The Sunlight Tax and Brahminical Biopolitics: Everyday Spatial Resistance of Trans Homemaking in Delhi

“In Delhi, we pay extra for the privilege of not moldering.” This observation, offered by a transmasculine collaborator in my research, names what I theorize as the “sunlight tax”—a biopolitical calculus where access to light, air, and safe habitation is rationed by the intertwined logics of caste, capital, and cis-heteropatriarchy. Through this paper, I map how everyday spatial inequalities are not accidental by-products of a disorganized rental market, but are engineered outcomes of what I term Brahminical biopolitics. I use this framework to employ Foucault’s analysis of state power, along with Ambedkar’s indictment of caste spatiality, to reveal the colonial and Brahminical orders that converge to pathologize trans bodies. I argue that this renders trans lives perpetually on the margins of the habitable city.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, life histories, and participatory research with 12 transmasculine individuals in South Delhi’s margins, this paper traces how everyday inequalities accumulate across scales: the body, the rental room, the street, and the city. State mechanisms of nominal inclusion, such as the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act (2019) and the Garima Greh shelter homes, are shown to function as carceral rather than caring spaces, enforcing discretion, selective penalization, and temporal tolerability over permanence. These are not failures of policy but its underlying logics: who is stopped, who is policed, whose informal dwelling is razed, and whose precarity is rendered invisible are all questions written by caste and produced through colonial continuities.

Yet, against this violent cartography, trans individuals engineer improvised sovereignties: forging kinship networks that function as urban infrastructure, reclaiming otherwise “unruly” spaces as heterotopias of compensation, and transforming their cramped rentals into nodes of community care. This paper contends that these acts of queer homemaking constitute a living counter-cartography, which is a practice of spatial abundance that maps a right to the city from its discarded fragments.