Ayaz Qureshi

Village mela  (village fair) was not a new thing but this year Nabla loved  maut ka kuwan  (‘the well of death’) where transgendered performers  ( hijrae ) danced on the Bollywood tunes between motorcyclists' gravity-defying stunts inside an enclosed circular arena of wooden planks.  The onlookers stood on a platform circling the top of  maut ka kuwan . From there they could see the action below - the dance of life and death. They whistled and jeered at the dancers, applauded the stuntmen on motorbikes and showered money to encourage more daring moves. Some made lewd gesture on sexually explicit moves of the hijare dancers others were held in awe of the whole thing or experienced ecstasy, screaming with joy and/or fright. Nothing in the whole  mela matched the excitement created by the near death motorbike manoeuvring of the stuntmen accompanied by sexy dances of the hijrae performers.      Nabla loved it. He was 20 some...

They got her married to someone who was already married but was also well off, even if not around most of the year. A labour migrant in UAE (or was it Saudi Arabia). She fell in love with a Mirasian da munda, a   boy from a different village who she met in the town. He worked there at a barber shop in the town bazaar.  The Mirasi boy brought her home.  His family accepted her at once.  She was clever and beautiful.   They went to the court for a nikha .  She claimed that she was divorced from her previous husband. The husband's family contested that claim.  The court asked for a proof of divorce.  She presented her two sisters and a brother-in-law as witnesses.   Nikha was done with the court's approval but the litigation that followed cost them dearly. The Mirasi family had saved some money by selling an old house to buy a new (bigger) house. This money was now spent on lawyers,  court fees and police. Some of...

In his inaugural speech to the nation on 19 August 2018, newly elected Prime Minister Imran Khan set out his intention to turn around Pakistan’s poor record on human development. Citing a recent report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Prime Minister lamented the fact that Pakistan is one of the top five countries in the world where children die as a result of diarrhoeal diseases spread by contaminated drinking water, one of the countries most hit by maternal mortality, and a country where almost every other child is stunted. He held up brain images to demonstrate the stark differences between the brain development of a healthy two-year-old and that of a stunted child of the same age. Stunting is not only a matter of impaired growth, he said; it also limits children’s intellectual capacities and thwarts the nation’s development. Read more

Issues related to gender and sexual minorities have been historically seen in human rights frameworks instead of international development. Although attitudes towards these minorities have become more accepting in recent times across different cultures (we should remember that many societies tried to cure non-confirming sexual and gender behaviours through the use of medical, behavioural, legal and religious interventions), data on their numbers and other demographic characteristics remains largely absent. Empirical evidence in the form of small scale studies points to the fact that sexual and gender minorities face disparities in many dimensions of development which are the current focus of global development policy and interventions, such as mental health, food security, violence, civic participation. If global development programmes are to be effective they must address these disparities, in addition to meeting development targets for gender and sexual majorities. But how do we do...

T he metaphor of threshold is central to understanding life-course changes in anthropology. Scholars such as Van Gennep (2011) and Victor Turner (1967) popularised the idea of rites de passage to account for cross-cultural practices of performing certain rituals to mark one’s transition from on stage in life to the next. A good example of such rites would be the initiation rituals which are usually performed around the time of puberty to mark the transition of an individual into adulthood i.e. the status of a full member of the society. Rituals associated with birth, marriage, death or even graduation are some other examples. Anthropologists have likened life-course to a series of rooms which are connected to each other through doors or portals between them. One enters the next room by leaving the previous room behind. Importantly, crossing the threshold is a moment of great uncertainty because it is at this precise moment that one is neither here, nor there . According to anthr...