A Cut in Time: Thinking “Backwardness” Through Khwajasara Difference in Pakistan
Salman Hussain
“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.
[1] How do hijras—and, more broadly, all who self-identify as transgender and/or khwajasara—embody and respond to what is construed as their temporal lag in Pakistan’s national development? A 2009 Pakistan Supreme Court decision\ reframed khwajasaras’ “backwardness” from a collective, socio-historical condition into an individualized pathology, a “gender disorder” inscribed on their bodies. This juridical shift was a contingent departure for the project of “khwajasara making.” It produced new modes of paternalistic recognition while generating temporal scripts that khwajasaras must inhabit, perform, or creatively rework.
I conceptualize backwardness within this framework not simply as a social classification, but as a temporal and moral diagnosis: a judgment about who is behind the nation’s developmental timeline—itself a perpetually lagging fantasy—and therefore deserving of care, like the khwajasaras who are increasingly framed as state-dependent subjects worthy of benevolent intervention.
Crucially, this status must be actively performed. Like other “suffering subjects,” khwajasaras must continually reproduce their “backwardness”—through bodily markers, narratives of injury and excess, and medical evidence/documentation. They do so to remain legible to the state and non-state sources and resources of respectability and survival.
In Pakistan’s early years, backwardness denoted collective disadvantage experienced by specific groups: religious minorities, “backward classes,” and residents of politically marginalized regions. Inherited from colonial governance, this category framed inequality as the outcome of historical deprivation and uneven development rather than innate personal deficiency. Backwardness indexed the unfinished business of decolonization and anchored citizenship in collective histories of injustice. [2]
Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, articulated this at independence by acknowledging the “burden” of inheriting “backward and depressed classes” and emphasizing the state’s obligation toward them. Although caste was never explicitly named in Pakistan’s constitutional framework, it persisted through entanglements with religion, occupation, and region. Backwardness functioned as a proxy category through which caste-like hierarchies were both disavowed and administratively managed.
Across South Asia, backwardness carried legal and political weight. In India, Niraja Gopal Jiyal shows how collective attribution of backwardness to castes and subcastes formed the basis for affirmative action, linking citizenship to redistribution and group-based redress. In Pakistan, while state formation and mechanisms differed, backwardness similarly justified quotas in education and public employment. Citizenship, in this moment, was imagined as a relationship between the state and communities rather than individuals.
This collective framing was never without contradictions. It often obscured internal hierarchies and excluded identities—such as gender-variant persons—that did not map neatly onto recognized groups. Yet backwardness remained a structural condition, rooted in history and social relations.
The 2009 Supreme Court judgement unsettled this collective orientation.
Individualization, Disability, and Moral Citizenship
Khaki vs. SSP (2009) was widely celebrated as a landmark event for khwajasaras. For the first time, the Supreme Court formally recognized their constitutional rights, affirming their status as equal citizens entitled to dignity, security, and state protection.
Yet this recognition was conditional. Khwajasaras were recognized not solely as a socio-cultural community with a distinct history (although the Court indexed their current status to their colonial criminalization) but also as individuals suffering from a diagnosable condition—a “gender disorder” inscribed in their bodies and psyche.
The Court explicitly equated khwajasaras with transgender people, collapsing a diverse spectrum of social identities, kinship systems, and religious roles into a singular biomedical framework. It expressed moral anxiety about “fake” transgender persons fraudulently claiming rights, jobs, and benefits, and mandated legal-scientific verification mechanisms to distinguish the “real” from the “fake”. [3]
The subsequent introduction of the identity category “Gender X” in the NADRA [4] database institutionalized this logic, translating judicial suspicion into bureaucratic form. This move positioned gender identity as a biological fact to be verified rather than a lived social practice or political claim. Backwardness was individualized and internalized: it became something one had, rather than something one experienced as part of a collective history of injustice and inequality.
The Court further instructed the government to integrate khwajasaras into “respectable” forms of labor, particularly public sector employment and education. This directive explicitly devalued and (re)criminalized subaltern survival economies such as alms-seeking, sex work, and ritual and other forms of labor—activities that had historically sustained khwajasaras while marking them as socially marginal.
The Court ruled that khwajasaras had a disability—a ‘gender disorder’ that qualified them for a special status. By aligning khwajasaras with persons with “disabilities,” the ruling framed exclusion as the outcome of bodily incapacity, difference, or what the Court called a “deviation”—and what I call a temporal misalignment—rather than social stigma.
