Invisible Anchors: Hijra Communities, Heterosexual Marriages, and Public Gender Dynamics in Kashmir

Abstract

Kashmir’s socio-political landscape, often framed around the India–Pakistan conflict, obscures internal power dynamics of gender, religion, and state authority. This study centers Kashmir’s Hijra communities—transgender groups historically integral to marriage and childbirth rituals—as an “invisible anchor” revealing a paradox of ritual visibility and structural exclusion. Although Hijras occupy indispensable ceremonial roles linked to fertility and prosperity, colonial and postcolonial legal regimes (from the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 to contemporary laws) continue to cast them as deviant and disposable. Employing a qualitative, intersectional and decolonial methodology—combining archival legal analysis with ethnographic interviews and queer theoretical insights—this research interrogates how postcolonial nationalist discourses police non-binary gender. Drawing on Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, Spivak’s subaltern critique, and Chatterjee’s analysis of postcolonial nationalism, we argue that Hijras are not peripheral anomalies but central to understanding Kashmir’s social order.

Their paradoxical status exposes how heteronormative nationalist narratives enlist Hijra presence for cultural continuity even as state mechanisms render them vulnerable and ungrievable. This study intervenes theoretically by weaving together queer theory, feminist intersectionality, and subaltern studies to decolonize gendered citizenship. Our analysis demonstrates that centering Hijra agency reveals the limits of inherited binaries and the state’s biopolitical management of life and death. The findings call for a decolonial rethinking of gender and nationhood: genuine nation-building in Kashmir must reckon with these gender-diverse “invisible anchors.” By repositioning Hijra communities at the center of analysis, this study enriches feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship and charts more inclusive political futures, reframing Hijra inclusion as a measure of Kashmir’s progress toward a genuinely plural and decolonial society.