 Greetings everyone and welcome. My name is Amina Yakin, I'm the chair of the Centre of the Study of Pakistan and the chair of the SOAS Decolonising Working Group and also the director of the SOAS Festival of Ideas. It's my great pleasure to welcome you for this evening's session, evening if you're in London, morning if you're elsewhere. I think Professor Khan's time is also in a different zone. So, you know, I also feel that I should welcome all of you in the greetings given the title of, wonderful title of today's session and say assalamu alaikum adab and greetings in sort of Urdu as well as English. And my job really here is to introduce you to the person who set this particular seminar up for us. I've been extremely fortunate and lucky to have had a brilliant and talented group of students working with me this year on the module that I teach, Imagining Pakistan and both post graduates and undergraduates and it's always very exciting to teach this course because I've met a lot of talented students over the years and this particular group has really taken things further and taken the challenge of contributing to the seminar series and putting student voice on the table because that's what we wanted to do so to not just curate it from the top down as it were but to have students setting the agenda as well and making this about things that they would like to talk about in here and we had the first session that was an interview last a few weeks ago now which was wonderful and really set the tone. So today is I'm going to introduce Yasir who will be who will then introduce Professor Khan and then Professor Khan will speak for 30 minutes and he says that's going to be on Pakistani time whatever that means and then we'll take Q&A at the end. So Yasir Peracha is on the medical anthropology program at SOAS. His main interests lie in the study of health, disability, gender and sexuality in context of colonialism and imperialism and I will hand over now to him and say welcome Yasir and welcome Professor Khan and I look forward to the webinar. Thank you. So I guess it's my responsibility to introduce our speaker so Fahsh Khan is Associate Professor and Chair in Urdu language and culture at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He received his PhD from Columbia University and he teaches Urdu language and literature tales of wonder of the Islamic world as well as the cultural history of the South Asian diaspora. He is author of the broken spell Indian storytelling and the Roman genre and Persian and Urdu. Currently he's writing an English translation of Aga's Tale which is of course the subject of today's talk as well as a monograph on generosity and Islam in the Kisla's of Hathamthai. And I just want to say speaking from personal experience Fahsh G is one of the most beloved professors at the Institute at McGill and I want to thank him on behalf of the SOAS community for joining us today for this talk. Welcome Fahsh G over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much to the fabulous Yasir Peracha who's been doing so much work behind the scenes to set up this talk and I'm very grateful to Dr. Yaqeen for allowing me to share this preliminary work. I've been on sabbatical so I'm not Zoom experience so please excuse any any malfunctions on my part. Oh I also want to thank Sunil Poon for doing the logistics and advertising and Ramzan Mubarak to those of you who are observing. So again this is a very preliminary work and I hope that if you have any corrections or anything to help me as I move forward with this project that you will present them in the Q&A if I assuming that I give you enough time. I wanted to give you I wanted to make sure to give you a content warning. I will be speaking about rape and sexual harassment during this talk as they are central to Agar's tale. The tellers of tales and sayers of stories recount that in farthest Montrealistan there once dwelt a lowly cis male wretch named Muhammad Khan Pasha. One summer's day as he sat ensconced within his chair of Urdu language and culture he read A Tale of Wonders written in 19th century North India. It's title the Qisai Agarogur written by a person known only as Asi and edited by Khalil Rehman Daoudi. It was a queer tale indeed. It told of what transpired when the boy-loving red demon stole away Prince Ruby of Poppy Seed City so as to gaze uninterrupted upon the prince's charms. And when Prince Ruby disappeared his father the King Mansur Shah made a new prince of his vizier's daughter Agar. In this way Agar acclaimed as a prince no longer a girl became Poppy Seed City's de facto ruler. Prince Agar a trans man maybe? As he turned the Qisai's leaves Pasha placed a finger upon his teeth astonished as he read of Prince Agar's transformations his wild Tamashas and his adventures with strange beings with strange desires. There were demons, seamurks, impudent paris, dejected frogs, a cheeky horse, helpful gins, magical women, and lustful men. In all of his adventures Agar was guided by the Jogi a great sorcerer and scholar who became Agar's teacher and his daddy but sugar-free. Poor witless professor Pasha chortled with joy at the queerness of Agar's tale. He thought it was such a unique story celebrating a trans male character representing a thinly veiled male-male desire between Agar and his lover Gul. Pasha celebrated with many backward somersaults as he kept reading. But then he read the tale's ending. It's a strong force, the desire to find a past that affirms your own presence. It should come as no surprise that those whose existences had been delegitimized should have a desire for a continuous history, for ancestors to celebrate, even if those forebears are not related to us through conventional processes of biological reproduction. Other forms of inheritance are possible through exemplarity. Manorisms, habits of touch, ways of speaking may be passed down regardless of blood descent. Or they may be claimed by a new generation without having been passed down by ancestors in the process that Elizabeth Freeman has called temporal drag. There are many ways to make ancestors. Scholarship on past representations of non-heteronormative acts in South and West Asia has evinced this desire for continuity, for historical mirrors, and for the valorization of claimed ancestors. Ruth Vanitah and Salim Kidwai's pioneering scholarship and translations have certainly seen driven by such a desire. To some extent so has Scott Kugel's wonderful study of the Persian and Urdu poet Siraj Orangavadi. But other studies have taken a less contiguous approach, based upon the idea of fractures within history and genres of texts. Here I'm thinking about the work of Siam Naim and Karla Petjevic on Amrat Parasti and verbal masquerade in Urdu-Rehti poetry, and especially in the Ottoman Arab context Khaled Roweheb's wonderful work on attitudes towards male-male erotic desire. When I read the ending of Agar's story, I felt a profound sense of disappointment and grief that the liberatory potential of the tale had not been fulfilled. The feckless demon king Gul pursues Agar throughout the story. At first, Gul's desire for the male Agar would appear to be a thinly veiled homoerotic longing. But Agar's only strong relationship was asexual and aromantic, with his teacher, the Jogi. Agar decided reluctantly to marry Gul. He made it a condition of his marriage that Gul must not make him wear women's clothing. But after the marriage was over, Gul's nanny persuaded Agar to wear a feminine outfit. As soon as he saw Agar in these clothes, Gul raped him. As Gul was forcing sex upon him, Agar kept demanding that he stop. To no avail. The tale does not represent the rape of Agar as a tragedy, but simply as a rite of passage for a woman and a wife. Agar's protests are supposedly the inevitable complaints of the ignorant virgin bride. They can be ignored by the groom, who knows that she will get used to it in time. She must be inured to penetration by a man for the sake of sexual pleasure and reproductive success. Afsane Najmavadi has argued that when a tale with liberatory potential ends in a heteronormative manner, that ending doesn't have to cancel out the promise of what came before it. She insists that we can read tales in a fragmentary way without letting everything be predetermined by the ending. Yet we cannot simply ignore the rape of Agar, or the fact that he was coerced into becoming a woman. Especially for a cis male reader like myself, to immediately erase the cis normative and patriarchal ending would be unethical. When I returned to Agar's tale years after my first perusal, I had already decided that I had to look at it, first of all, with an affirmation of historical and generic difference. A kind of pessimism