Overview
What hijra means.
Hijra is not a word for a feeling. It is a community with houses, lineages, ritual work, an internal economy and its own funeral rites. You do not become hijra by recognising yourself in a description. You become hijra when a guru takes you in and a house accepts you.
It belongs to South Asia — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and families from there living elsewhere. It is not open to outsiders. If you have no connection to these communities, no amount of fit gives you the word. What you would be claiming is somebody's household, somebody's guru, somebody's saint.
It is also not simply the local word for transgender woman. Most hijras were assigned male at birth and live in feminine dress and feminine speech. Some are intersex. Many say they are neither man nor woman. Some say they are women. The community has never agreed on this and does not need to.
The history is documented, not folklore. Court and revenue records under the Mughals and after. Criminalisation under the British Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, which listed hijras as a class to be registered and watched. Legal recognition again in Bangladesh in 2013, India in 2014, Pakistan in 2018. Outsiders have written whole books about hijras; hijras have written their own.
What is genuinely unsettled is the present. Many young South Asian trans women want nothing to do with gurus, reet payments or working the trains, and say so loudly. Many hijras answer that the house fed them when the country would not. Both are describing something real. This page does not settle it.
So read what follows as description, not invitation. If you are in it, you will know which parts sting.
A traditional third gender recognized in South Asia. Hijras have a recorded history spanning over 4,000 years.
Hijra in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
Hijra communities have a documented presence in South Asia going back through Mughal-era court and revenue records, where hijras held recognised, sometimes salaried positions. Devotional traditions link hijra identity to the goddess Bahuchara Mata, and to episodes in the Ramayana in which Rama blesses those who did not fit into 'men' or 'women' and stayed loyally at the forest's edge. These religious framings are living traditions, not merely origin myths.
Colonial rule sharply worsened hijras' legal and social standing: the British Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 formally classified hijras as a criminal class subject to registration and surveillance, embedding stigma into law that outlasted independence by decades. Legal recognition has only partially reversed this — Bangladesh recognised a third gender in 2013, India's Supreme Court did so in the NALSA judgment of 2014, and Pakistan passed its Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act in 2018 — but everyday discrimination in housing, healthcare and employment remains widely documented.
- Where
- South Asia (Mughal era to present); word predates modern coinage entirely
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
There is a woman you call amma or nani who is not related to you by blood, and what she says about your money is final.
You paid reet to enter your house, or you are still working it off.
You know which houses hold which streets, which markets, which hospitals — and what happens if you do badhai on somebody else's ground.
Your income rises and falls with the wedding calendar.
You have blessed a newborn in a house that would never rent you a room.
You have two names.
The one on the ration card and the one your guru gave you. Both are real; only one gets used.
The clap is not a gesture to you, it is a working sound, and you can tell a real one from a film one instantly.
You already know who will wash your body, where the funeral will happen, and that it will be at night.
You have sat in a government office for a third-gender certificate and been sent back for a document nobody could name.
When someone asks whether you are a man or a woman you have four different answers depending on who is asking.
You have worked a train carriage where everyone paid fast to make you move on, and you did the maths afterwards and it was a good carriage.
Day to day
What it looks like on a normal Tuesday
Wake in a room with more people in it than beds. Tea, then the day's assignments — who takes which mohalla, who is on the trains, who is on the road.
A call comes. A boy born two streets over, three days ago. Four of you go with the dhol. Songs at the doorstep, then the negotiation everyone understands is a negotiation. They offer five hundred. You ask five thousand. You settle at sixteen hundred and a sari. The grandmother is warm. The uncle films you on his phone.
Afternoon: the chemist who sells hormones without asking, the tailor, an hour of reels. Somebody's test result came back and nobody wants to say it out loud.
Evening is the count. Your share goes up to your guru, hers goes up to hers. Then a diya for Bahuchara Mata, or Thursday at the dargah, depending on the house. Then the same room, the same eight of you, someone's phone playing until two.
Not every day and not every house. Some hijras leave for a salon chair at nine and are back by seven, and the rest of it happens around that.
Across the parts of a life
Open the area you came here for.
Straight answers
What people get wrong
Hijras have a magic curse.
