Exploring Love through Loss: Illustrating the ‘Lived Experiences’ of Hijras in Retrospective

The hijras are an indigenous group of sexually marginalized transwomen who are engaged in traditional occupations. My paper will be focusing on love, love relationships, emotional instability, betrayal, partly crossing paths with mental health. I want to bring to light the pain caused during and after heartbreak and rejection not once but several times by lovers. This incidents of being physically or mentally mistreated in relationships, exploited, violated, and deceived in love happens because the hijras belong to sexually marginalised section. Men take advantage of them by manipulating them, enjoy benefits through the pretence of love, have sidekicks, and many more. The commitment is a distant dream because marriage with a third gender is not legal in India and it is not fullflegedly approved by society. The incapability to bear children pushes hijras to surrender and sacrifice to humiliation and defeat in the hands of the lover. Research does not talk about the emotion of these transwomen who yearn for love all through their lives. Simmel had argued that love is not motivation, it is different, it cannot be explained psychologically. Therefore in my paper, through the experiences of my subjects (hijras), I will attempt to reflect on how the hijras get marginalized in relationships by dint of them inhabiting a transsexual body. In addition to this, while exploring the experiences of the hijras I will engage theoretically with the concept/ experience/emotion of love. Secondly, I will also try to explore the nature and complexity of these non-heterosexual relationships. I will be writing this paper in the context of the hijras in West Bengal, India.