Khawaja sira

Where the name khawaja sira comes from

Eunuchs have been present in South Asia since Islam arrived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Many were imported as slaves and rose to positions of standing: political advisers, respected generals, guards of the royal harem. Some held sacred offices, at the Ka'ba in Mecca and at the burial place of the Prophet in Medina, and some served as guardians of the Prophet's sanctuary. That history is why khwaja sara reads as respectable in Pakistan while khusraa in Urdu and khusra in Punjabi read as insults, and it is why the Urdu word hijra is avoided by many of the people it describes. Wikipedia's account of the wider category dates its development to the Delhi Sultanate, from 1206 to 1526, and the Mughal Empire that followed it until 1707.

The literal translation offered in English has usually been Eunuch, and the fit is poor: only a fraction of khawaja siras today are castrated. The word has been formally objected to. In 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 dropped from government documents on the ground that no community identifies with it.

What no source on file dates is the word itself. Khwajasara is traceable as a court title, and khawaja sira as a community name is plainly later, but nothing consulted here records a first use of the term in its present sense, so this entry gives the lineage without a year attached to it.

The names change every few hundred kilometres, and the categories behind them are not interchangeable. Wikipedia lists the regional vocabulary as rough synonyms that are better read as separate identities, since each carries its own local practice.

Nepal's Meti and Pakistan's zenana sit slightly to one side of that list, alongside the Indian kothi: feminine men who take a feminine role with men without living in the households, and often without the initiation.

Why khawaja sira and hijra are argued about

Whether the two words name the same thing is disputed inside the community, and the disagreement is precise. Jannat Ali, who coordinates the drop-in centre at the Khawaja Sira Society in Lahore, draws the line at the household: a hijra is somebody inside the guru-chela system, while a khawaja sira can be anybody, including a person outside it, and by that account a trans woman is a khawaja sira. She is not in the system herself, and has described the first question anybody asks a newcomer as the name of her guru, along with the warning that survival in the community without one is very hard.

Sunny, who works for NAZ Pakistan, the parent organisation of the Khawaja Sira Society, puts it the other way. Hijra, on her account, is a culture rather than an identity, one that trans women in Pakistan have to follow because there are no other options, though some now stand outside it. She draws a different line inside the same vocabulary: a trans woman is a woman, and the word hijra belongs to those who consider themselves both. For her the two terms mean the same thing. Anchal, who stopped at a car window on a Lahore food street in 2016 and corrected the reporter who had used hijra, said only that the community prefers khawaja sira.

How the guru-chela households are organised

The guru-chela structure is the backbone: a guru is a head teacher, chelas are disciples, and a chela can in time become a guru. Entry is formal. A payment of 125 rupees, called chittai, makes somebody the chela of a chosen guru. Discipline is financial and social at once. Sunny describes fines of five, ten, or a hundred thousand rupees for a mistake, and says that refusal to pay ends in the cutting off of hookah pani, the ordinary socialising with the rest of the community, with members no longer permitted to meet the person at all. Gurus, she adds, are not all good ones.

Most arrive after leaving home. Children whose behaviour is read as girlish are pressed by parents to change it, often less out of hostility than out of fear of what neighbours and relatives will say, and the households absorb the people that pressure expels. The traditional economy is blessing at weddings and births, where khawaja siras are widely held to have been granted a power from God to give blessings or badduas, curses, and that ritual work sits alongside begging and sex work as the income the community has been left with.

Why the courts changed the category

In 2009 a group of khawaja siras returning from a private wedding in Taxila were arrested, mistreated, and harassed by local police. The jurist Aslam Khaki filed a writ petition, and between 2009 and 2011 the Supreme Court of Pakistan issued a series of directives, the most consequential of which created a new gender category. The court held that khawaja siras are citizens under the constitution of 1973, with rights and obligations, including the right to life and dignity, equally protected, so that no discrimination against them is possible. The National Database and Registration Authority then added a third gender category, officially named Khawaja Sira, to the computerised national identity card. It was the first time the community had been recognised by the country's legal and administrative apparatus.

Two things complicated the victory. The court documents used only the word eunuch, naming neither hijra nor khawaja sira. And the category was, in Muhammad Azfar Nisar's account in Governing Thirdness, almost unanimously disavowed by the community it was created for, which is why the recognition that human rights advocates greeted as a watershed moved so little. Nisar's argument is that legal recognition granted on the basis of a problematic description is only a small part of the apparatus that governs these lives. The 2018 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act went further, barring discrimination in education, healthcare, and employment and allowing people to correct their documents to their self-identified gender. Nepal, India, and Bangladesh have all accepted a third gender as well, and India, Pakistan, and Nepal carry the option on passports.

What the census could not count

The 2017 census of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics recorded 6,709 transgender people in Punjab, 2,527 in Sindh, 913 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 133 in Islamabad, and 109 in Balochistan. The Pulitzer Center, reporting in 2016, put the figure at roughly 1.5 million. Wikipedia's own infobox gives a third number, more than 10,000 in Pakistan as of 2020, which is close to the census total and nowhere near the estimate.

One study fills part of the gap without closing it. Ali and Ashraf's cross-sectional survey of 91 self-identified khawaja siras in Islamabad, published in 2026, recruited through community gurus by snowball sampling, and found 68 per cent of the sample above the clinical threshold for psychological distress on the Hopkins Symptom Checklist, 34 per cent unemployed, 66 per cent without income enough for basic expenses, and 45 per cent uncomfortable or unsafe in healthcare settings. The authors state plainly that recruitment through gatekeepers introduced network bias and limits how far the sample represents anybody beyond itself.

How the stage represents khawaja sira

Visibility in Pakistan runs two ways at once, and theatre is where that shows most clearly. Boldea, Farooq, and Călină, writing in Theatrical Colloquia in 2026, describe a divided field: the commercial circuit of Punjabi stage shows and contemporary mujra draws khawaja sira performers into work built on ridicule and eroticisation, while smaller theatre initiatives and the film Joyland leave room for self-representation. Mujra itself carries the same history as the community. It began as a court form of dance, music, and poetry associated with the tawa'if and the Mughal artistic tradition, and colonial rule and later moral campaigns degraded both the form and the standing of the performing communities attached to it. The article's conclusion is that the choice is not between visibility and invisibility but between two kinds of visibility, one built on consumption and one on testimony.

Some khawaja siras are Intersex, and Pakistani society widely assumes all of them are, an error the intersex entry sets out in general terms. The relationship to Transgender is contested, and the relationship to Hijra is contested inside the community itself.