ABSTRACT
Muli befriends several transvestites of various castes who work as male prostitutes. These men also work with Muli on house construction projects. They joke with Muli and with each other, using women’s expressions and feminine forms of address. They dress and behave like women who follow purdah and kinship avoidance restrictions. Muli befriends one of their customers, a man named Madhusudana, who sleeps with both males and females. At the great festival of Shiva, Muli supplies Madhusudana with his prostitutes. For a while Madhusudana depends on Muli for prostitutes, but ultimately Muli becomes psychologically and economically dependent on Madhusudana, who leaves him.
Muli provides a rare account of an unusual life-style in India that has received little attention. While transvestites are tolerated, they are a subject of ridicule and are associated with pollution and the breaking of caste rules and boundaries (see Carstairs 1967: 59–62). Ironically, the transvestites are the only people who accept Muli as he is; his own caste and family downgrade him because he is lazy and does women’s work, and high-caste men simply exploit him for his prostitutes.
