Betwixt & between

Part bildungsroman and part manifesto, The Truth About Me is, fittingly, a book that does not fit fully into either category.

The Truth About Me: A Hijra
Life Story; A Revathi
Penguin; Rs. 299

Revathi, born Doraisamy in a small village in Tamil Nadu, journeys through incredible violence in multiple cities to arrive at Sangama, a sexual minorities human rights organisation in Bengaluru. She has had a sex-change operation, danced for a living, done sex work, done no work at all, and finally alighted on activism to find a way out of the vicious cycle of deprivation and ostracism to which the hijras are prey. Moving from a tale of personal woe to a defence of civil rights, this book covers a lot of ground about the make-up of hijra communities in Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Mumbai and, finally, Bengaluru, where the author now lives. It also charts a movement from particular grievance to universal rights in which the plight of the hijras is turned into the plight of all women and then into the lot of all sexual minorities. The Truth About Me grows, in other words, from being parochial to cosmopolitan, always engaging pathos in order to get its point across.

When not engaged with the larger horrors to which hijras are heir, however, this pathos can seem overwhelming and repetitive. True to the conventions of a bildungsroman, the narrative of Revathi’s life story follows a repeated pattern of arriving at a place, settling in, and then running away because of unmet needs or unsatisfied ambitions. But more often than not, these frustrations are seen as personal setbacks rather than as systemic injustices. Self-pity threatens to drown out analytical judgment for at least two-thirds of the book. But perhaps that is the point? Without seeing the horrifying consequences of being a hijra, would we be able to get behind the necessity for justice that those horrors demand? Perhaps not, but the sheer repetitiveness of sentences like “I don’t have the strength to bear the blow upon blow that keeps falling on me” (297) do detract from the sense that this book is also an activist’s multifaceted manifesto.

Full review here Deccan Chronicle

Hope floats

A. Revathi's book is not just a vivid account of a hijra's life, it sends out a strong message to the society at large

Encapsulating the life of a hijra, the pain and anguish which is an integral part of the everyday experience of the fraternity's members, is A. Revathi's autobiographical book The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story (Penguin India/Rs.299) Originally written in Tamil, it has been translated into English by V. Geetha, a writer and social activist. Being a hijra herself, Revathi knows this life inside out.

Confessing to having been marginalised Revathi, who was born as Doraiswamy, a male, says “This book is about my everyday experience of discrimination, ridicule, and pain, it is also about my endurance and my joys and moreover it intends to introduce to the readers the lives of hijras, their distinct culture, and their dreams and desires”. Prior to this, two hijras have written books about their life in Tamil, Priya Babu's “Naan Saravanan Alla” (2007) and Vidya's “I am Vidya” 2008.

The versatile Revathi has been working with Bengaluru-based sexuality rights organisation, Sangama, for over nine years and has also acted in a Tamil movie “Thenavattu”.

Full report here Hindu

Voice for visibility

A.Revathi opens up to Nithin Mayanth on the struggles of hijras, the role of art in connecting people, and more…

In its effort to correct dominant prejudices against hijras, A. Revathi's translated autobiography, published by Penguin India, The Truth About Me – A Hijra Life Story, positions the reader as an anthropologist of hijra life, in particular into the everyday violence they endure. Revathi sees her writing as an extension of her role as a rights activist, who has been working with Bengaluru-based sexuality rights organisation, Sangama, for over nine years.  She speaks about reading, writing, and the reception of her book

What role does reading play in your life?
To tell you the truth I have not read much.  I regularly read newspapers, weeklies and magazines but almost no literary books.  Accessing Tamil literature in Bangalore has not been easy either, and managing to squeeze my day for time to read a novel, almost impossible.  Though one book I've read twice, and which inspired me to write The Truth About Me, was Bama's Karukku.

And writing, what has that meant for you?
Writing, for me, is a way of bringing together the two worlds that I am part of – the hijra community and my family. Be it writing my autobiography, short stories or compiling Unarvum Uruvamum (Emotions and the Body – a book on hijra lives in South India published in 2004), writing makes these two worlds talk to each other.  In fact I believe that not just writing but all the arts offer us a way to do this.  Art is able to connect us when all face-to-face conversations have failed due to prejudices or feelings of hurt and pain.  For many hijras who have been denied access to formal education, dancing, acting and singing become potent ways to express their feelings and ideas to the rest of the world.  

Recently my hijra friends encountered a woman on the streets who hugged them and begged them for my phone number and having got it called me to tell me how much the book meant to her and how it helped her rid herself off her prejudices and fear of hijras.  This is what is important for me; to touch people's hearts through my art.

Full report here Hindu

She’s the man

‘As I re-emerged in my man’s garb, I felt that I was in disguise, and that I had left my real self behind’ In her autobiography, Revathi beautifully captures the essence of her life, struggle, aspirations and hopes, including intimate details of a life in a hijra household. She narrates her early years as a shy but hardworking boy who always felt as a girl and enjoyed doing the daily household chores. She poignantly captures some moments where she questions her identity and her existence — her teachers used to cane her for not being a boy enough, the PT teacher punished her for not playing boys’ games, parents and siblings constantly humiliating her for doing household work.

