capitalist dictator’s rule, propped up by US support in the context of the Cold War. As far as the Capital’s ruling and literate elite was concerned, Pakistan was finally on the up-and-up after the unstable minor ministries of the 1950s.

More confident in their posture than ever, this bourgeois began soul searching, trying to define what constituted “Pakistaniat” and our collective (national) identity. Within these shifting political paradigms, the Ayub Khan junta undertook many steps that have had lasting consequences to this day.

It is also during those sensitive years when the junta attempted to reintroduce the infamous Criminal Tribes Act to Pakistan. For context, the CTA was the primary policy instrument via which the British attempted to genocide the India’s hijra population. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the CTA was more-or-less exclusively implemented in the North West Provinces (NWP), consisting of contemporary India’s Uttar Pradesh province, and, to a lesser degree, Punjab.

Much of the rest of Raj’s hijras had been spared its incomparable brutality (which is not to suggest they’d experienced no challenges under colonial rule, but I digress). So it is particularly terrifying to think that the same genocide could’ve been enacted in what has come to be known Pakistan.

This gives rise to a couple of questions: Why was the Ayub Khan junta so keen on reintroducing the CTA to Pakistan? And how were their efforts thwarted? To answer them, we need a little more background.

Rule by Aligarh

Ayub Khan’s regime was characterized by its rather intimate ties with the bureaucracy and Karachi’s business elite; indeed, outside of the military itself, Khan found a lot of support for his coup and subsequent autocratic rule within these two segments of the Capital’s intelligentsia.

At the time, Pakistan’s federal bureaucracy was dominated by educated Muslim refugees, predominantly from North India. Similarly, the country’s large business interests, profiting from US investments and East Pakistan’s colonial exploits, were also dominated by families that had migrated to Karachi from India. This hold over the nation’s identity by this minority group is demonstrated by its inclination towards Urdu, an otherwise minority language in East and West Pakistan.

This bourgeois – and by extension, the state – was searching for reasons to justify and legitimize Pakistan’s existence. Now that the country had not completely imploded in on itself upon its creation, a palpable fear among the elite in the immediate years following partition, and a strongman was in power, there was an attempt to develop strong institutions and policies that did not just practically strengthen Pakistan’s functional foundations, but also attempted to craft a Pakistani identity.

Alas, this same North Indian elite had also been the most-exposed to the Hijra Panics of NWP and were the most actively involved in implementing the CTA’s hijraphobic provisions there. Thus, to the same North Indian elite that had been made to believe that there was no place for hijras in a “civilized” and “modern” India under British rule, it made sense to reintroduce the CTA to “civilize” the lands they now governed to build a “modern” Republic.

Nameless Heros

Of course, we’d be living a very different present had the CTA been enacted in Pakistan at the time. So why wasn’t it? For that, we have to thank our queer predecessors – the hijra community of Karachi of the time.

Upon catching wind of these efforts, Karachi’s hijra community gathered en masse outside Ayub Khan’s private residence one day and created, for lack of a better word, a ruckus. A cacophony of taashas rang through the street alongside calls for the proposed CTA to be recalled. Unfortunately, Ayub Khan wasn’t home, since he primarily stayed at the Governor’s House, but his mother was, and she came out to see what all the commotion was about.

The hijras immediately surrounded her; the gurus lodged their complaint about her son with her. They explained how they sang lullaby’s when he was a newborn, ensuring his well-being. That, thanks to their auspices, he had grown up to become a powerful man. But that he was now abusing his power to potentially brutalize a downtrodden segment of society. And that they promise to curse him for this cruelty unless he retracts this law.

Mrs. Khan listened to their complaints and promised to speak to her son about this matter, upon which the hijras dispersed. Now, details of what happened next are not recorded. Having grown up in a desi household, I’d like to imagine a lot of scolding and Amme-jan’s chapal was involved, but I frankly don’t have the faintest clue.

All I know is that in the days that followed, the proposed CTA was quietly revoked, never to be heard of again.

Centering Pride in Our Local Histories

I’ve always found a lot of pride in this story; of the time my people successfully pushed back against a military junta, a claim few can make in the Land of Pure. They did this at a time when they did not have the sort of institutional support contemporary NGO-dominated queer activists carry.

Indeed, the fact that the records amorphize all of the individual hijras partaking in this protest as one mass and don’t mention any single person should indicate exactly what era this was – one where if you were a hijra you were just that, a nameless hijra (not that we’ve made soaring strides since then).

Yet, I also appreciate that no one in particular is named – as much as I would like to know who exactly was involved. Fact of the matter is that Great (Wo)Man histories are typically inaccurate. Reducing all of those individual hijras into a collective mass elevates them as a united community that came together to thwart a dictator – arguably in the most desi style ever; by complaining to his mother.

It is pertinent to note that this incident took place several years before the historic Stonewall Riots, led by Marsha P. Johnson in 1969, the birthplace of the contemporary “global” LGBTQIA++ movement. Whereas I have nothing but the utmost of love and respect for Ms. Johnson and the fellow community members who initiated these efforts in the Global North, I see their movement as theirs – relegated to the Euro-US West – with little bearing on my queer experience in South Asia.

Those discourses, while instructive, nevertheless seem foreign and incompatible with the non-secular lived experiences of South Asian queerness, its fluidity, its inherent appreciation of the esoteric, and its history. Presenting the Stonewall Riots as the absolute and universal starting point of our community’s “contemporary history” is not just dismissive of our experiences in the Global South, but feels borderline neo-colonial.

So for my context (perhaps even our collective context), looking to the past for alternative incidents and discourses of (our) queer resistance is not just interesting, it is a necessity – paradigms from which I can derive not only my pride, but also my sense of self. Paradigms whose genealogies can be traced back to the rich queer heritages of the region and can offer an alternative queer worldview of our own, rather than simply co-opting frameworks that aren’t native to us.

To that end, the events of early-60s Karachi sing to me as a testament to hijra resilience, a demonstration of what does it mean to be a South Asian queer as a (collective) noun, an embodiment, but also as a verb, an active praxis and ethic.

So long live the hijra resistance and our collective insistence on bucking the norms.

Pride Mubarak to you all.