Shikshan Sanshodhan : Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract: This paper examines the pictorial representation of hijra (transgender/third-gender) figures in South Asian graphic narratives, arguing that their visual treatment constitutes a distinct and undertheorized mode of structural violence. Drawing on postcolonial visual theory, trans studies, and the semiotics of sequential art, it contends that hijra characters are systematically rendered as spectral presences within South Asian comics—visible in background crowds, liminal spaces, and peripheral gutters, yet absent from narrative agency, interiority, and panel-centered subjectivity. Through close readings of Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor (2004), the Amar Chitra Katha mythology series, Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm (2010), and select independent digital anthologies produced between 2015 and 2023, the paper identifies four recurring rules of a visual grammar of non-personhood—the Rule of the Background Register, the Rule of the Functional Appearance, the Rule of the Reactive Gaze, and the Rule of the Typological Body—and argues that this grammar is in structural correspondence with the juridical history of hijra non-personhood in South Asian law, from the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 to the ambivalent recognitions of the National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India judgment of 2014. It further theorizes the concept of “visual personhood” as a formal category for comics scholarship, drawing on Judith Butler’s framework of grievability and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to argue that the systematic withholding of the close-up, the point-of-view shot, and the interior caption from hijra figures constitutes an act of representational harm legible as violence. The paper concludes by examining counter-narratives in independent publications—particularly Priya Dali’s “Aamchi Mumbai” in the Gaysi Zine (2019) and Meera Devi’s work in the Queer Ink Visible/Invisible series (2021)—that propose an alternative visual ethics centered on the close-up as the primary instrument of grievability and personhood.