Serena Nanda

Hijras have been part of Indian culture for centuries, occupying a specific social and economic position that has no clean equivalent in Western frameworks.

Serena Nanda, whose work with hijra communities became the standing ethnography on them, tells us they operate in a structure with its own rules, its own succession, its own means of support.

They are not a Western progressive invention.

They predate the colonial imposition of the British two category system by a very long time.