This legal framework inaugurates what I term the project of “khwajasara making”: a governmental effort to re-time khwajasara bodies into the linear, progressive temporality of national development. Backwardness becomes a bodily lag that can be corrected through diagnosis, discipline, and incorporation into respectable labor, transforming citizenship into a therapeutic, educative project.
The individualized framing also converts backwardness into a moral claim. Rather than being viewed as a political minority entitled to representation, Khwajasaras are framed as victims whose plight justifies state and/or humanitarian intervention.
Their citizenship is grounded in vulnerability, incapacity, and temporal lag—a bodily condition that must be corrected through education, respectable labor, and (benevolent) state surveillance. What emerges is not inclusion on equal terms, but a paternalistic project that seeks to re-time deviant bodies into the nation’s developmental clock.
Backwardness as Temporal Misalignment
Lucinda Ramberg’s notion of being “out of sync” (2016) offers a preliminary but critical lens for understanding this temporalization of citizenship. In the context of her work on Dalit conversions to Buddhism in India, Ramberg suggests that being out of sync entails not being aligned with the “time of the capital”; it is associated with “threatening others ‘to extort money’” or engaging in begging, sex work, or entertainment labor rather than in respectable (read: middle-class) ‘productive’ labor (2016, 245).
Elsewhere, I have argued that hijras’ demand for justice emerges from their historical dispossession by the colonial state and their exclusion from middle-class sharafat (respectability). Challenging their dispossession, I wrote, “hijras identify with middle-class signs of ‘progress’ and question traditional hierarchies, identities and sources of izzat [respect/dignity]” .
After the 2009 ruling, however, this misalignment is no longer collective but bodily and individualized, anchored in gender variance itself.
Backwardness becomes a temporal pathology. The khwajasara body is imagined as delayed, stalled, or arrested—requiring intervention to be brought into productive time. Yet paradoxically, this lag is also what enables recognition. By performing backwardness through narratives of suffering, disability certification, and moral appeal, khwajasaras seek access to state resources otherwise denied to them.
As Ramberg notes, backwardness “has its possibilities” (2016, 228). Khwajasaras strategically mobilize backwardness to align themselves with other protected categories, such as persons with (other) dis/abilities. However, this alignment comes at a cost: it requires the continual reproduction of injury and dependence.
Temporal Cuts and Lived Contradictions
The dynamics of backwardness become especially vivid in the life of Goggi Ma, an elder (guru) khwajasara performer I encountered on the outskirts of Islamabad. Her trajectory illuminates the tensions and possibilities of backwardness as a temporal and political condition.
Past the twilight of her work as a hijra performer, Goggi—like many other khwajasaras—often invoked comparison with groups viewed through a minority lens: Christians, Scheduled Caste communities, other marginalized minorities, and persons with ‘disabilities’. Like herself, she saw these groups as having been left behind.
“Hum peechhe reh gaye” or “peechhe rakha hua tha” [5] were among the phrases she used to convey a newly articulated sense of difference vis-à-vis these fellow citizens, many of whom occupied socioeconomic positions as precarious as her own.
Like most khwajasaras, Goggi’s life history was marked by a series of temporal cuts—ruptures that reorganized kinship, labor, and futurity. One such cut was castration, which constitutes both a material and symbolic severing from heteronormative kinship and reproductive futurity. Within hijra kinship, castration traditionally confers legitimacy as a “real” hijra, anchoring one within religious myth and ritual authority. At the same time, it marks a definitive break from the timelines of marriage, biological reproduction, and filial continuity valorized by a state that appears, even in all its benevolence, as a heteronormative legal regime.
A second cut occurred through kinship rupture. Like many khwajasaras, Goggi Ma had left her natal family under conditions of abuse and violence to join a guru–chela hierarchy. These kinship formations provide care, nurturing, and protection, yet they also impose rigid obligations, excessive exchanges, and ossified hierarchies. Leaving the natal home entails a temporal dislocation from family futures organized around property inheritance, spatial fixity, and temporal continuity/lineage.
A third cut emerged with Goggi Ma’s arrival into ‘respectable’ labor. She spent decades as a performer embedded in hijra kinship networks. But after her twilight years were over and as she became workless and shelterless, she finally procured employment at a childcare center. This ironic return was both temporal and political: it marked an entry into legalized regimes of middle-class productivity, documentation, and discipline (Ma had to have her X Card made as well as provide several ‘respectable’ references). These regimes promise recognition while obscuring prior forms of labor, belonging, and pleasure.
