La La Maternité renversée : le rituel de dūdhpilānā dans la communauté hijrā indienne

Abstract

The primary goal of this article is to show that the dūdhpilānā (breastfeeding) ritual enables the creation of a symbolic kinship structure within the hijrā community and gives birth not to a daughter, but rather to a mother. Many hijrā rites of passage are appropriation of female rituality that allows women to officialise new kinship structures and, it the case of interest to us, of an inversed maternity, inversed in the sense that the ritual of dūdhpilānā not only allows an older hijrā to officialise her maternal relation with a younger hijrā, but also, and inversely, a younger to officialise her filial relation with an older, as if, within that ritual, the daughter were to give birth to the mother. To this end, it will be necessary to clarify how is simbolically declined, within this non-procreative hijrā community, the Indian kinship structures of māykā(biological family) and sasurāl (inlaws).