Millions of people believe it, which is a fact whatever you think of it. For many hijras the blessing is genuine devotional work. It is also leverage at a doorstep when a family is trying to pay you two hundred rupees, and hijras will say that themselves. Outsiders keep only the curse half because it makes a better story.
All hijras are castrated.
Nirvaan is real and it matters inside some houses, but plenty of hijras never have it. Akwa — not operated — is an ordinary way to live, sleep, work and be counted in the same house.
Hijras steal boys and castrate them.
A colonial-era libel that keeps circulating, and it gets people beaten. People arrive at houses because home stopped being possible, usually in their teens, usually on their own feet.
Hijra just means eunuch.
That is a colonial translation and a surgical description. It says nothing about kinship, work, religion or a house. It is used today mainly by people who want to make a person sound like a condition.
South Asia honoured hijras until the West arrived.
Reverence and contempt have sat side by side for centuries. The 1871 Act made things enormously worse and its logic still shows up in policing, but it did not invent the stigma and independence did not end it.
Hijra is just the Indian word for transgender woman.
They overlap and they are not the same. Hijra is a household, a lineage, a trade and often a faith. Transgender is a category about gender itself. Many hijras are not women. Many trans women want nothing to do with a guru.
All hijras are Hindu.
A large share are Muslim. Plenty of houses are mixed, and plenty of hijras keep Bahuchara Mata and a Thursday at the dargah in the same week without any sense of contradiction.
Legal recognition fixed it.
Bangladesh 2013, India 2014, Pakistan 2018. The cards exist. Quotas exist on paper in India. The landlord still says no, the ward still says no, and the man reading your certificate at an interview still goes quiet and says they will call.
Take care
On the hard days
The hospital that will not admit you while you are bleeding, and the corridor where you sit waiting for the one doctor who does not mind.
Police, under a public-nuisance law old enough and vague enough to apply to whoever they choose. A night in a cell. Nobody to call except the house.
The family that took the blessing warmly at ten in the morning and called you a beggar to a neighbour by noon.
Being the joke in the film your nephew is watching in the next room.
A sister in the house dies and no blood relative comes for the body, so it is on you. Again.
Your guru takes the money you had put aside for the operation, and there is no court you can take her to.
Forty-five, no savings, no pension, a body that hurts, and the younger ones asking why anyone still lives this way — and half of you agreeing with them.
And missing your mother. At a random hour, for no reason, years after she stopped answering.
Pronouns
Pronouns
Most hijras use feminine forms. In Hindi and Urdu the verb endings carry it; in English "she" is the usual translation. Inside the house everything is sisterly and maternal — didi, amma, nani, guru.
Some hijras say flatly that they are not women and not men, and will correct you in either direction. Some younger people use "they" in English and nothing at all in their own language.
The word "hijra" is itself argued over. Between hijras it is ordinary. From a stranger on the street it is one of the worst things you can be called. Many prefer kinnar, khwaja sira, thirunangai, aravani or mangalamukhi. Use what the person in front of you uses.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1You are not South Asian and have no connection to these communities. The description may fit you exactly. The word is still not yours. Work out what the feeling is; do not borrow someone else's household to name it.
- 2You are South Asian, feminine, possibly trans, living an ordinary life with a job and a flat and no guru. That is a trans woman's life, or a gender non-conforming man's, or something you have not named yet. Hijra without a house is mostly just a word.
- 3You want a private label for a private feeling. This is a public role with debts, territory, obligations and a share of your earnings going upward every night.
- 4You are intersex and someone told you the word applies to you. It might, if a house takes you. Intersex is a body. Hijra is a community.
- 5You dance and dress at functions, then live as a man the rest of the week, and that arrangement suits you. That is its own thing and every South Asian language already has words for it.
- 6You like the saris and the drums and the idea of chosen family, but you would not work a train at night or hand over half of what you earn.
- 7You are here for a novel, a film, a costume or a character. Read Revathi, Nanda, Reddy, Hinchy. Take the reading. Leave the label.
Close by
Related identities
Transgender woman (South Asia)
Same countries, different system. She may transition medically, live with her family, hold a salaried job, and never have a guru, never pay reet, never do badhai. Many refuse the hijra structure on purpose. Some hijras are trans women; most trans women are not hijra, and both sides find the conflation irritating.