After working at the center for a couple of months, however, Ma left. She told me that “udher bohat sakhti thi…maza nahi aa raha tha” [it was not much fun working there], and retired to a derra set up by one of her own chelas.
Together, these cuts reveal that khwajasaras inhabit multiple, overlapping temporalities: the familial past left behind, the ascetic and performative present of hijra life, and the future-oriented labor timelines on offer as respectable citizens—the last often deliberately disrupted by khwajasaras as a recursive reminder of why they departed from their homes in the first instance.
Goggi Ma’s masking and unmasking of these layers underscores the ambivalence of backwardness as an available resource and a constraint. Backwardness is not simply imposed but actively inhabited and reoriented towards everyday survival.
Queer Time, Futurity, and the Limits of Moral Citizenship
Vaibhav Saria (2021) and Omar Qasmani (2022) offer rich ethnographic accounts of non-heteronormative temporalities in South Asia. Saria’s work with hijras in Odisha (India) theorizes asceticism as a diagonal movement to linear time, where queer life is oriented through religious myth and selective engagement with the state. Qasmani’s ethnography of saintly fakirs in Sindh (Pakistan) traces “unstraight affordances”—forms of sociality and care that exist outside reproductive futurity and capitalist productivity. These works illuminate how queer and gender variant communities rework dominant temporal logics, often framing queer temporality as a departure from the state’s timelines.
Goggi Ma’s story, like many other khwajasara experiences that I witnessed, complicates this picture. It shows how state-recognized backwardness pulls queer temporalities back into a medicalized narrative of lag and correction. Khwajasaras’ lives oscillate between kinship, labor, and bureaucracy, revealing how they must continuously play with the temporal demands of recognition. Ma’s mobility between attachments to hijra kinship, ‘respectable’ labor, and bureaucratic interpellation shows the limits of moral citizenship.
The 2009 Supreme Court decision re-indexed backwardness from a collective socio-historical condition into an individualized, medicalized, and moralized pathology. This shift repositioned khwajasaras as suffering subjects—citizens recognized through vulnerability and temporal lag rather than political belonging. It reconfigured khwajasara citizenship, labor, and temporality, embedding recognition within a paternalistic project of techno-medical diagnosis and moral progress. Khwajasaras were recognized not as minorities requiring political representation, but as suffering subjects deserving benevolent intervention
Backwardness now operates as a moral summons to be rectified and resynchronized with the nation’s developmental time. Khwajasaras respond to this summons tactically, leveraging backwardness while playing with its constraints. In doing so, they expose the contradictions of contemporary citizenship in Pakistan, where inclusion depends not on equality but on the continuous performance of suffering and lag/delay.
Notes
[1] These reflections are drawn from my ethnographic engagement with khawajasara activists and communities in Islamabad and Rawalpindi since 2014. The paper is a shorter version of a draft I shared for the ‘Majority Minority Politics and Democracy in South Asia’ workshop organized by Mohsin Alam Bhat and Natasha Raheja at Cornell University in September 2025. I thank both organizers and especially the participants at the conference who generously engaged with this work.
[2] See, for example, Patricia Gossman’s Riots and Victims (1999) on first Partition of Bengal (1905) and how it was viewed to benefit Bengali Muslims as a distinct “backward” community.
[3] Even though the Transgender Rights Bill 2019 obviated these medical and psychological signatures over khwajasara bodies, the Bill was challenged in the Federal Shariat Court and parts of it were struck down in May 2023. The appeal against the decision is pending since then in the Supreme Court.
[4] The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) was established in 2000 to regulate government databases and manage the registration records of Pakistani citizens. It issues Computerized National Identity Cards (CNICs). Until 2016, khwajasaras, like many other marginalized communities, were often denied CNICs. A 2016 Lahore High Court ruling directed NADRA to allow a guru to be listed in place of a father when processing CNIC applications for khwajasaras (Mian v. Fed., 2016).
[5] We were behind or we were kept behind.
Salman Hussain is a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellow at York University, Canada, and a Visiting Research Associate at the Center for Feminist Research, York University. His research interests are law and decolonization, human rights and social movements, gender and sexuality, and political violence and terror.
Thumbnail credit: "Supreme Court-Pakistan (cropped)" by Khalid Mahmood is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.