Since the late eighteenth century, Westerners encountered people in South Asia whom they described as “hermaphrodites” or “eunuchs” and condemned as immoral and obscene. In the North-Western Provinces of the British Indian Empire in the nineteenth century, this revulsion culminated in a targeted legal campaign to exterminate “eunuchs”—a pejorative colonial category for various groups of people assigned male at birth whom the British regarded as failed men due to their alleged impotence or feminine gender expression. Among these people, ethnographic scholarship has particularly explored the figure of the hijra—typically depicted as people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender identity and may voluntarily undergo castration and penectomy. Hijras form communities of leaders and disciples and claim an auspicious status to confer blessings on people in return for money or gifts, but they may also do sex work (Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India, 2005). While the ethnographic literature on hijras mentions the colonial policing of hijras and “eunuchs” in passing, Jessica Hinchy's Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India is the first book-length study to explore their encounter with the colonial state in depth.

Hinchy focuses on the underexamined second section of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, a British colonial law that criminalized several communities in India whom the state regarded as dangerous and disorderly. The second part of the law addressed “eunuchs” and applied specifically to the North-Western Provinces administrative region of British India. Through a meticulous study of colonial archives, Hinchy demonstrates that the policing of “eunuchs” and hijras was not a strange preoccupation as regarded by some historians, but rather, gender and sexual regulation were crucial to the consolidation of colonial rule. A key strength of the book is that it situates the anti-eunuch campaign in terms of both its general resonance and local specificity, showing how the Criminal Tribes Act not only exposed the centrality of gender and sexual regulation to colonial governance, but also unfolded in regionally specific ways that diverged unpredictably from other colonial contexts.

In the first section of the book, Hinchy shows that through the anti-eunuch campaign, the colonial state performed its political authority via the regulation of gender, sexuality, body, kinship, and domesticity. Moral panics about “eunuchs” signaled structural anxieties about disorderly populations that seemed to render colonial power vulnerable. As feminine-presenting people accused of being sodomites who also allegedly kidnapped and castrated children to increase their ranks, hijras and others regarded as “eunuchs” threatened the colonial gender binary and sexual norms. Further, in the British colonial imagination, gender transgression intersected with political, economic, and spatial disorder. Hijras, who lived in communities of initiates and traveled across administrative borders to collect alms, did not conform to sedentary kinship arrangements based on reproductive conjugality and were seen as economically unproductive—they were thus ungovernable in multiple ways. Hinchy shows that the anti-eunuch campaign not only marked a case of gender and sexual regulation, as often depicted in previous literature, but also aimed to produce a governable population as per colonial notions of political and spatial order.

Hinchy further shows that the regulation of “eunuchs” demonstrates both transimperial linkages and localized divergences with respect to the metropole (Britain) and other colonized regions. “Eunuchs” and hijras were regarded as threatening more so in the North-Western Provinces than they were in other Indian provinces. Further, Hinchy revises scholarly and activist depictions of homophobia in India as a colonial import by showing that while the discourse on “eunuchs” in the North-Western Provinces reflected increasing anxieties about cross-dressing and homosexuality in nineteenth-century Britain, it also drew from stigmatizing Indian middle-class attitudes. Strategies of regulation also evidenced divergent patterns—while Indian convicts in penal colonies were sought to be disciplined into productive labor, “eunuchs” were regarded as incapable of reform and thus targeted for extermination through severe restrictions on their public presence and attempts to prevent new initiates. Noting that this marks a genocidal strategy more common in settler colonies than in British India, Hinchy nuances Michel Foucault's historiography of governmentality as the ascendant modern form of power that seeks to produce self-disciplining subjects. In this respect, the book contributes to a non-teleological history of modern regimes of power by showing that in colonial contexts, not only race but also gender and sexual difference served to exclude colonized people from self-governance.

The two remaining sections analyze fractures and tensions within colonial knowledges and regulatory practices that resulted in multiple accounts about “eunuchs” and frustrated the project of extermination. Showing how colonial archives incorporated multiple sources that contested official knowledge, Hinchy deftly weaves fragmentary narratives to provide an illustration of nineteenth-century hijra lives. An important insight is that people categorized as “eunuch” or hijra had multiple occupations beyond the professions of blessing or sex work that both colonial and contemporary literatures associate them with—some were even agricultural laborers, challenging their depiction as economically unproductive. Hinchy goes on to demonstrate ambiguities within colonial regulatory and policing practices, including confusions and debates regarding how “eunuchs” were to be identified, local variations in the extent of policing, and disagreements between upper and lower levels of administration. “Eunuchs” and hijras utilized these fissures in the colonial edifice to articulate various quotidian forms of resistance, including cross-border migration and wearing androgynous clothing, which frustrated regulation and ensured their survival to the present day.

Overall, Hinchy's meticulous study provides multifaceted insights into the profound yet fractured colonial regulation of gender and sexuality. One issue concerns Hinchy's positioning of the hijra as the primary community targeted by the anti-eunuch campaign. While groups identifying as hijra certainly existed in the colonial period, colonial discourses adopted hijra as a loose overarching label into which various regional terms for gender variance were collapsed (Shane Patrick Gannon, “Translating the Hijra: The Symbolic Reconstruction of the British Empire in India,” PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2009, 22). Hinchy notes the porous nature of the colonial hijra category, and acknowledges that her identification of particular people as hijras is speculative since colonial archives did not necessarily note self-identification. Yet, at some points, she assumes a clear distinction between the hijra community as the main target of regulation and other identities like zanana, feminine males located outside hijra lineages, who seemingly evoked more sporadic concern. However, people outside lineage-based groups may call themselves hijra, and hijra identities may overlap with categories like zanana rather than forming a consolidated community (Aniruddha Dutta, “An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India,” Gender and History 24, no. 3 [2012]: 831). Therefore, isolating a coherently bounded hijra community as the primary focus of colonial regulation may be misleading. However, this is a minor drawback in an otherwise rich account that will be indispensable to those interested in the history of colonialism, gender, and sexuality in South Asia.