Friday, October 9, 2020

Short Book Reviews: A Transgender Heroine in Fantasy India

Stealing Thunder, by Alina Boyden (Ace)

I loved the context of this book as much as the story itself. As part of the “Own Voices” movement, the speculative fiction community has examined not only the inclusion of transgender characters but asked who writes about them. This book is the first fantasy novel featuring a transgender character and written by a transgender author to be published by a major house. Alina Boyden sets her tale in a non-Western culture in which transwomen have an established cultural niche. She draws her inspiration from the Indian tradition of hijras, which dates back as far as 3000 years ago, referring to third gender or trans-feminine people. Texts such as the Rigveda, Mahabharata, and Ramayana mention such people in a respectful way, in contrast to the actions of the British Empire in attempting to erase the hijra community entirely. In India, hijras who are assigned male gender at birth sometimes castrate themselves, wear feminine clothing and adopt feminine names, live together in households, relate to each other as female kin (sisters, daughters, etc), and perform at events such as births and weddings.

One such is this novel’s protagonist, Razia Khan, born as the Crown Prince of one of many small kingdoms in this alternate pre-British India, including training with the magical feathered dragons called zahhaks, which are a rare and powerful military asset. Now she works as a skilled dancer and courtesan, working and living in a tightly knit household, a dera, ruled by an insatiably greedy madam. In addition, she’s a thief whose booty supplements their income. After being engaged to provide entertainment for a wealthy merchant, she falls in love with the handsome prince of Bikampur and gains his affection in return. But all is not well, for her very life is at risk should her father learn of her whereabouts, a bully from her tormented childhood appears at court and recognizes her . . . and war is brewing. Razia’s training and natural aptitude make her a genius at the use of dragons in military strategy, and her sound advice brings her the esteem of her prince’s father.

The style and pacing of the story invites the reader to savor this world and its culture. The enumeration of settings and details, including jewelry and clothing, and the beat-by-beat descriptions of action and interactions, which are then repeated, create a slow spiraling effect. All of this is interwoven with Razia’s own internal monologues, so that we are able to experience her world and her personal history through gradually evolving lenses. At first, I questioned the slow pace and repetition, but as I noticed how the descriptions – what Razia notices and the context in which she places it – reflected and embodied Razia’s own personal growth, I found it highly evocative and satisfying. Small details, like the conversation between Razia, who chose castration as a gift, and a eunuch who had to come to terms with the involuntary loss, evoked a much larger world of consent, choices, and power.

Razia begins the story terrified of discovery, uneasy about stealing but so grateful to her madam that she feels she has no choice, and pathetically desperate for love. As she comes to accept being valued, she discovers her own courage – a trait she believed she lacked because she had been told – and beaten – so many times as a child for being unmasculine. She doesn’t take the easy way out, whether it’s accepting the likelihood of betrayal to her father, and subsequent assassination, or the risk of losing Arjuna’s love by telling him the truth about her thieving, standing up to those who once bullied her, or always, always remaining true to herself as a transgender woman. It would have been so easy for the story to follow the typical Romance tropes based on misunderstandings so easily cleared up by a single conversation, and Stealing Thunder avoids them all. By the end, I not only cheered Razia’s commitment to a genuine life, I had a greater understanding of how she has managed to find empowerment within the superficially submissive, dependent role of a hijra courtesan.


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