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Unpacking The Imposed: The Colonial Binary, Hijras, And The Queering Of India, Eric Cortes-Kopp '22

Student Scholarship

Most scholarship concerning hijras and other queer groups in India are limited to the late 1990s and early 2000s. Originally, my project sought to rely on primary source materials mainly from the National Archive located in New Delhi. I requested that some key documents be digitized prior to the second Indian lockdown early in the summer. Therefore, my project became more of an historiographical project, relying on two main monographs, several scholarly articles, and interviews with leading scholars of hijras. Three main sections comprise this work: précis of the two main monographs that have been published to date on hijras, …