must precede the possibility of celebration. Gaji Amin presents an exemplary form of queer pessimism in his study of Jean Genet's pedorasty. De-idealization, Amin writes, de-exceptionalizes queerness in order to analyze queer possibility as inextricable from relations of power, queer deviance as intertwined with normativity, and queer alternatives as not necessarily just alternatives. So in this talk, what I'm doing is borrowing Amin's de-idealizing approach in order to examine how patriarchal imperatives get the better of disruptive possibility in the Qisa. So in Qisa's, there are plenty of women who become men and men who become women. Changes of gender through both clothing and bodily change are relatively common. Men fall into enchanted wells and emerge as women on the other side. Women dress in masculine clothing and take to the battlefield, like Gurdaw Farid in the Shah Nama, or Niqabdad Narangipursh in the tale of Amir Hamza. But with the exception of one other tale that I recently read, the Urdu and Gujarati tale of Muhammad Hanif and Zektun, Agar's tale is the only Qisa of which I'm aware that centers a person who has changed genders. I don't want to take de-idealization too far to make Agar unavailable as an ancestor, or to deny the force in the Qisa of Agar's transmasculinity. The tale does not show him simply as a woman pretending to be a man. Agar's past girlhood always haunts him, although he is insistent in affirming his present maleness. Even the one time when Agar refers to himself as a woman, in order to convince the pari Sarvasa to marry him, he simultaneously affirms his masculinity. So in this scene, Agar and Sarvasa are embracing in the marital bed after getting married, and Sarvasa told Agar, there is a pool in my garden. If a man bathes in it, he will become a woman, and if a woman bathes in it, she will become a man. Give it a try if you feel like it. But Agar passed up the chance. He said, God has gifted me with a masculine power, Himmate Mardanagi. Because of it, so many of my labors have been successful. Agar's transmasculinity is fluid, precarious, and as we see from this scene, sometimes strategic. But of course, the same has been true for many trans males in our own context. But I'm going to avoid speaking of Agar as a trans man. I prefer to describe him as a male, because in the Qisa, Agar himself does not always describe himself as a Mard, as a man. On two occasions, he says that he was an Amrad. And Amrad's were not exactly men. For those of you who don't know, as my slide will tell you, an Amrad was a younger male who was potentially, or really, the object of an older male's desire. So for example, when Agar met his teacher, the Jogi, and became his adoptive son, the Jogi immediately misgendered him. He said, for a daughter like you, I would sacrifice a thousand sons. But Prince Agar responded, I am no daughter. You've mistaken me, perhaps because of my saddagi. Now, I'm never sure how to translate these terms for the time being in my draft of the translation. I've translated it as twink. But that doesn't quite capture what's going on. It's not a very historicized term. The term sada in this context is synonymous with Amrad. And I think it refers to the fact that Amrad's were usually beardless. Their faces, in other words, were sada or unembellished with facial hair. And Amrad might or might not be considered a man, though, of course, he was usually on his way to becoming a man. Agar's immature Amrad masculinity allowed him to do what men could not do with impunity. So he entered the space of the Zanana, or women's quarters. He went on quests with magical women. As Sani Najmabadi has even suggested, the possibility that in late 19th century and early 20th century Iran, it may have been the boundary between Amrad and man that made men into men as much as the boundary between woman and man. If we had the time, it would be useful to consider transformations more broadly in Agar's tale, how they occur, how they relate to desire, and to the meaning or lack thereof of gender and transgendering in pre 20th century India. But in order to do so, we would need to think through as many cases of creatureal change over time as possible. And we would need to recognize the vast differences between each instance of transformation. So it becomes very difficult to generalize about trans transformation for these reasons. I've listed in my PowerPoint some of the most explicit terms around transformations. And each of these terms it would do has a slightly different implication. Transformation is sometimes about shifting modes of being. It's sometimes about self making or self performance. Sometimes it's about appearances, and sometimes it's about real states and presence. Similarly, when we look at the various modes of transformation that living beings undergo in the Kisa, we find a wide array, cross dressing, disguise, and other changes of clothing, trans species change, growing up and growing down because some characters become younger in Agar's sale. Many, many kinship reconfigurations and bodily changes caused by the ingestion of food and drink. To think about each case of transformation is not something that I can do within the confines of this talk. I would have to answer many questions. So for example, what is normal? And what is custom breaking? Adat. Can we distinguish between or deconstruct the binary between bodily change and changes of clothing? This is something that in the presence is important, not just for thinking about transgender, but also for legislation around the Sikh turban and the Muslim hijab. What transformation is imposed by others and what is self-willed? How is transformation dependent upon self assertion and how upon the recognition of others? These are all questions that apply to transgendering as much as they do to transformation more broadly. What I can say for now is that the presence of this bewildering range of transformations is a marker of the profound instability of bodies in the tale. Prince Agar did not move only between femininity and masculinity. He boasted of being able to take on hundreds of forms using the magic that the Jogi taught him. When his lover, King Gul, witnessed Agar turning into a demon, spitting fire, he blurted out in amazement the following shade. What art is there that he does not possess? Sometimes he is a demon, sometimes a buddy. Is he a flame or lightning or the air? Nothing has been fixed or proven. What is he? So note here that I've indicated that sabit means both fixed and proven. Proven is the meaning that very often Urdu and Hindi speakers know best in the present, but especially in its older senses it also means fixed. And I would argue that this word with its double meaning, sabit, is key to understanding the instability of Agar's transformations, which benefit Agar while causing distress and bewilderment to others. At the same time, the remark and this term points to the male desire to prove that Agar is a woman and to fix him in this singular gender. Throughout the Kisar, Agar's transmasculinity is haunted by the possibility that some man will prove and fix his womanhood. This danger infects the audience with an anxiety, a fixation that endures across the tale. We keep on wondering and worrying, can Agar avoid being turned into a woman forever? But in the first place, Agar becomes a male in order to fulfill the patriarchal dynastic needs of Papisid city. Inevitably, perhaps, the state exigencies that made him into a man are instrumental in turning him into a woman when his gender instability threatens the kingdom. So like so many Pisas, Agar's tale begins with a crisis of patrilineal kinship. When the original prince, Prince Ruby, is kidnapped by the Amrat Parast, Red Demon, the king Mansur Shah resorts to making the 12-year-old Agar into a prince. And the Kisar says, it transpired at last that the king adopted the Vizir's daughter, Agar, as his son. And he placed her on the royal throne as his heir. It was whispered about everywhere amongst all the citizens of the kingdom that the king's son, never beheld even by the eye of the son, was to be exhibited upon the seat of state. When they heard the news, the people of Papisid city took heart and made pilgrimages to peep at the heir to the throne. It was said among the folk that he was a prince with accountants like Joseph's, justice equal to no shirvans, generosity like hathens, and courage like that of Rustam. So Agar's maleness was established in the first place by his being displayed as a prince upon the throne of Papisid city and by the visual and verbal recognition of Agar's subjects. The people of Papisid city masculinize him by attributing to him the virtues of the conventional male exemplars of