Description: "This is the first book to provide an introduction to badhai that charts its performance throughout South Asia and examines its characteristics and relationship to the differing contexts of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. With its repertoire of devotional prayers, songs, dances, and comic repartee performed by socially marginalized trans feminine hijra and khwaja sira, badhai has long been recognized as vital to these communities' identities. For students of theatre and performance, anthropology, religion, gender and cultural studies, the book illuminates an important form of performance, considering its changing status and uncertain future"--
Brief description: Adnan Hossain is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory at the Department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He is the author of Beyond Emasculation: Pleasure and Power in the Making of Hijra in Bangladesh (2021).
Review Quotes: "At once deeply grounded in ethnographic research and theoretically ambitious, this excellent volume is a remarkable attempt to centre performance as a site of worldmaking, relationality and resistance for hijra, khwaja sira, and trans communities in South Asia ... In sum, Badhai is a ground-breaking and necessary contribution to queer and trans South Asian studies and performance studies more broadly." --Bloomsbury Pakistan