Recognised in Law, Still Marginalised in Practice

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.