My report for work for the hijra Koovagam festival I attended

Report
Myla
Koovagam hijra festival, Tamil Nadu
22.4.08

I went to Chennai for the weekend for Passover, a Jewish holiday. I stayed through Wednesday 23rd April so I could attend the annual hijra festival which happens near Villupuram.

My friend and I took a bus in the morning to Villupuram which took around 5 hours. We arrived and attended the end of the hijra beauty show that was happening in a hall in town. After getting some food we met up with Am, who works at the Kalkuta office of ____ (my roommates work at the Hyderabad ____ office and put me in touch with Am as well as Di, who is from the Chennai office, for this event). We met several of their friends, and then nine of us piled into two cabs and we headed 30km to the Koovagam festival.

Although we left Villupuramaround 6:30pm, we didn’t reach until around 9:30. The traffic on this small road kept us stopped and completely immobile for over an hour. We saw some people walking and considered doing this also but it was hot and we didn’t know how far it was. Gradually there were more and more people until finally there were swarms of people outside the car and it was kind of scary how large the crowd became. They contributed to the gridlocked traffic. The hijras became concerned for us since we were foreign girls and said that when we arrived we would stick closely together. They had my friend put something over her shoulders since her kurta was sleeveless. Finally we slowly moved all the way to the parking area.

We began to walk towards the Temple, which was about a kilometer up the road. The hijras had me and my friend walk in the middle of all them and we frequently stopped to assure that we were all together. Many men were walking in each direction and us and the hijras together attracted a lot of attention. Other hijras smiled at us or said hello, which was quite nice. Many men, however, were quite aggressive and would stick their hands in our faces trying to shake our hands, or ask me “What country??” or ask the hijras if the two foreigners with them were also transgendered. Many men walked very close to all of us and would step between our group members and walk behind us very closely. The energy was very intense and overall I found myself very creeped out by it.

We got to the Temple and it was a bigger space (instead of the small road with cornfields on either side which had constituted the walk there) so it felt a little better. There were still people, mostly men, everywhere, staring and trying to talk to us, but there were also some police watching to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. We opted not to go inside of the temple since it was a 30-minute wait and the queue looked very tightly packed and we wanted to stay away from the larger crowd. Whenever we would stop to regroup or take a photo, tons of men would materialize and stand near us and stare and leer and try and catch out attention. When we would talk, men would walk next to us, or if they saw us walking in the opposite direction as them, they would walk right at us and brush into our bodies with their hands. At one point we were walking in the crowd and although I had my arms protectively in front of me, a man walking in the opposite direction as me grabbed my breast and ran away (though I shouted and slapped his back).

Overall we were only at the event for a little over an hour. The traffic on the way home was awful and it took us about 3 hours to get back to Villupuram. On the way home when we were stuck in traffic there were still thousands of men pouring past us towards the Temple and we got scared and locked our doors and shut our windows even though it was very hot. Sometimes people would try to look in our windows or even try the door handle. Although there was a lot of creepy energy and men and the traffic was awful, I felt it was a really good experience for me. I enjoyed seeing the festival and especially talking with the hijras. I sort of interviewed Am and An and there stories and insights were extremely interesting. Another hijra had come to the festival for the past ten years and told us how it has evolved over time. Di told us about the Hindu story that the festival celebrates. The only thing that was very upsetting for me was getting to experience first-hand the type of discrimination that hijras face in every day life. They seem to be not taken seriously or respected as people – though many men are obviously happy to have sex with them or eve tease them at an event like Koovagam. In any case, I was glad to witness this event and get exposure to an event and to people I might never otherwise have gotten to know.