Hijra Farsi: Secret language knits community

 MUMBAI: It's not often that one stumbles upon a secret language floating around the streets of a busy Indian metropolis, least of all a language that has been alive-and-kicking across the sub-continent for a century or two.

While the language in question is shrouded in mystery, its keepers are anything but obscure. The vivid make-up, rose-red lipstick and colourful saris draped across a body that is neither entirely male nor entirely female make South Asia's Hijra community among the most visible sexual minorities. Yet their lexicon is invisible to civil society, though it remains in use across much of India and Pakistan.

"Nobody besides the Hijra community would understand the language we speak. It was created for the purpose of self-preservation during the British Raj. While literature shows that Hijras occupied a privileged position in ancient India, the British criminalised us and put us behind bars. This language was as a survival mechanism for Hijras," says Simran Shaikh, an attractive and articulate member of the community, speaking to TOI at her guru's sunlit home in Kamathipura's 1st lane, a stretch of Mumbai's red-light district reserved for Hijras.

Shaikh's claims are backed by academic research in India and Pakistan. The language is sometimes referred to as Koti or Hijra Farsi, though it has more in common with Urdu and Hindustani than it does with Persian.

That the language is still in use may have to do with the fact that the community continues to be persecuted in independent India. "Seventy-four percent of the Hijra community has suffered violence and harassment," says Shaikh, who works with Alliance India, an NGO that works on AIDS prevention.

"Today, if there's some information I'd like to communicate with those within my community that the outside world does not need to know, I would use this language. For instance, if there's a police van in sight and I want to warn a member of my community standing on the road, I'd use this code language," says Shaikh.

'Complete language'

Academic research validates the claim that Hijra Farsi is indeed a language and not simply a collection of secret code-words. A research paper by Islamabad-based scholars, Muhammad Safeer Awan and Muhammad Sheeraz, who studied the language spoken amongst Pakistan's Hijra community, shows that the language contains its own unique vocabulary. It has its own syntax that differs from other mainstream languages, making Farsi "as good a language as any other."

Another academic paper by Himadri Roy, professor at Indira Gandhi National Open University, Delhi, shows that, much like any other language, the language of the Hijras has nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and other parts of speech, with verbs used to complete a sentence.

It's a language that a pretty young Hijra called Ayesha, who has yet to come out of the closet at home, uses when she meets other members of the community. She uses this language while talking to her friends in public, when she doesn't want the rest of the world to know what she's saying. She talks of the words used to allude to an attractive man, as well as words that distinguish men of different age groups. There's a specific word to describe a man in the age group 16-18, and another for one who is 25-30.

"See what I'm wearing," says Ayesha, pointing to her colourful get-up and bright sari. "We call this satla in our language," she adds, referring to a word used for feminine clothes. For Ayesha, a language to call her own has helped her embrace her identity as a Hijra.

source: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-10-07/india/42793159_1_secret-language-urdu-alliance-india