This is the first full-length book to provide an introduction to badhai performances throughout South Asia, examining their characteristics and relationships to differing contexts in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Badhai's repertoires of songs, dances, prayers, and comic repartee are performed by socially marginalised hijra, khwaja sira, and trans communities. They commemorate weddings, births and other celebratory heteronormative events. The form is improvisational and responds to particular contexts, but also moves across borders, including those of nation, religion, genre, and identity. This collaboratively authored book draws from anthropology, theatre and performance studies, music and sound studies, ethnomusicology, queer and transgender studies, and sustained ethnographic fieldwork to examine badhai's place-based dynamics, transcultural features, and communications across the hijrascape. This vital study explores the form's changing status and analyses these performances' layered, scalar, and sensorial practices, to extend ways of understanding hijra-khwaja sira-trans performance.

This book is based on long term ethnographic research with hijras, the emblematic figure of South Asian sexual and gender difference in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It proposes the hijra as a counter-cultural formation that embodies not only a direct contrast to hegemonic patterns of masculinity but also as an alternative subculture offering the possibility of varied forms of erotic pleasures and practices otherwise forbidden in mainstream society. While most studies view hijras as an asexual, emasculated, third sex/gender, this book calls into question the phallocentric logic that obscures alternative sites and sources of bodily power and pleasure, emphasizing how hijras craft their own subject position. Ethnographically rich and theoretically engaged, this book will cause a new, global re-examination of both hijras in particular and the wider range of 'male femininities' in general.