beauty, justice, generosity, and bravery. So in the first place his maleness is imposed upon him by the needs of the Papisid city state. Nevertheless, Agar's maleness became something that he cultivated and wished to keep. But he was never quite a conventional male. He became the Jogi's student and adoptive son, in part because being known as the son of the Jogi was his way of trying to escape the patriarchal state in favor of what Indrani Chatterjee calls monastic governmentality. And I don't have time to go into this idea, but it's a very powerful one, especially for this Pisa and for the study of non-heteronormative acts in 19th century India. But more obviously, Agar was attracted to the magical powers that the Jogi could give him. This magic enabled him to defeat 40 kings who made war on Papisid city and magic fueled the success of his quests. The power that Agar yields through magic makes him a more potent male, especially upon the field of war. At the same time, scholars of the Shaanama, like Dick Davis, have argued that many audiences would have doubted that male heroes who used magic and trickery were fully men. Why would that be? Zara Ayubi has recently argued very clearly and convincingly that manuals of ethics or akhlaq represented certain virtues such as justice and bravery as masculine. In Qisas, the association of bravery with manliness is so strong that women who make war cannot escape masculization. Their courage cannot be imagined as a womanly trait. But I would argue that there are other character traits, both positive and negative, that are contestable between the genders that can be transgendered or transvalued. So, for example, generosity is a supposedly masculine trait falling within the compass of futuwat or javanmarthi. But when women in Qisas are more generous than men, their generosity threatens to disrupt the masculine gendering of this virtue. And this means that men who are generous might find themselves performing a feminine virtue. The Qisa must then contain this threat by re-establishing the superiority of male generosity. Another such contested trait, which is very important to Agar's tale and to transgendering in the tale, is makr or gail, which tales of the makre zanan, the wiles of women, and triacaretra, or women's character, regularly attributed to women. I have a lot to say about makr and a lot to write about it, but let me only say here that it points to a power relation. For the powerful, gail is an illegitimate trick. But for the disempowered, gail is a means of escape. Qisas attribute wily and tricky behavior not only to women, but also to feminized or less masculine males. So to look at an instance in which Agar is accused of guile, we can go to a passage in Agar's tale in which King Gul is pursuing Agar sexually, sexually harassing Agar. And one evening before dinner, he managed to get his hands around Agar's body. He tried to feel Agar's breasts. But Agar acted swiftly and he sniffed a magic flower at which his breast, his chest, became flat. According to the Qisa, Gul found no sign of Agar's breasts anywhere, and he became lost and frustrated. Prince Agar said, you and your bad thoughts, get these false ideas out of your head. Gul said, I know your disguises are Behrup very well. So with this accusation of Behrup or the taking out of many appearances, deceit associated with the low status Behrupia community, as he gropes for Agar's breasts, this is Gul's most blatant attempt to prove his femaleness and fix his gender. Agar's lack of fixity is represented as an illegitimate makr, a bamboozling ruse, a false exterior to evade male sexual desires for females, or a form of cock-blocking. Agar transformed in such a way that should have proven his masculinity to Gul. Yet the stubborn logic of Gul's response is that his transformation into a male is itself an act of guile that is quintessentially feminine, proving Agar's femininity instead. So Agar just can't win. But why does he agree at last to marry Gul? What happens is that another suitor appears, seeking Agar as his wife. This is Askari Pelvan, a ferocious man who lived in the wilderness with the beasts, and who was like a beast himself. The hegemonic or hyper-masculine man controls women through overt violence, and military violence is the strategy that Askari Pelvan used. He laid siege to Papisid city, and from beyond its walls he crassly demanded that Agar become his wife and sing for him. However, Askari Pelvan was strangely intimidated when he heard about Agar's manly feats of courage. The quissa says, Askari Pelvan said to himself, the one who has performed such feats of manhood, how could they accept having anyone govern them? This is a bloody half-baked idea of mine. This thing would turn out very badly. He was a bash that he had been so cheeky. He made the excuse that he had to go pee, and he returned to his wasteland. Once Askari had slinked off, Gul persuaded Agar that while his counterfeit maleness allowed him to be seen in public, everyone knew that he was a woman. Agar's beauty and desirability would put the kingdom at risk of further warfare and chaos, and Gul pleads with the prince. It has been proven to everyone that you are a woman. Everybody is distracted and crazy like a bull bull because of your rosy cheek. Every day, because of you, thousands will be murdered. So gradually, Agar grew convinced and depressed by the idea that his kingdom, for whose sake he had been made into a male, was in peril because he was now recognized and fixed as a woman. The welfare of the kingdom and the inevitability of male succession to the throne made Agar feel that his choice was between marriage and suicide. In fact, right after the wedding, Agar tries to poison himself, but he is stopped by his new husband, Gul. So Prince Agar succumbed in the end to the same governmental patriarchy that had made him a male and a prince, and he succumbed due to the perception of his maleness as a feminine form of guile that necessitated his being fixed into the one thing that he really was, a woman. From this perspective, it would seem as if Agar were merely the victim of a patriarchal order that needs to prove his femininity and keep it stable. But simultaneously, Agar's masculinity enabled him to participate in patriarchy in a particular way. He participates in patriarchy in a way that prefigures the process by which he would be made into a woman himself at the end of his tail. A lot of the kiss is taken up with Agar's quest to acquire women for other men to marry. So for example, one evening, Agar discovered that the Vizir Shariah was hopefully in love with Queen Pearl. But the facts that, but the feats that Queen Pearl's suitors had to perform were beyond Shariah's ability. Prince Agar said to Shariah, well, why don't you lend me your big big sword, and then I'll show you who I am. The selfish man gave him his sword and said, if you can do this deed, I shall be your lifelong slave. So Agar went to Queen Pearl's father, Raja Basik, to fulfill the conditions. He turned into a dragon and he raced with Raja. He went swimming in a cauldron of boiling oil and he bathed in a boiling hot hamam. When he had won Queen Pearl, he married her to the sword and then he took her away to bestow her upon Shariah. Note that Queen Pearl has said nothing about wanting to marry Shariah. In fact, she said nothing at all, as far as the Vizir is concerned. She was a silent gift that passed between the hands of two males. Her position and that of other females whom Agar acquires and gifts to men is described very well by Gail Rubin's idea of traffic in women. So for those of you who aren't familiar with Rubin's foundational 1975 feminist essay, she reads Claude Levy-Strauss, the anthropologist's work, to argue that patriarchy, or what she called the sex-slash-gender system, worked partially through the gifting and quasi-commodification of women that Levy-Strauss had described as a pillar of human culture. Through this form of exchange of women, bodies become gender, the ones who give or receive women are perceived as men, and the exchange objects are recognized as women. So the gifts of women that Agar performed enacted patriarchy and produced the genders that it required. But why would Agar go to such trouble to get women and give him to other men? Why this selfless generosity? Apparently selfless generosity. Patriarchy in the Islamic world often depended on a male homosociality that gave individual males power beyond their individual capacities. Agar's gifting of women was calculated to give him a kind of return on his investment in the form of solidarity with the men to whom he gave brides. And sometimes it does. In gifting women, Agar masculinized himself in a way that, in theory, should grant