Revathi writes, “I didn’t know that I behaved like a girl, it felt natural for me to do so. I did not know how to be like a boy.” It was Revathi’s inner desire that made her flee from her house to join the hijras where she received respect and recognition for being who she was.

But life among hijras was not comfortable due to a strict hierarchical nature of the community. Revathi describes her days among hijras, how she was made to work endlessly for ‘senior’ hijras, how she was tossed among different hijra households, her nirvana and how she negotiated her way with her gurus, chelas and hijra fraternity to be where she is now — an activist fighting for the rights for her community.

Full report here Hindustan Times

A Tamil writer-activist's alternative journey

Alternative sexuality is no longer a forbidden turf for the working class in smaller towns, though they have to wage fiercer battles than their metro counterparts, says A. Revathi, a popular face of southern India's sexual minority groups.

'The struggle was more difficult for me as I belonged to the working class,' Revathi told IANS in an interview.

'We had to run away from our homes to find members of our own community and work for a dignified living because we were not accepted by our families unlike many of our counterparts in the metros who are affluent and their education status gives them immunity against social taboos.'

A portly matron with dusky skin, the Tamil writer, actress and Dalit activist was here to release her autobiography 'The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story'.

With a broad smile, twinkling eyes, mass of brown shoulder-length curls and a large 'bindi' glowing on her wide brow, Revathi was born as Doraisamy in a family of five - the youngest of three brothers - in Karnataka.

Doraisamy, who loved to wear her sister's long skirts, sweep the courtyard and draw the 'kolam' (the prayer motif) every morning, was his parents' pet.

'But the boys at school, as well as the men who saw me outside the house, would call out, 'Hey, Number 9', 'female thing' and 'female boy'. Some even enquired, 'why do you wear a girl's clothes'. I understood that I was indeed that way and wanted to remain so,' Revathi said.

Full report here Sify

Like any other woman

Nalini Jameela, author of The Autobiography of a Sex Worker (2007; extracts below) and the forthcoming The Company of Men: The romantic encounters of a sex worker is a former sex worker in Kerala who has for years worked to organise other sex workers and ensure that they are treated with respect. She recently spoke with Jayasree A K about her efforts to mitigate the stigma attached to sex work and the individuals involved in it. Translated from the Malayalam by the interviewer.

Why do you identify yourself as a sex worker even though you are also a writer, a human-rights activist and documentary filmmaker?
First, all my achievements came through sex work. It was my sole means of livelihood for many years. I cannot negate it. Second, I consider sex work a dignified job like any other. If I want to speak for other sex workers, I have to identify with them. Another reason is that my viewpoint can be authentic only when I talk about sex-work issues as a sex worker myself. But I have also had to cope with stereotyped images of a sex worker. A woman programme officer with Doordarshan once told me, ‘I had a very different picture of Nalini Jameela. You look like my mother.’ That lady expected a middle-class ‘mistress’ like ‘Susanna’ [an upper-middle-class vampish character in the eponymous Malayalam film], because of my popularity as a sex worker-cum-writer.

How did you go forward with organising collectives of sex workers?
The collectivisation of sex workers was inevitable with the beginning of the spread of HIV/AIDS. Earlier, we were hidden from sight, which led to our exploitation. With the HIV epidemic, it became imperative that we organise, and this also provided an opportunity to bring our issues into the open. I started my organisational activities with Jwalamukhi, a collective of sex workers in Thrissur, Kerala, in 1999. Though this was an HIV-prevention project we took it beyond that, emphasising the sex worker’s identity and penetrating into mainstream society. When invited to speak about our issues at public meetings, we responded by organising open debates in which people from different walks of life could participate. For example, we invited the director and lead actress of the film Susanna for a discussion, when we realised that the film was supportive of our movement. This has helped to mainstream sex workers’ issues.

Interactions with the mainstream were particularly significant in Calcutta and Sangli [in Maharashtra]. The movement received support from various interest groups because many brothels exist there and are, to a certain extent, accepted as part of the socio-cultural milieu. In the case of South India, where brothels are scattered, women are strong but do not get space for articulation. But support groups and individual human-right defenders have played a positive role in mainstreaming sex workers. Collectives of sex workers had also been formed in other parts of India, and networking with them gave us more strength. For the last few years, I have also worked in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, and there is now a trade union for sex workers in Karnataka with which  I am associated.

Full report here Himal 

Man, I feel like a woman

It is with a pinch of salt that Revathi narrates stories about her childhood crushes. “I used to write love letters to the boys I liked in class. But I never gave them. What would they think if a boy gave them a love letter?” she asks.

