Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233 Aniruddha Dutta, ‘An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras, Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India’ Gender & History, Vol.24 No.3 November 2012, pp. 825–849. An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijras , Kothis and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India Aniruddha Dutta In many postcolonial societies, the relation between contemporary gender/sexual iden- tities and historical precursors of gender variance and same-sex desire has been a fraught and controversial question. 1 While right wing nationalist discourses have of- ten attacked such identities as western influences, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) activists have traced homoeroticism and gender variance, and even LGBT identities, back through revisionist readings of pre-colonial history. 2 Scholarly accounts usually repudiate the conservative denunciation of homosexuality, but the historicity of gender/sexual identities and their relation to postcolonial modernity remains a debated question across several world regions. For example, Joseph Massad critiques western advocates of LGBT rights in the Arab world for propagating a neocolonial discourse of identity that ‘produces homosexuals ... where they do not exist’, seeing gay/lesbian identities as modern western constructs that might repress non-identitarian histories of same-sex desire in the non-west. 3 In contrast, Peter Jackson links the emergence of LGBT identities in Southeast Asian nations to their distinctive trajectories of na- tionalism and capitalism, which are not reducible to western influence, and argues that LGBT identities evidence non-western variants that need not derive their logic or justification from pre-colonial histories of gender/sexual variance. 4 In India, scholarly and activist debates on the historicity or emergence of gen- der/sexual identities are thrown into sharp relief in the case of the kothi (or koti), a category for socioeconomically marginalised gender variant or ‘feminine’ same- sex desiring males that gained visibility within the emerging institutional movement for LGBT rights in the late 1990s. Some activists advocated kothi as a more cultur- ally authentic identity than the putatively westernised ‘gay’ used by elite English- speaking Indians. 5 Several scholars critique this indigenist argument and link the emergence of the kothi to the rise of Indian activism for the sexual health and human rights of sexual minorities, situated within the interlinked globalising ex- pansion of sexual rights activism and HIV-AIDS prevention funding. 6 Lawrence Cohen argues that kothis ‘emerged in cities like Mumbai as a new social fact’, distinct from previous usages of the term, parallel to the rise of funded non- governmental organisations (NGOs) and associated communities. 7 Paul Boyce and C  2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.