him access to the power of homosocial patriarchy. His participation in the system, in which he even outdid other men like Shariaad, should also have counteracted suspicions of his femaleness. So the more masculine he seems, the less the suspicion should be that he is a woman. But in the end, Gul's desire and his relentless quest to fix Agar as a woman triumphed over Agar's masculine power. Now we come to my conclusions. This preliminary idealizing reading of Agar's tale has revealed, I hope, some of the ways in which Prince Agar's transmasculinity enables him to have power through patriarchy. It is shown as well how his maleness is put into question, leading to what is from our perspective a tragic conversion of his transformational multiplicity into a fixed and controlled singularity of gender. These two sides of Agar are related to one another. The traffic in women that he performs is the same traffic to which he falls prey. I think that patriarchy in Islamic societies of the time was quite different from the form within which we live. Laurie Shannon, the scholar of English literature, has argued that competing normativities existed in early modern Europe and that heteronormativity was accompanied by subnormative regimes. Years after first reading Agar's tale, I came to the conclusion that patriarchy in Islamic societies worked through at least two normativities. One, a heteronormative male-female desire that excluded other males and genders like the Muhannas or Hitra's, and two, a subnormative male desire that was especially directed towards younger males and perhaps people of other genders and which also contributed to the patriarchal system. In either case, people who were not men had to seek power through association with tutelage under and sexual and kinship transactions with men. People like Amrits could have the ultimate privilege of becoming men after undergoing this subordination, while others could only build up other sorts of capital derived from men. Despite increasing concern regarding homonormativity and homonationalism, patriarchy in the West today remains largely cis-heteronormative. At the same time, trans-manhood has been available as an identity for some time now in the West, and trans men have been navigating a complicated relationship with various kinds of feminisms, including trans-exclusionary forms. So on my various feeds on the internet every few months a video or an article pops up in which trans men talk about the clarity with which they have been able to see male privilege after their transition, and incessantly they have to defend themselves against J.K. Rowling-esque accusations that they're dangerous defectors somehow to the patriarchal cause. I want to stress that I'm looking at Agar's trans-masculinity within the confines of the tale of the 19th century Indian context and of my de-idealizing approach. Agar's trans-masculinity, entwined as it is with patriarchy, is not identical with trans-masculinity in the Western present, because patriarchy itself is differently configured in the two contexts. On the other hand, there must be continuities as well, especially within a text that is not so much historical as it is imaginative. Agar must be contained at the end of the story via marriage and rape because he shows up normative masculinities through acts of parody, substitution, and heterosociality. If he didn't pose a threat to men in some manner, I don't think that it would be necessary to put an end to his wiles. So I think that Agar is most clearly an ancestor for those who face rape in the present, especially, but not exclusively, for trans-males and masculine women who face the threat of rape that aims to fix them into a proper femininity. So right now, I'm very deep in the work of just translating the tale, and I haven't had much time to think about it, which is why, you know, this is kind of a kaccha talk, and I would appreciate your feedback. But in the end, I hope that Agar will emerge as an ancestor in other ways, and I think that in order for that to happen, we need to understand how another reading of the tale could revalue or trans-value Agar's instability, his transformations, and especially his makr or gail. Because however much makr, gail, is maligned, it is impossible to deny that it is among the akhlaq, the divine traits that Muslims are expected to imitate. Wallahu khairul makrin. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Khan, for such an enriching and fascinating talk. I wish we were live, so we could have done around applause for you. So please hear some virtual applause there. And your talk has really connected with so many issues that are contemporary and urgent in relation to contexts of trans-exclusiveness and sexuality and manhood and patriarchy and the position of an Islamic society when it comes to that very important question of masculinity. We often ask questions about femininity and the position of gender and women, which is seen as one of the problems that Islam has in the West. So it's something that's debated from lots of different angles and that's not really something that you're talking about here. You're opening up the discussion on masculinity through this looking back at this particular kissa. And I think if it's late 19th century, around the 1850s or 60s, I think. That's right. And it comes out in Urdu and it has a very... It comes out in Urdu. There is a Pagash al-Baz, who might be here, has pointed out to me that there's a Persian version in the British Library from the 18th century, I believe. And then, you know, I probably will never get my hands on this, but in Hadrabad, I think, there was a woman who wrote a versified version of this story, I think in the 1880s or 1890s. Right. That's really interesting to hear, because I was thinking also of that historical moment when this kissa is written and what's happening with sexualities and with masculinity. And also thinking about the kissa tradition and the broader Islamic tradition and its presence in India and also that the kissa are available in other languages as well. And we have the Punjabi kissa as well. And gender is very much central, seems quite central to them, that question of gender and also that questioning. And I suppose the question that I was thinking of in relation to... I mean, you had a lot of people in your talk that whose work I admire and respond to from Ruth Benitha and Salim Kadwai to Scott Kugel and many others. And I was just wondering about the persona of agar, because... and I could be completely wrong here and have misunderstood this from another kind of biography that I came across of the story. Is he sort of masculine from the start? Is he male from the start of the story? Or does he change... does the gender? Because there's so much fluidity to the story that you're talking in terms of how the gender is formed and transformed. And also the presence of this other... the jins, which is also a Quranic referentiality as well. And so I was just interested about this unfixity of gender and of the central kind of persona of the prince as it were. I mean, is that sort of something that we try and fix in a contemporary reading? Or is it in that sort of... in the way that it's written? Is it fixed from the start of the story? Or did you find that more changing more as you kind of read the story? So, you know, I had a lot of trouble deciding on a pronoun to use for agar, because he is, you know, at the beginning of the tale, he is born as a girl. And it describes... it describes his birth as a girl and, you know, the girl child is described in very feminine terms. And it isn't until Prince Ruby, Prince Lal, disappears that he is made into a prince. And, you know, because Urdu and Hindi and all these languages don't have gender pronouns only, gender adjectives and verbs, it can sometimes be difficult to understand, you know, how the is gendering him. But it was really the kind of repeated instances of his insistence that he is a male that led me to refer to him as he almost throughout. But even after he becomes a male, for example, there's a quest which requires him to wear women's clothing. So he puts on women's clothing. At one point, he again, he tells Sarvassa, because Sarvassa is reluctant to marry him, but he says, look, I'm a woman, it's okay, we can sleep together, and there won't be a problem. So, you know, he says to her that he is a woman. So it is very fluid, never mind the kinds of other transformations that he undergoes, turning into a demon, turning into a dragon, right? And so what's really happening in the, in the tale is that it's the men, it's, it's Gull and Askarit Talwan, and other men in the tale who are doing their best to kind of control the threat of his, his Behrup, his, his