With the launch The Truth about Me — A Hijra Life Story, published by Penguin and translated from Tamil by V Geeta, A Revathi takes to the wider world, the story of her growing up, the years she groped for answers about her sexuality and how the sex change operation established her place in the society as a woman. At the launch of her book at Reliance TimeOut, as she addresses a curious set of people gathered around her, she chuckles as she says, “Before the surgery, people asked me why I had the mannerisms of a woman. Now people ask me why I have a man’s voice.”

It is a little hamlet in Namakkal taluk in Salem district that she calls home. In the book, she talks about how she returned from school to try on her sister’s long flowing skirt and tie a towel around her head and let it swing like a long braid. “No one thought of it much then, for I was little. They reasoned, he’ll outgrow all this when he grows older,” the book reads. Looking back at those years, she says, “I was a woman trapped in a man’s body.”

Revathi who made friends with other Hijras (transgenders) from around town used to take constant trips to the Villupuram festival organised by the state government, that was a melting pot for transgenders. There she danced, sang and gave oratory performances as part of the cultural celebrations. “Of course, I never told my parents where I was going,” she recalls. That’s where she met a group of hijras from Delhi and soon she left home, making her way to Delhi, to escape the constant jabbing from her neighbours and the embarrassment she caused her parents. “My parents never understood me,” she says. “Understanding begins in the family. It then spreads to the street, the neighbourhood and the rest of the world,” she notes. “I had my sex change operation at 16. That made me look like a woman, not just think like one,” she says.

Full report here New Indian Express

Breaking grounds

Sexual minorities the world over continue to suffer various forms of prejudice and discrimination—at the hands of the state and the wider society—even in countries where they are legally recognized and their rights are guaranteed by law. In India, where these minorities are not even deemed to exist—at least legally—their harrowing plight remains unknown to the heterosexual majority—who, in any case, remain, by and large, not just indifferent but even relentlessly hostile to them.

Few members of India’s sexual minority communities—gays, lesbians, bisexuals and hijras or the ‘third gender’—dare, for fear of being scorned and much worse, to stand up and be publicly identified, leave alone struggle for their rights and the injustice and prejudices that they are haunted with throughout their lives. Gender-rights activists and some human rights groups have only recently begun turning their attention to these communities, and that too only very haltingly.

This book enjoys the rare distinction of being the first book ever to have been written by an Indian hijra. In her autobiography, Revathi, now a prominent hijra rights activist with a sexual minority NGO based in Bangalore, recounts the horrors of her tumultuous, terror-filled life. Born a male in a peasant family of modest means in a village in Tamil Nadu, Doraisamy (as he was named by his parents) discovered—as many gay men do—in early childhood itself that he was very different from the other boys of his village. At school, he shunned boys’ games, preferring to play with girls and dressing up like a woman in his mother’s clothes. As the years passed by, instead of his ‘feminine’ ways falling aside, as his parents had hoped, Doraisamy increasingly began to feel that he was actually a girl, although trapped, for no fault of his own, within a male body. And the more ‘feminine’ he dressed and behaved the more he was taunted by his peers at school and his parents and siblings at home. He had no one to share his pains with till at last he met a group of young gay men in a town near his village. For the first time, he discovered that he was not alone in this world, not the only boy who felt and behaved like a girl. From these men he discovered that it was indeed possible for a boy to become a girl, or, more precisely, a hijra—a eunuch.

Full review here Countercurrents

We want to live as women, and we want our dignity: A Revathi

“All I ask is that you accept as worthy of respect what you’ve all along considered unnatural and illegal. We want to live as women and if we are granted the facilities that will enable us do so, we will live as other women do,” writes A Revathi, a transgender activist, in her autobiography, The Truth About Me, published by Penguin Books, India, the first of its kind to be written by one belonging to the third sex, a hijra.

The book will be launched officially in the city on August 6 at Reliance Time Out, 74, Ground Floor, Prestige Feroze building, Cunningham Road at 6.30 pm.

Revathi is the former director of Sangama, an organisation for sexual minorities that started working for greater awareness and education of issues related to sexual minorities in August 1999. “After beginning work at Sangama, I came to realise that I am not alone, and I need not be ashamed of who I am anymore. In fact, I now proudly proclaim that I am a complete woman,” Revathi said.

Full report here DNA

Women more avid readers than men

A new survey indicates that women are more avid readers of books than men.

According to the British survey, women know how to read properly, while men have a desultory and, at best, casual approach to books -- in fact, the fair sex cannot put a book down once they begin it. Men, on the other hand, are much less likely to keep up this sort of pace. Twice as many men as women admitted that they never finish a book.

The survey of 2,000 people found different types of readers. 48% of women can be considered to be page turners, or avid readers, compared with only 26 % of men, The Guardian reported.

Slow Worms are those who spend a long time reading, but who take their books very seriously and finish them. They can often manage only one or two books a year. This group was made up by 32% of male respondents and 18 %women.

Serial Shelvers have shelves full of books that have never been opened and are not likely to be -- 17% of women and 20% of men fall into this category.

A similar survey carried out in December found half of men and one third of women have lied about what they have read to try and impress friends.