Kinnar
The dignified word, common in north India and often used interchangeably with hijra. The Kinnar Akhara, formed in 2015, gave it an explicitly Hindu religious frame. Muslim hijras, and there are many, frequently do not use it.
Khwaja sira
Pakistan's respectful umbrella term, taken from the courtly title. Inside it sit categories — zenana, khusra, narban — that do not map cleanly onto Indian hijra houses. Cousins, not the same structure.
ReadThirunangai / Aravani
Tamil Nadu. Aravani ties to the god Aravan and the Koovagam festival; thirunangai is the modern respectful term and the one to use. Tamil houses, Tamil terms, its own history — not a translation of hijra.
Jogappa / Jogta
Devotees of Yellamma in Karnataka and Maharashtra, dedicated to the goddess, living in feminine dress. Different deity, different lineage, different work. Not a hijra house and not run by gurus in the same way.
Nirvaan and akwa
Not separate identities. Statuses inside the same houses — operated and not operated. People sometimes read them as different kinds of person. They are not.
Eunuch
A colonial translation that describes a surgery and nothing else. No kinship, no house, no ritual, no faith. Do not use it about a living person.
Third gender (legal category)
A box on a government form. It covers hijras, trans women, intersex people and others who share almost nothing. The state made it; nobody grew up inside it.
Two-Spirit
Constantly listed next to hijra in articles that should know better. Indigenous North American, belonging to specific nations, also closed to outsiders. No historical relationship of any kind.
ReadWaria, Kathoey, Bakla
Indonesian, Thai and Filipino systems with their own histories and their own economies. Similar in shape when flattened into English; unrelated in lineage. Each belongs to its own people.
Questions people ask
Frequently asked questions
Is "hijra" a slur?+
It depends entirely on the mouth it comes out of. Between hijras it is completely ordinary and used a hundred times a day. Shouted from a passing bike, it is among the worst things you can say in Hindi or Urdu. Many people prefer kinnar, khwaja sira, thirunangai or mangalamukhi in public settings. If you are asking because you want to get it right: use the word the person uses about herself, and if you do not know it, ask.
Are hijras transgender?+
Legally, usually yes — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh all group hijras under transgender or third-gender law. Personally, sometimes. Many hijras use both words without difficulty. Others say transgender is an English NGO word that arrived in the nineties and describes a medical process rather than a household. And plenty of South Asian trans women are not hijra and never intend to be. The categories overlap. They are not one thing.
Can I identify as hijra if I am not South Asian?+
No. It is not a personal label with criteria you can meet. It is entry into specific households with specific gurus, specific saints, specific territory and specific obligations, granted by people who have to accept you. There is no online route in and no one who can grant it over the internet. If what caught you was the description of being neither man nor woman, that feeling has words that are yours to use. Start there instead.
How does someone actually become hijra?+
Through a guru. You turn up at functions, you become known, you ask or you are asked. Then there is reet — a payment and a ceremony that makes you the chela of that guru and a member of that house. Afterwards you live under her, hand up a share, and she is responsible for your food, your medicine, your quarrels and your funeral. It is closer to being apprenticed and adopted at the same time than to coming out.
Do hijras really have the power to bless or to curse?+
A great many people in South Asia believe so, and that belief shapes everyday life whatever you personally think. For a lot of hijras the badhai is real devotional work, tied to Bahuchara Mata or to the tradition in which Rama blesses those who waited for him at the forest's edge. It is also leverage at a doorstep when a family is trying to pay you two hundred rupees, and hijras will tell you that themselves. Outsiders keep only the curse half, because it makes a better story than a woman trying to make rent.
The flag
Not a stripe flag and competing designs — HijrAnon's 2016 Ardhanarishvara design (nonbinary.wiki) and Samir/Samira's 2018 flag (lgbtqia.wiki), whose maker later said she is not hijra; in practice the community uses the trans and rainbow flags.
Sources
- How Britain tried to 'erase' India's third gender — BBC News Supports the Criminal Tribes Act 1871 and colonial-era criminalisation history; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Bahuchara Mata — Wikipedia Supports the devotional/goddess association named in the prose; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India — Asian Studies Review Peer-reviewed source on colonial-era policing of hijras; fetched 2026-09-06.
Still figuring things out?
Twenty questions, four minutes, and a few words worth trying on.