Makar, his, his formal instability in order to, in order to kind of contain him, particularly for the, for the purposes of the, of state stability, but also for the, you know, and relatedly for the sake of patriarchy. Okay, thank you. That's really interesting. And, and I'm like, would love to talk more about that, but I can see quite a few questions are popping up on the Q&A function. And before I turn to them, Yasir, did you want to come in with any comments or a question? Well, I have many questions, obviously, it was a wonderful talk. Thank you so much. I think going off of the sort of your concluding points about seeing a good as a product of his own time in the 19th century. I'm curious, like, I know you, you've talked about this already, but I'm, if I was wondering if you talk more about the translation process. I know that, for example, like Nashmabadi warns against imposing our own ideas of sex, gender, sexuality systems on different places and times. And you mentioned like right at the beginning, I think you said like a trans man, maybe, and the question of like translating umbra, this twink and all the discourses associated with that. I was wondering if you could talk about like navigating translation at the level of the sentence, like when you're choosing the words, like, and all the discourses associated with that, like sort of the power dynamics of that. It's very difficult. So, you know, I'm trying to, I'm trying to do to translate. I've already done a full literal translation of the of the work and I'm now kind of polishing it and and putting it into into language that captures more of the subtleties of the tale. And, you know, by the way, I want to thank Niusia Bastani, Jessica Stilwell, let's see, B. Khalili and Kiran Sunar for looking through these these translations with me as I as I go along. And, you know, for pointing out any infelicities as I as I translate. It's really hard because I'm trying to do this translation in such a way that that does seem contemporary in certain ways and that presents agar and and other, you know, forms of queerness that may not even necessarily be connected to a certain character as exemplary or ancestral for people in the in the present. You know, I'm even doing, you know, kind of millennial things like when I, I mean, actually, Yasuri, you know that I do this in my world class when I there are a lot of weddings in this story. And and it always says that it will doom down to show the way. So I'm saying, you know, it was a lit wedding. The wedding was lit. For example, but but for example, with a with a translation like twink, I'm very nervous about this about this kind of translation, even though it's very evocative and, you know, it speaks to to the present in in a very strong way, because, you know, at the same time, I'm doing my best to to make the translation otherly to make it strange and to and to historicize it. And one of the ways in which I'm doing that is by breaking English. I haven't done so much of that in in my in my translations for this for this presentation, because I don't want to I don't want to to, you know, do the the the Desi accent, big, big sort that this kind of thing. But yeah, it's it's a very it's a very fine balance. And I have to I have to choose very carefully when things when I when I'm presenting an unfamiliar English, and when I'm trying to connect it to to the present, then especially to, you know, my my millennial students or juniors, like you. Okay. Thank you, Yasir and Professor Khan, you mentioned B Khalili, she must have heard you because she she's put a question in the Q&A box for you. I'm interested in the homosocial and potentially homosexual peace here is Agar's masculinity at any point, underscored by his own desire for women, rather than the act of gifting women to other men. Yeah, this is so this is so hard to it's so hard to tell whether this is the case, because indeed, Agar, you know, the way in which he substitute for them in marriage. So, you know, in one case, he he marries. One second. Am I back is my internet connection. Yeah, you just went away for a minute, but you're back. Okay, okay, so in a minute, a second. Okay. So, so Agar, you know, in one case, he, as I mentioned, he marries Queen Pearl to Sharia sword. In one case, he, he marries Russian right buddy by referring to himself during the Nika as Manu Cheher, and he then gives her to Manu Cheher. And so, and in the case of Sarabasa, he in fact, you know, marries her and sleeps with her. I don't remember which, which of the lazeers. So there is indeed a question of to what extent his own desire is, is involved in these kinds of transactions. And that's something that, you know, after this de idealizing thought process, I really need to think about. So thank you to to be be they've been they've been very instrumental to in fact, the way in which the pessimistic way in which I've, I've thought about this. And I want to point out that the bees own work on on Hidra's has been very important for me. Okay, great. We've got another question, which perhaps connects with the previous one, but in a different way, from Sana Beg, can the term page be substituted for an Umrah? Can we view the masculine erotic sensibilities today through the top slash bottom dynamic? So, I mean, I don't know. I've not heard the term, the term page. I would love to know more about about this. And if, if Sana could, you know, tell me more about it or email me about it, I'd love to, to know more, but definitely the top bottom, bottom dynamic is what really not only makes the difference between the Umrah and the Luti, i.e. the older man who is the Umrah's lover, but which but also dictates the amount of opprobrium that was directed towards either member of this sexual duo. And that's something that Khaled al-Wahid talks about in a very, in a very detailed and precise way. So certainly, you know, top bottom is very important. But, you know, I want to point out that, you know, I cut out a part of this talk that that discussed the phenomenon of what I call loverly masculinity, which is a kind of masculinity that anyone who has read the Ghazal is familiar with, in which the man, whether he, the older man, whether he is in a relationship with, whether he's pursuing an Umrah or a female, makes himself out to be the subordinate partner, right, makes himself out to be, you know, slain by the by the dress of his or her lock and so on. So, you know, he is the one underneath, while in fact, in structural terms, he is, he has the power. And this, you know, it doesn't matter whether it's whether the lover is a male or a female, this is the case. So it's this kind of, you know, topsy-turvy, vertiginous performance of manly submissiveness that happens. So top and bottom, in other words, are kind of, you know, they're involved in this sort of somersault. Okay, great. Thank you there. While you've been talking, I just looked at my name and it's coming up as Amin Acha and I thought, obviously, all this talk is causing some sort of transformation. Anyway, my surname is Yakin. So there's a question from Christian James. Do you read any significance into the etymologies of the author's lexical style? For example, Behroub derives from Sanskrit and Makkah from Arabic, both being terms that apply to Prince Agar's behavior. Do you perceive any differences in the way such terms are applied, which might have implications, for example, regarding perceptions of non-normative gender relations in Sanskritic and Islamic hate societies? Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, you know, there are certainly, Agar is described in many different terms. So, you know, Baran Badalna, which, you know, Sanskritists will recognize, for example, is a very common term for transformation in Agar's tale. But I'm not sure that I would, you know, I'm not really very interested in distinguishing between the Sanskritic and the Islamic. You know, I think that I would resist kind of following these two as separate strands in the story, to be very honest. But thank you for the question. It's an interesting one. That's really an and a good point. And I think that's been also something that Shamsarayman Farouk has written about, isn't it, the kind of in with regards to the Indic context and how Sanskritic and Islamic had kind of come together in that narrative. Okay. There's a question from anonymous, an anonymous attendee. I'm going to skip people who are who asked a question a second time, and I will come back to you at the end if we have time, just so that we give everyone an opportunity. So the anonymous attendee question is, as someone who is doing a literary analysis of Amir Khosra's work in Bridge Hindi, should an in depth translation proceed a literary analysis, even though the language is easily discernible by the reader? Sorry, I might have misread something. