This lavishly illustrated book is too informal and imprecise to do more than skim the surface.
What percentage of Indians walk the various paths of non-standard sexuality? How do their lives correlate to their counterparts in other societies? What happened to the crying child in the photo captioned "born with... an enlarged clitoris...abandoned by its parents"? Is she a hermaphrodite or just a well-endowed normal female? And what do hijras look like underneath? To these and similar questions, the book has no answers.
Proofing errors such as Kanagi spelt Kanaki in the same para and inconsistencies such as Roman Emperor Elagabalus enthroned in 281 BC at age 14 but murdered in 222 BC ‘while still a teenager’ reduce credibility. There’s a warmth of intent and a wealth of interesting tri-via—did you know, for instance, that kothi can mean effeminate men—which make the book intermittently fascinating. With tighter editing it could have been an excellent guide to a hidden world.