This project started with a mistake—a mistake I made while trying to understand the lives of gender nonconforming (GNC) people1 in South India. What initially began as an awkward social blunder evolved into the focal point of my investigation, ultimately shaping the narrative of this book. Let me explain.

One warm, sunny morning, I sat in a small front room of a sexual rights nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Bangalore, India. In addition to the sunlight peeking in through the front windows, the room was lit by a flickering fluorescent “tube light,” creating a maze of shadows. The workday was just beginning, so the office was abuzz with activity. There were people coming in and out, happily greeting one another. It was one of my first days visiting this office, so I did not know many people working there yet. Indeed, many looked my way quizzically, probably wondering why someone like me was there before hurrying off to begin their work.

Sexual rights NGOs first emerged in India in the early 1990s as a response to the global concern over the HIV/AIDS pandemic. These NGOs attracted increased international funding for advocacy targeting groups considered “high risk” for HIV transmission, like feminine-presenting GNC people. Through their advocacy, sexual rights NGOs also inadvertently shaped how both traditional and emerging groups of GNC people are understood in India—by themselves and others around them. That understanding is the subject of this book.

In the midst of this activity at the NGO office, I sat chatting casually with a fluctuating group of between four and six people. Most were paid employees of the NGO, so they would sit and listen or contribute to the conversation for 10–15 minutes before going to do some work, then return later on. As people added this or that idea to the conversation only to leave a moment later, I felt as if they were slowly painting a portrait for me of the larger picture about GNC identity in India—one that I had only the barest outlines of at the time. Looking back on this experience, I realize that the fragmented nature of our conversation reflected the different fragments I have pulled together in this book to explain the emergence of newer groups of transgender women and how ideas about these trans women impact the traditional GNC groups they are often contrasted with.

Introduction

The date of discovery of the quantum Hall effect (QHE) is known pretty accurately. It occurred at 2:00 a.m. on 5 February 1980 at the high magnetic lab in Grenoble, France (see Fig. 1.1). There was an ongoing research on the transport properties of silicon field-effect transistors (FETs). The main motive was to improve the mobility of these FET devices. The devices that were provided by Dorda and Pepper allowed direct measurement of the resistivity tensor. The system is a highly degenerate two-dimensional (2D) electron gas contained in the inversion layer of a metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) operated at low temperatures and strong magnetic fields. The original notes appear in Fig. 1.1, where it is clearly stated that the Hall resistivity involves universal constants and hence signals towards the involvement of a very fundamental phenomenon.

In the classical version of the phenomenon discovered by E. Hall in 1879, just over a hundred years before the discovery of its quantum analogue, one may consider a sample with a planar geometry so as to restrict the carriers to move in a 2D plane. Next, turn on a bias voltage so that a current flows in one of the longitudinal directions and a strong magnetic field perpendicular to the plane of the gas (see Fig. 1.2). Because of the Lorentz force, the carriers drift towards a direction transverse to the direction of the current flowing in the sample. At equilibrium, a voltage develops in the transverse direction, which is known as the Hall voltage. The Hall resistivity, R, defined as the Hall voltage divided by the longitudinal current, is found to linearly depend on the magnetic field, B, and inversely on the carrier density, n, through R = B/nq (q is the charge). A related and possibly more familiar quantity is the Hall coefficient, denoted by RH = R/B, which via its sign yields information on the type of the majority carriers, that is, whether they are electrons or holes.

At very low temperature or at very high values of the magnetic field (or at both), the resistivity of the sample assumes quantized values of the form rxy = h/ne2. Initially, n was found to be an integer with extraordinary precession (one part in ∼ 108). This is shown in Fig. 1.3.

I end this book by returning to the beginning. Throughout my fieldwork, I thought of Rahima often and reflected on her haunting description of ‘floating through life’. How is she doing now? Did she still feel like she was floating? What did she really mean by ‘we will only keep floating until the day we die’? I wanted so terribly to ask her these questions the next time we planned to meet. But I never got the chance. Less than three weeks after our first meeting on that hot summer evening in August 2017, Rahima passed away. Nobody was able to tell for sure how or what the reason was. Some say it was due to a sudden fever and diarrhoea; others say it was because of unbearable grief after learning that her husband was murdered by the Myanmar army while in jail.

There is death in the Rohingya refugee camps – a lot of it. I intentionally did not dwell on death in this book as I wanted to focus on life – life that is messy and difficult and filled with immense pain, though nonetheless hopeful and resilient despite all odds. But as hard as she tried to remain hopeful for her children, it was not enough for Rahima. I pray that she has finally reached the shores.

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

Chapter 3 considers the various forms of writing about the city that imagined or invoked the perspective of the stranger who walked its streets. It examines how tourist accounts of London in pocket guidebooks shared with proposals for urban improvements and surveys of the city an understanding of the visitor to London as both an audience for accounts of London and also a potential critic of the city. While map, print, and booksellers began to produce items that walked strangers around the city and pointed out its key sites, those proposing improvements expressed concerns that foreign travellers might be disappointed by a city that lacked the grand and magnificent architecture of its European neighbours. Together, these works point to a desire to accommodate strangers and to offer them an account of Britain as a polite and commercial nation.