Hijra

That is why the word is not a translation of transgender. Max Bearak made the argument directly in the Washington Post in April 2016, under a headline saying that terms like transgender do not work for India's third-gender communities. Harvard's Religion and Public Life case study records that people of non-binary gender expression have held important roles in Hindu society for more than two thousand years, with evidence in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, where the hero Arjuna becomes the third gender. Wikipedia dates the community's institutional shape to the Delhi Sultanate, 1206 to 1526, and the Mughal Empire, 1526 to 1707, whose rulers patronised third-gender Indians. Harvard puts that patronage in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries instead, and this entry records both windows rather than choosing between them.

How a person becomes hijra

Most hijras are assigned male at birth and few are intersex. Serena Nanda's Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India, the standard English-language ethnography, records one apparently intersex person among thirty informants, and finds nothing in the narratives she collected to support the widespread Indian belief that hijras recruit by making successful claims on intersex infants. In her account people join in youth: to express a feminine gender identity more fully, under the pressure of poverty, after ill treatment by parents and peers for feminine behaviour, after a period of sex work, or for several of those reasons at once.

Joining means leaving. The defining act, in Harvard's summary, is departure from home into a community that removes itself from wider society and teaches its lessons in secret. A young person follows a guru, who teaches the chela the hijra ways of life and the ritual roles performed in Hindu households. Some hijras then undergo an initiation called nirvaan, the removal of the penis, scrotum and testicles, understood as an offering to the goddess Bahuchara Mata. Over generations these households have consisted of people living in extreme poverty, or rejected by their families of origin, or in flight from them.

The common Indian belief that every hijra is intersex, asexual and impotent is inaccurate in each part. Many hijras are sexually active or in relationships, and many do sex work. Some describe themselves not by a sexual orientation but by renouncing sexuality altogether, which sits awkwardly against that practical fact. Their partners are usually men who consider themselves heterosexual on the grounds that they penetrate; those men are frequently married, and the relationships are kept from everyone else.

What hijras do at a birth

Hijras perform badhai: singing, dancing and blessing at births, and at weddings a day or two after the marriage ceremony, in exchange for payment. To many Hindus the blessing confers fertility, prosperity and long life on the child, and it carries that force because of who gives it, the sacrifice of procreative capacity to the goddess being what is held to grant the power. The obverse is a curse, which hijras say they use only in extreme circumstances. Hijras also arrive unannounced, claiming attendance as a sacred duty, and families that refuse entry or refuse to pay sometimes call the police, who often decline to remove them.

The ritual role is Hindu and the people holding it are not all Hindu. Many are Muslim and a few are Christian, and some follow both traditions at once, centring a household on Bahuchara Mata while taking a Muslim name and observing Ramadan. Adnan Hossain wrote that arrangement up for the Asian Studies Review in 2012, under the title "Beyond Emasculation: Being Muslim and Becoming Hijra". Excluded almost entirely from employment and education outside the ritual functions, many hijras live by begging and by sex work.

How British law made hijras criminal

The British colonised most of South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, working from the Christian understanding of gender they arrived with, named all hijras criminals in 1871 and instructed colonial authorities to arrest them on sight. Harvard's summary is that the religious functions carried the community through without significant interruption, and that nearly two hundred years of stigmatisation took a toll all the same. The 1871 law was repealed shortly after independence. The contempt outlasted it: hijras are refused treatment at hospitals, harassed by police, and are often the victims of violence and abuse.

Naming belongs to the same history. English writing rendered hijra as eunuch or hermaphrodite, translations in which, as Nanda put it, "the irregularity of the male genitalia is central to the definition". In a series of meetings convened between October 2013 and January 2014 by the transgender experts committee of India's Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, hijra and other trans activists asked that eunuch be discontinued in government documents, on the ground that no such community uses the word of itself. The Eunuch entry covers what that English word does name.

What the NALSA judgment changed for hijras

Recognition came in 2014. The Supreme Court of India held in the NALSA judgment that transgender people, hijras included, constitute a third gender entitled to constitutional protection, that "it is the right of every human being to choose their gender", and that the matter "is not a social or medical issue, but a human rights issue". The court directed the government to open education and employment to all third-gender groups. Geeta Pandey reported the judgment for BBC News on 15 April 2014. India, Pakistan and Nepal now offer a third option on passports and certain official documents, and Khawaja sira and Meti carry the Pakistani and Nepali cases, each dated in its own entry.

What followed is uneven. Eesha Patkar reported the election of India's first hijra mayor, at Raigarh, for the Guardian in March 2015, and Vidhi Doshi reported in the same paper in May 2017 that Kochi had taken on twenty-three hijras for its public transit system. Against that, the 2026 study Trans People in India: A Decade after NALSA describes an implementational disenfranchisement: bureaucratic gatekeeping over identity certification under the 2019 Act still keeps the community from the social security and economic integration the judgment mandated.

Why the hijra count is disputed

The 2011 Indian census recorded 487,803 people under other, a figure the reference workbook behind this catalogue marks as an undercount. Estimates circulating around the 2014 judgment put the third-gender population of India at around three million. Pakistan's recorded figure stood above ten thousand in 2020. The distance between an official count and a community estimate is the finding here, and nothing in the material reconciles the two.

Why the regional names are not synonyms

The subcontinent supplies a long list of near equivalents, better read as separate identities than as translations, because the regional differences behind them are real.

Thirunangai is the clearest case of a community renaming itself. It arrived with thirunambi, respected man, and thirunar, respected person, and the set rejects the hijra concept in favour of a broader trans identity rather than relabelling it. In Urdu, khasuaa and khusraa are generally treated as derogatory and khwaja sara is used instead.

Kothi is the distinction missed most often. A kothi is a feminine man or boy who takes a feminine role in sex with men, but does not live in the intentional communities hijras live in, and has not necessarily been through the initiation. Its local equivalents are durani in Kolkata, menaka in Cochin, meti in Nepal and zenana in Pakistan. In South India, male devotees of the goddess Renuka, who is believed to be able to change a person's sex, are called jogappa and sing and dance at births and weddings much as hijras do, in a role nobody files under this word.

What the word hijra means literally

Merriam-Webster has an entry for hijra, and it says nothing whatever about gender. The English dictionary gives only hegira: the departure of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina, dated to 16 July 622 in the Julian calendar, which is the epoch of the Islamic calendar. The Arabic noun behind it means departure or exodus, from the verb hajara, to emigrate or to abandon, and English has used the word for an exodus in general since 1753.

The South Asian term, by contrast, is recorded as a Hindustani word, romanised also as hijira, hijda, hijada, hijara and hijrah. Nothing in the material gathered for this entry connects the two, and a resemblance between an Arabic noun and a Hindustani one is not a derivation.