Hijra is a gender community recognised across South Asia, mainly in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, made up largely of people assigned male at birth who live in feminine gender roles inside a distinct social and ritual system.
Definition
Hijra is not a South Asian word for transgender. It names a community, a kinship structure and a hereditary occupation as much as a gender.
Being hijra means belonging to something. That is the part that most Western summaries drop.
Hijra communities are organised around the guru-chela relationship: a guru, the senior figure, takes on chelas, disciples, who join her household. The household controls a territory in which it holds the right to perform, and it functions as an economic unit, a family and an authority structure. Serena Nanda, whose fieldwork produced the standard ethnography of the community, described the guru-chela bond as the single most significant relationship in hijra life. People who join are frequently people who have been thrown out of, or have fled, the families they were born into. The house replaces what was lost.
The traditional occupation is badhai: performing at births and weddings, singing, dancing and conferring blessings, in exchange for payment. The blessing has weight because hijras are widely understood to hold the power both to bless and to curse fertility. Many hijras are devotees of Bahuchara Mata, a goddess associated in Gujarat with gender transformation, and religious practice is not incidental: it is part of what makes the role legible.
A minority undergo nirvan, a ritual removal of the penis and testicles carried out within the community. It is optional, it has never been universal, and the Western fascination with it is out of all proportion to its place in hijra life.
Hijra communities are also religiously mixed. Many hijras are Muslim, many are Hindu, and the community's ritual vocabulary draws on both, which is one of several reasons the "ancient Hindu tradition" framing does not survive contact with the evidence.
An important note
Hijra is a specific community with its own entry requirements, obligations and internal hierarchy. It is not an identity label available to people outside South Asia, and it is not a synonym for transgender, non-binary or third gender. Many South Asian trans people are not hijra and do not want to be. Some hijras use transgender alongside hijra, some reject it. Follow the person.
Two terms to avoid: "eunuch", which is the colonial administrative category and carries that history, and the older English rendering "hijra" used as a mass noun. Related but distinct communities exist across the region, including kothi, aravani, kinner, thirunangai and jogappa, and they are not interchangeable.
History
How old is the tradition?
Older than colonialism, and not 3,000 years. We said 3,000 on this page for a while and we were wrong.
Sanskritists generally date the core of Valmiki's Ramayana to somewhere between the seventh and fourth centuries BCE, which is roughly 2,400 to 2,700 years ago. The episode in which Rama blesses people who are neither men nor women, often cited as proof of ancient recognition, is not part of the critical edition of the Sanskrit text. It circulates in later retellings and in hijra oral tradition. That does not make it worthless: it makes it a living tradition rather than a dated document, and hijra communities telling their own origin story is a different kind of evidence from a manuscript, not a worse one.
What is solidly documented is the Mughal period, when eunuchs and gender-variant people held recognised positions at court and in household administration, and the colonial period, when that changed completely.
What did British rule do?
It criminalised them. Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 singled out "eunuchs", requiring registration, banning them from performing in public, from wearing women's clothing, and from adopting children, and giving colonial officials power to remove children from hijra households. Jessica Hinchy's archival work shows this was not incidental Victorian prudishness but a sustained project aimed at making the community disappear within a generation.
It did not work, but it left the stigma behind. India repealed the Act in 1952. The provisions targeting hijras had already reshaped how they were policed, housed and employed, and much of that survived independence.
Legal recognition, and its limits
Legal status varies by country and it is moving quickly.
Nepal, 2007. The Supreme Court in Sunil Babu Pant v. Nepal Government ordered recognition of a third gender category and the repeal of discriminatory laws, ahead of the rest of the region.
India, 15 April 2014. In National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India, Justices K. S. Radhakrishnan and A. K. Sikri recognised transgender people as a third gender, held that gender identity is a matter of self-identification and not of surgery, and directed that transgender people be treated as socially and educationally backward for the purposes of reservations. This is the judgment the guide previously referred to only as "2014". It has a name and it is worth knowing.
Bangladesh, 2013, and Pakistan, through a series of Supreme Court orders from 2009 and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018, which was itself subsequently challenged.
India's Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019, in force from January 2020, was opposed by much of the community it claimed to protect. The objections: it requires an application to a District Magistrate for a certificate, which reintroduces the official gatekeeping NALSA had removed; changing a marker to male or female requires proof of surgery; penalties for offences against transgender people run from six months to two years, well below the equivalent penalties where the victim is a cisgender woman; and the reservations NALSA directed were left out. Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists and activists including Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a petitioner in NALSA, all objected.
This is the fastest-moving area of law in the whole guide, and amendments and challenges are live. Do not rely on this page for the current position: check a primary source or a local organisation such as Orinam, which maintains a running resource section on Indian legal change.