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what, even though the language is easily discernible by which which reader that's the question. I mean, to answer that in, according to whatever I understand, I think, I mean, certainly translating this piece, I, of course, I don't always translate what I what I analyze. But, you know, undoubtedly doing, doing, doing a translation of this piece, especially my literal translation has certainly helped me with my literary analysis. Yeah. Okay, great. There's a question from Dean Akhadi at the end of your talk, you mentioned that without certain necessities and pressures, Uggur's magical adventures could have continued, but could they have, or is the containing and subduing of Uggur inevitable? The reading public revolting if such a wild card were permitted to carry on in the end? Yeah, no, I don't, I can't remember whether I, whether I said that Uggur's adventures would have continued, but I do think that, you know, in the, well, I mean, of course, it's an imaginative work of verbal art, but, but certainly, you know, even, even imaginative texts are circumscribed by what is imaginable for, for their, for their societies. So I think, Dean, that you're absolutely right that it is, it is an inevitability that, that he would have his gender fixed as, as feminine because simply because his, the, the danger of his instability is, is, is too great for the state and for, for patriarchy. Okay, great. There is a question from Georg, it's a very long question. Okay, he's wondering if you could dwell on ancestry, and on the question of ancestry and quoting Marx here, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past, the tradition of all dead generations, ways like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And it is a long quotation. So ask you to have a look at it on. So, sure. So there's a second question. It's a dense debate right now in Pakistan after this and last year's, or at March, there's a deep desire to prove that queerness is nothing new to the continent, subcontinent motor too. I can read the rest of it out of you. Like, I'd like to add that there's a very dense debate right now in Pakistan after this, and last year's or at March around Quinn, LGBTQ rights, there is a deep desire to prove that queerness is nothing new to the subcontinent in order to counter the right wings, claim that queerness is not in line with Pakistani culture. And while, of course, there have been sex and gender conflicts since the origin of patriarchal in class society, and that's also queerness, I think it's important to not derive rights from history, ironically saying this is a historian. I think we should accept that society has changed and so of our needs and thus identities, of course, immediately and not direct deterministic ways. I'm not sure if this is a question or a question. No, I think I understand what what's being said. And, you know, absolutely, I think that while it's so important to to affirm the rights of queer and trans non-binary people in places like like Pakistan, it's important at the same time not to idealize the past in a way that in a way that malforms it. And in a way that might, in fact, cover over other possibilities that the exemplary of the past provides, whether positive or negative. Okay, great. Yeah, I think that's a question we could definitely talk about for a long time, couldn't we, in terms of the debate and the disagreements, and the importance of, you know, having that open conversation and whether it's even possible to do that in within the country. So there's a question from Samia Khatun, Pasha in a characteristically insightful piece, Toni Morrison tells us that if we think of a literary production as a dream, the subject of the dream is always the dreamer, the author. Can you tell us what this drama might tell us about the architecture of the 19th century or the writerly subjecthood? Is the drama about the author's interiority or how is this new work that you are authoring about your subjecthood? Yes, thank you, Samia. So in fact, I've been thinking very recently about the kind of the aspirational qualities of Agar's tales, which, you know, indeed involves thinking of it as a dream. And I'm learning about this, especially from Omad Kassmani. In terms of, you know, I'm not going to, I can't think beyond that right now, because I haven't had the time. But certainly this is, you know, I don't know about the author's interiority as a literary scholar. I've been kind of, you know, I've had Foucault and Baute and so on knocked into me so much that I think very rarely about the author. Although, you know, if we wanted to, if we wanted to try, I mean, I would think that this is a story written by a man. If we were to imagine that he was a man who desired other males, then, you know, one could think of it as an indirect way of telling such a tale. But I'm not sure that I would say that as a professor. I would say that as, I don't know, a piece of gossip or something like that. In terms of who the dream is for, certainly it's partly for myself. And especially for some of my students and juniors from whom I've learned so much about these affairs. So thank you for that talk, for that question. Okay, so we have a question, an appreciation from Eduardo Acarón. I hope I've pronounced the name right. Do you believe that we could also see the concept of patriarchal bargain could apply to Agar's participation in trafficking women? How could this relate to the other concepts mentioned here as they apply to the text, such as male homo-sociality and commodification of gender? So I would love to, Eduardo, if you could email me, I would love to know more about the specific sense of patriarchal bargain that you're talking about. Thank you. There's a question from Zbigniew Igielski, a very interesting lecture. Do you know about existence of any similar kisses in Punjabi? No, I wish I, I wish I did. I wish I knew of any kisses like that in Punjabi. There's no Punjabi version of Agar Gullas as far as I know. So yeah, I mean, the text that we're most aware of, I don't recall cases of such transformation in those in those tales, but then again, you know, there are certain ones like Saif al-Maluk or, you know, Yusuf Zurekha that I haven't read, so it's quite possible and likely that they're there. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I suppose the discussion of caste is quite interesting. I was thinking in terms of the kind of, from the world of princes to the world of sort of different types of power dynamics and the kind of land and the landscape that they occupy is quite different. So the politics of this particular caste is quite interesting in the time that it is written and the kind of public that it's aiming for or the kind of audience it's aiming for in that zone. And certainly it doesn't seem to be, because I think one of the things that strikes me about sort of a casella like he ranja is that there is a there is a kind of empowerment of women within it as well. Whereas this one seems to have a, have quite an ambiguous relationship or ambivalent relationship to how that gets constructed in the first place as there's a lot more fluidity, as you said, but then an emphasis on the masculinity. Giorg is thanking you for your response to him. And it's expressing his appreciation. Thank you Giorg for your question. And for, there's a question from Claire Pament. Thank you for a beautiful talk. Curious if you had found similarities to the gendering and sexualizing of Hwaja Sera in 19th century literature. Nicholas Abbott has some recent work on various Latifas. If this was something that you had considered. Yeah, so of course, you know, I've thought a lot about the about hijras or Hwaja Saras in relation to the category of in relation to the trans category. And one of the things that I would like to ask Claire at some point is about the about the Behrupias, because I was very interested in this characterization of Uggar Beygur as performing Behrup, which not only you know, points to his Makar, his Gael, but also sort of allies him, associates him with these members of what is certainly a lower cast, these people with a with a lower status who are also thought of as as dangerous or threatening or, you know, or unserious in in some ways. I'm very interested in Jessica Hinchi's work, for example, as well as as well as Claire's work on the on the hijras. One of the things that the Hinchi points out is that certain communities like the the Bhagatias who were doing cross dressing, um, were treated under the same legislation as British colonial legislation as as the as