Badhai

Badhai is the ceremonial performance by which hijra communities of South Asia bless a newborn child or a new marriage, arriving, traditionally uninvited but expected, at a household where a birth or wedding has occurred to sing, drum and dance, invoking Bahuchara Mata, the goddess hijra tradition holds as its particular patron and source of religious authority, before receiving a customary payment from the family in return for the blessing performed. The badhai is, within hijra religious self understanding, the substantive core of the hijra community's claimed religious authority and social role, since the blessing is held by tradition to be especially powerful and efficacious precisely because it comes from hijras, understood within Hindu religious frameworks that hijra identity itself draws on as occupying a distinctive, liminal and in specific ritual contexts spiritually potent social and religious position, neither straightforwardly male nor female in a society's ordinary gender categories.

Badhai has historically functioned as a genuine, if precarious, economic and social institution for hijra communities, whose traditional livelihood has centred substantially on the payments received for this ceremonial blessing role alongside other traditional occupations, even as hijra communities have simultaneously faced, across much of modern South Asian history, significant social stigma, marginalisation and, in specific historical periods including under British colonial law, direct legal persecution that badhai's continued ritual demand did not straightforwardly offset.

India's Supreme Court formally recognised a third gender legal category in 2014, a landmark recognition that has begun to shift, though by no means fully resolved, the legal and social standing of hijra communities within Indian society, and badhai continues to be performed today as a living religious and social practice even as younger generations of hijra activists and community members increasingly also pursue formal education, employment and political representation alongside, rather than as a replacement for, the traditional ceremonial role. The atlas records badhai as the hijra community's own stated religious practice and claim of spiritual authority, consistent with treating a living tradition's self understanding as the primary source for describing it.