A Study On The Theme Of Hijra In Hindi Literature

Chitra Mudgal（1943-）is an outstanding female Hindi writer in the later period of 20^thcentury in India.She is a productive writer with different forms of creations including novels,short story collections,essays and children’s literature.Her works involve a lot of issues such as gender,family,society,economy,religion and politics,which vividly depicts every aspect of middle-class life in India for readers in a more comprehensive way.Post Box NO.203-Naala Sopara,the fourth novel of Chitra Mudgal,was published in 2016.It is the first time that she has turned her attention to the third gender community Hijra in India,showing Indian Hijra miserable experience of being the victim of bullying.This novel won Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018.Queer theory originated from the West in the late 1980s and early 1990s.It fights against the traditional concept of gender treating gender identity as a natural,stationary dichotomy of male and female and advocates that gender identity is determined by social environment and is constantly changing.This theory has been used as a literary criticism to interpret literary creations by literary critics such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.Hijra group in India breaking through the traditional gender dichotomy have been glorious because of their particular gender,but also for their gender identity Hijra have become one of the most marginalized and bullied groups in India in the modern era.Chitra Mudgal’s Post Box NO.203-Naala Sopara focuses on Hijras’life and their mind.Therefore based on the Hijra this thesis is interpreted with the help of related theories of the Queer theory.This thesis analyzes how the Hijra community,mainly represented by the protagonist--Vinod,resists the dominant heterosexual hegemony and patriarchy in Indian society and builds self-awareness and gender identity of the Hijra community,which shows the humanistic care and brave subversion contained in the novel.The thesis is divided into three parts with five chapters coming between the introduction and the conclusion.The introduction expounds on the literary and social importance of the research and summarizes the current studies on Chitra Mudgal and her novel Post Box NO.203-Naala Sopara in India and abroad as well as clarifies the research theoretical methods and research values in this thesis.Chapter One summarizes the life and literary works of Chitra Mudgal.Chapter Two presents the reality of India’s Hijra and Hijra-themed literary works including Post Box NO.203-Naala Sopara.Chapter Three,Chapter Four and Chapter Five are the main body of this thesis,which analyze Post Box NO.203-Naala Sopara based on the three contents of queer theory.Chapter Three explores the different gender identities of Vinod and Pune both of whom are young Hijra with congenital malformations of male genitalia in modern India where the gender identity is relatively static and opposite in accordance with queer theory’s objection of male and female gender binary tradition.Chapter four analyzes the emotional positioning and emotional appeal of Vinod and Pune according to the content of queer theory which takes a stand against the heterosexual hegemony.Chapter Five elaborates Vinod’s unremitting struggle in the face of Indian cultural hegemony,patriarchy and Hijra community’s internal hegemony and his self-identification shaped in the struggle based on the third content of queer theory about criticizing thinking Patterns on the Indian cultural hegemony and patriarchy.The conclusion reviews and summarizes the main ideas in the thesis.This thesis is based on the Queer theory to interpret Post Box NO.203-Naala Sopara in order to stimulate readers to think about the identity and living space of Hijra and other marginal social groups in India,so that readers can understand Indian Hijra more objectively and deeply.