the as the hijras. And I wonder whether the Behrupias were also targets of that kind of legislation, which would have demasculinized them in a in a particular way. So so I'm very curious to to know more about that. And I'd love to be in conversation with with with Claire about that. Okay, great. Thank you. Well, it's it's, you know, lots of wonderful questions. And of course, great to have Claire there as well. And this is the point where you wish you weren't in a webinar format, and you could kind of get people in to this to the room as it were. I was just, we've got about 15 minutes left to to converse a little bit more, if that's all right with you. And I'll continue to take questions as they come up. And one of the things that I wanted to go back to was the the presence of the what you well, you kept referring to the transformations that are present in the text and very nicely kind of picked up the translated words in Urdu and in English as you had kind of thought of them. And I was quite interested in how in that question you raised, what is normal? Right. And I wanted to kind of ask you a little bit more about that, you know, because normal is there's so many ways around which normality is constructed through through the law, through the state, through, perhaps even that idea of monastic governmentality that you didn't have time to go into. So I was wondering if I could just ask you to to expand a bit bit more, take us into the demons and the puries and Yeah, no, it's it's it's very interesting to me. I mean, it's not only so so when I when I think about normal and custom breaking, what I call I'm thinking of the distinction between the the kharikul adat, the custom breaking and what is adat or what is valid according to to adat, custom or the intellect. And there are so many forms of transformation in the tail that are significant, but which that but that are less, you know, they're less jazzy kind of a so for example, eating, right, all kinds of transformations occur through eating, you know, sometimes different form different modes of transformation are aligned. So for example, one character eats a key that is which is a rice and milk pudding that is made by the mother of his enemy, and thereby his enemy becomes his brother. Right. So, so, you know, for example, through ingestion of a substance, a kinship relation is formed. And that I think of that as a kind of a kind of transformation. Right. In other cases, you know, what things that we think of as normal are allied with the with the custom breaking. So for example, in order to at one point, Agar actually turns ghul into a woman. And ghul is very is very perturbed by this because, you know, being a woman is supposedly such an awful thing. And he does this by by giving ghul a sniff of a magic flower. Right. So by taking in this odor, ghul is turned, you know, in this very strange way in this custom breaking way into into a woman. You know, where the border lies between between the normal and the and the custom breaking is is very difficult to to say. But, you know, anything that we think of as as magical, anything that is that doesn't happen regularly seems to be what what is what is custom breaking. But but that's a good question. I haven't had the time as as I mentioned to to really go deeply into these specific instances of transformation beyond the beyond the transgenderings. But that's something that I want to do. Thank you. And while you were talking there, another question, which perhaps is, I don't know if it's a fair question to ask, because, you know, you haven't really focused on last on this, but it's it relates to that incidence of rape in the text that you do pick up on and talk about. And and we've also got the very real conversation about rape that is take rape culture that is taking place in Pakistan right now based on some some some alarming statistics in terms of of gender violence of sexual violence. And I suppose I was thinking, in terms of, you know, the power of narrative, what do you think might be the power of narrative in those types of situations where we're dealing with a situation in a modern period and I mean, and I know modern is the contentious term to use, but in a contemporary situation, how how might the kisser or these types of stories, you know, are there any lessons any kind of it goes back really to that point about a clock, right, that you pick up on in in your reading and connect it with how essential it is to the telling of this tale. You know, do you think these types of stories can be deployed or or can can this type narrative help us to to kind of make sense of the present? Well, I think that so, you know, so as I as I mentioned, in the tale itself, rape is is normalized and this is something that, you know, this is one of the terms that I that I translate in in many ways, in many ways a modern way, because the because the kisser does not characterize it as rape or or is it now or anything like this, right? It's, you know, marital sexual relations with with with your wife are totally are totally fine. But, you know, this is where we need to this is where it is important to to dehistoricize such a such a tale I think and to take its negative exemplary. There's a great Dastangoye session by by a woman in 2017 about about the the issue of marital rape and she she turns it into into a into a tale that's really powerful. It's it's on the the quint I can I can email it to anyone who who wants to to ask it refers to a prominent case in in India, in which, you know, at the end, it went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court Justice said, a feeble no is not is not withholding consent. In the case of in the case of agar, you know, he he says no, no, no, very, very clearly. And one of the things that really struck me during when I read this this final chapter was in fact the the resonance between the act of rape at the end of this of this tale and this particular case in which a friend of mine is a survivor. And the way in which it was handled by the by the Supreme Court and the way in which, you know, this kind of rape as well as marital rape are normalized in in in South Asia. Thank you. That's really interesting. Yasir has come back and there are also some Q&A some more questions that have popped up and Ty was ticking on. So Yasir, did you have a question or did you want to read out the questions? I mean, I had a brief question just like sort of the opposite, maybe a fewer question or the inverse. Like we just talked about what what the story can tell us about the present or like the resonances between the story and the present moment. But I'm also wondering about the value or danger of the story telling us about something about of the sex gender system of that time. I know in your book for you talk of in the broken spell you talk about like the tumultuous relationship between history or historiography and the kiss a genre. And also you mentioned that this is more of an imaginative tale than a historical one. But I'm wondering if you see a danger or a value in reading the story as a history of or symbolic of pre-colonial or colonial even sex gender systems. Yeah, no, that's a that's a good question. I mean, no, I'm still I'm still not not aware of any historical instance of a figure who a trans trans male figure who would be like like right like this is not this is not the the story of of a hijra, for example, this is this is not the the story of anyone who is like anyone who existed in in history at the time. It's a very kind of, you know, it's a it's it is a dream in a certain way. It is, you know, perhaps aspirational. So, you know, I wouldn't I would agree with would see him name. And I wouldn't take take this kind of story as a mirror of history. But I mean, I mean, it's not a mirror of history wholesale. But, you know, certainly the way in which patriarchy works and the way in which, for example, the rape and the fixing of agarist gender is normalized in this in this tale is, I would think, a reflection of of the way in which the way in which the society worked. So we need to we need to distinguish between what is what is a dream and and what is a what tells us something about the historical period in society. Okay, great. We have more questions. So maybe if it's all right with you, if I might read a few of them together, and then we can try and fit them in before we finish. Sarah Malik says I lost connection at one point during the tour. Please excuse if this was addressed. I'm curious to know if you have looked at the figure of the trickster in North American indigenous storytelling in relation to the construct of the muckers. There's another question about from an anonymous attendee about readership and reception of this