Hijra

Hijras form a recognised third gender community across South Asia, understood within Hindu and Muslim popular tradition alike to hold a particular ritual power to bless, especially at births and weddings, an appearance known as badhai in which hijras sing, dance and confer blessings on a household in exchange for gifts or payment. The same tradition holds that a hijra denied proper payment or respect can withdraw that blessing or actively curse a household instead, which gives the community a form of social leverage that has helped sustain its economic role across many centuries even as hijras have often faced serious marginalisation in other areas of life.

Nanda's and Reddy's ethnographic studies both describe hijra communities as organised into structured households called gharana, each led by a guru who trains and takes responsibility for a group of chelas, disciples, a hierarchical social structure that functions as an alternative kinship system for people frequently rejected by their birth families. The badhai appearance follows a recognisable pattern, singing and dancing performed at the threshold of a household rather than inside it, a boundary position that mirrors the community's wider social standing, present at the most significant family occasions yet kept at the edge of ordinary domestic life.

Hijras have a documented presence in South Asian court and religious life reaching back centuries, including recorded roles as guardians and administrators in Mughal era courts, well before the modern legal category of a recognised third gender existed anywhere. That recognition arrived comparatively recently: India's Supreme Court ruled in the 2014 NALSA judgment that hijras and other transgender people must be legally recognised as a third gender with full constitutional protections, and Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal introduced comparable legal recognitions in the years that followed.

Reddy's ethnography of hijra identity in South India stresses that this legal recognition has not translated evenly into social acceptance or economic opportunity, and many hijras continue to face significant discrimination in education, formal employment and housing despite now holding recognised legal status, so the traditional ritual blessing role and the more precarious forms of income it has long supplemented remain economically important for many hijra communities even today. Nanda's earlier fieldwork, still widely cited, describes the gharana system as functioning much like a religious order in its internal discipline, with defined obligations of respect and support running between guru and chela that persist for life.