guess. Are there any commentaries or glosses? What do we know about its spread and readership? You mentioned a later translation in Hedrabad. Was it widely read? There's a question from Sonia Week. Thank you for this wonderful talk. I was wondering what terms were used for rape in the text. Are they allegorical or explicit in conveying the act of sexual violation? And could you talk more about the implication of this act and how we would characterize Gul in terms of an ideal man as understood in the mirror for Prince's genre? For example, his right to conquer the virginity of his bride versus his negligence of justice. Shall I stop there? Let's go on. Almost a question. Okay. There's a question from Omar Khasmani. Thank you for a wonderful talk. It seems to me there's a whole array of crossings that come to bear in your material. And I wonder if you're thinking queerness also in relation to the diversity of characters, for instance, more than human forms, beings, objects, and substances. Okay. So let's do those questions first. And okay. So the question of indigenous storytelling and the trickster, no, I haven't looked at the possible parallels between that and Makr, but it's a very interesting idea. The readership and reception of the Qisas, I don't know of commentaries or glosses, and it's very difficult with these Qisas to understand how they were received, except through, you know, taqrises at the end or, you know, things like that, and later versions of them. Unfortunately, so far, I've only seen this version of Agar's tale. Because of the pandemic, I didn't have the time. I wasn't able to come to the British library. I haven't been able to get my hands on the Hadrabaddi Masnavi of Agar Gul. But certainly the fact that it was available as a lithograph, and I know that there are many manuscripts in Pakistan as well, is an indication that it was, you know, moderately popular. I wouldn't say that it's, you know, a very popular tale. In terms of rape, I think this question is, I've answered this question, too, to some extent. Rape is not represented as rape. And this is one of the complicated issues that I'm having to navigate in my translation. I think that it's imperative for me to translate it as rape, to understand it as rape, and to think it as rape. But it's not represented as such in the tale. In terms of Gul as an ideal man, I think that actually his, I mean, you need to read the whole tale, but he is a kind of, he participates in what I call loverly masculinity, which involves his being, you know, he's always kind of sick, and he's crying that, you know, that Agar isn't paying enough attention to him and this kind of thing. So, you know, in a way, he's a sort of pathetic figure who then, you know, in the end asserts his masculinity in the end, because he's kind of, because he's supposedly entitled to do so, right, after all of this suffering at the hands of this beautiful and cruel man, whom he, male, whom he knows to be a woman, who he understands to be a woman. Omar, thank you for this question. I mean, I'm very interested in the idea of transhumanist or what the folklorist Pauline Greenhill calls trans biology. I think that's a little bit of a back formation, but it's an interesting question. Anyways, you know, for example, at one point Agar gets turned into stone, right? Is this kind of, you know, can we think of this kind of a change as queer in some way? I'm not sure I need to read the theory more, but that's certainly something that I want to think about. Okay. Okay, great. We've got a few more questions, which I think, if you're okay to take them, and if the male doesn't mind us going over by a couple of minutes, we'll try and sort of get everything in. There's a question by Cal Brannon on how do you think the colonial post-colonial context in which the kisser was written, had an effect upon the perceptions and interpretations of readers? I think this has come up before as well. Do you think that even amongst native Urdu speakers, the social political context of the time meant that they were common misconceptions of what the kisser was aiming to comment on? Also, I find it very interesting and fascinating to have a main trans-masculine character in the kisser. From what I've seen, I'm open to correction from most Islamic societies acknowledge mochanats, hijras, although discriminated, but not trans-masculine individuals, as though in patriarchal societies one can downgrade to a woman, but not upgrade to a man. That's a really interesting point. There are a couple of people who have written questions before, but I will pick up the questions about Homo erotica because they're coming up. There are a couple, so one from an anonymous attendee considering, and a question on queerness as well by Edine, the anonymous attendee is asking, considering how Homo erotica in South Asia expresses itself repeatedly through the bearded older lover who penetrates the beloved, would it be wise to cover same-sex relationships in erotica under the same canopy as a whole, even though it has been masculine erotica historically? And the other question was from Sana Beg, considering how Homo erotica expresses itself. Oh, I think it's the same person. So it was Sana's question, so that's fine. And there's a question from Dean. I find it intriguing that despite the queerness of this tale that gender binaries and their accompanying expectations and pressures seem consistent across station and creature types, where the royalty, Jogi, Spurries, etc., and other circumstances, social position often subdivides and dictates the gendering of individuals. For example, it is often said that human beings are all female when faced with divine masculinity, or that even female aesthetics are masculine compared to ordinary laymen thoughts. So big question. Okay, thank you everyone for these questions. Okay, beginning with Cal Brennan. So I'm not sure about the post-colonial reception of this pissar in particular, but one of the things that my book, The Broken Spell, is about is precisely the misconceptions about the Qisa that existed, especially after the 19th century, and especially after partition and so on. And Chantreman Faroukhi has also written about this in his study of Amir Hamza, Shahi, Isai, Qirani. So of course, there's an Islamic discourse about the Muhannas, and Muhannas I mentioned in the Quran. But indeed, I'm not sure about discourse on transmasculine individuals, so that's something that I need to do more research into. Let me go down to, well, I guess it's Sana big. Yeah, this is a good question whether it is wise to cover same-sex relationships and masculine erotica under the same canopy. I'm not sure. I mean, possibly it's possible to think of an act as perverse or maybe even query benefits between two individuals of different genders. It may simply be down to what is normative in a particular context, but that's speculative. Finally, Dean, I want to, can I quote a, can I cite a comment in a Zoom chat? Because this is the idea that indeed, no matter whether the figure is a demon or a buddy or a joggy or whatever, it is really, social status really makes a big difference when it comes to how gendering and how these acts are represented. So I'm going to steal that if you don't create some way for me to cite it, Dean. Okay, well, thank you for such a Herculean response to all the questions which have kept coming, which is testimony to your rich, stimulating and exciting talk. We wish you lots of luck and success with this project and we hope to welcome you back when you are at a later stage to carry on the conversation and the discussion. It's been a real privilege and an honor to have you with us. So thank you very much for joining us and thank you to all the participants for their engaged, lively questions. I think this is a such an important topic. And I suppose the one person I was kind of going to throw in, which I didn't have a chance, was just Judith Butler's idea of gender performativity. And I've been listening to some of her responses on the kind of trans question. And that's been very interesting and kind of informative. So I think that might also be very interesting for your work as you go forward with all the really rich stuff that you have. And I'm very grateful to Yasir for bringing you to us. We've been meaning to have you with us for a long time. He's made this a possibility. So thank you, Yasir. And thank you to Sunil Pan for patiently sort of doing all the back work and staying with us a bit longer than planned. So thank you, everyone. And Ramadan Mubarak and Ramadan Karim. And I hope that we all have very, we will join you all in thanking Professor Khan for being with us today. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye for me.