Nirvana, the ritual of castration in the hijra community, is a rite of passage that turns harm into kinship, trauma into collective healing, and redesigns mental health by turning marginality into method
There is a small room in an old building in a dedha village populated by Gujjars, situated on the outskirts of the Trans-Yamuna region of New Delhi. The Gujjars are conventionally known as a pastoral community in India, who are given the status of Other Backward Class (OBC) group by the Constitution of India. The room is inside a building that looks like a failed shopping complex project, now encroached upon by local goons. The goons collect rent from people who stay in one-room sets inside and small businesses that they let flourish outside the building.
Past this little space is an uncovered drain with food and faeces flowing in it, just across which is a small room, which I enter. Inside the room is a built-in shelf decorated with steel utensils piled cleanly on top of each other, a mattress on the floor and an old rug spread out for people to sit on. The ceiling is dampened with seepage. A spittoon and a gas stove mark the two corners for the tenants of this room — three hijras who go for offering ritual blessings and curses to a residential colony in east Delhi in the morning and for sex work to Anand Vihar bus adda, an inter-state bus terminal on the Delhi border, in the night.
The main occupant of the room is Phulo, who is the guru of the other two hijras, her chelas (mentees) who stay with her. Phulo’s natal family, including her mother, father, brothers, and sisters-in-law, live in a three-storey mansion just beside the small room across the street, from which she can oversee the area from the main entrance of her building. I enter her room with Laila, another hijra and a mutual friend, and Phulo begins warmly welcoming me, offering me water (refusal of which would be considered extremely rude), while making a gesture to one of her chelas to get me a cola from outside. However, this request is cancelled by another gesture from Laila, signalling that there is no need for any formalities between them and me.
A rebirth in the mortal life
Phulo is a lively 28-year-old hijra who, while adjusting her salwar-kameez, broke the ice by saying, “Batao kya poochna hai. Mai sab bataungi.” (Tell me what it is that you want to ask. I will tell you everything.) She asked what I wished to know about their world and what I intended to do with that knowledge. I told her, “I want to know your personal story. I am going to write about it.” “Well, my name is Phulo,” she giggled, “And you are looking at the most beautiful hijra, as beautiful as Kareena Kapoor!” Her chelas laughed and teased her affectionately, calling out, “Oho nirwan moorat!” (castrated hijra).
Phulo further explained that she was an asli (real) hijra by means of being chibbra hua or castrated. I asked, “where?” “Through our secret network of doctors outside Delhi,” she revealed. I asked, “when?” “A long time ago, almost five years now,” she confirmed. I asked, “why?” Raising her eyebrows, she looked at me as if stumped by the stupidity of my question, sighed effortlessly, and answered, “Because I wanted to.” Phulo expressed, “Yeh humara punarjanam hai isi zindagi mein. Chibbarne ke baad toh sab badal jaata hai. Achchi kamayi hoti hai aur badhiya dikhte bhi hain.” (This is our rebirth living a mortal human life. Everything changes after castration. We earn well and also look good.) Her castration took place in a small village located in western Uttar Pradesh, notorious for its poverty and escalating crime rates.
Nirvana, the practice of castration among the hijra community, is often seen by outsiders as violent and archaic. But to the hijras themselves, it is a rite of passage, a ritual of harm that births new kinship, new personhood, and collective healing. In India, hijras exist at the edge of society — visible yet invisible, mocked yet feared, revered yet reviled. From ancient temple carvings to Mughal harems, they have always been present, but seldom truly seen. Official recognition as a “third gender” in 2014 gave legal shape to their identity, but it did little to touch the emotional geography of their lives.
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At the heart of this geography is the wound, a literal, physical wound inflicted during nirvana. In a world that denies the hijra communities dignity, this wound offers them something else: belonging. While legal recognitions have helped legitimize the hijra identity in policy frameworks, they do little to address the affective, psychic, and embodied worlds that hijras inhabit. One of the most central — and controversial — practices within this world is the ritual of nirvana, an unregulated and community-performed castration often accompanied by prayers to Bahuchara Mata, the community’s patron goddess.
Rather than pathologising this act through biomedical lenses alone, this piece approaches nirvana as a psycho-social and sacred phenomenon where harm is neither incidental nor hidden but ritualised, witnessed, and sanctified. Drawing from fieldwork, oral narratives, and psychoanalytic theory, it examines how the hijra community transforms suffering into salvation. But beyond the immediate ritual lies a deeper, more complex story about collective trauma, embodied resistance, and the psychological alchemy of pain into personhood. As India begins to engage more seriously with mental health discourse, it’s time we ask: What happens when harm becomes a path to healing?
From organ to signifier
In the work of Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist often considered the founder of psychoanalysis, the phallus is closely linked to the penis and castration anxiety. It represents power, presence, and loss, especially in the Oedipal stage, where the child perceives the phallus as something possessed by the father and potentially taken away. French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, however, saw this as limiting. Instead, he decoupled the phallus from the penis and relocated it within the Symbolic Order, the realm of language, law, and social norms.
In his influential essay, “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958), Lacan argued that the phallus is a signifier of lack, a placeholder for what cannot be possessed or fully represented. It is not an object that one has or doesn’t have; rather, it is a function that structures how desire operates in the unconscious. How, then, might such Freudian-Lacanian concepts of castration — steeped in anxiety and loss — relate to the hijra’s castration ritual, which is embraced rather than feared?
Castration in the context of the hijra communities does not symbolise lack; it represents transformation and rebirth. In Freudian psychoanalysis, castration anxiety is central to the construction of the normative subject. It is the fear of loss that induces conformity. For hijras, however, castration is not feared, it is sought. This reversal destabilises classical psychoanalytic models and reorients our understanding of the gendered psyche. Thus emerges a psychological paradox: how harm, when ritualised and witnessed, can become a source of psychic reconstitution.
As scholar and activist Adnan Hossain, in their book Beyond Emasculation: Pleasure and Power in the Making of hijra in Bangladesh (2021), explains the hijras’ position, “...On the one hand, hijras decentre and dismantle the phallus (the manifestation of masculine dominance both at the level of representation and practice) as the only and primary site of pleasure, power and masculinity, they also, on the other hand, paradoxically enforce and reinforce those ideals and politics of masculinity otherwise employed to socioculturally delegitimize them.”
Although the hijras have distinct words for the vagina and the castrated area. It is worth noting that although the castrated area is meant to function as a symbolic vagina, it is still regarded as different from an actual vagina. This distinction is maintained through the separate terms, with ‘chapta’ referring to a symbolic vagina and ‘seepo’ to an actual vagina in Hijra Farsi. However, many of my hijra interlocutors used these words interchangeably in many contexts to describe how well their surgery had gone.
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If, after castration, the hijra’s castrated area develops a structure resembling a vagina (similar to vaginoplasty), then the hijras refer to their castrated area as ‘seepo,’ as some of my informants, who sought professional allopathic surgeons, have done. Nevertheless, the semantics of both words can be ambiguous, and it is unclear whether the word ‘seepo’ replaces ‘chapta’ if vaginoplasty has been performed, as different individuals assign different meanings to these words depending on the surgical technique used by different surgeons, with no standardisation of procedures to ensure uniform results after castration.
A mirror to society’s wound
Hijras do not undergo nirvana simply as a gender-affirming surgery. It is a socio-religious ceremony infused with mysticism, power dynamics, and collective memory. Many times, hijra gurus oversee the process, blessings are invoked, songs are sung, and in that ritual theatre of blood and devotion, the hijra disciple is spiritually reborn. The sacred wound becomes both a site of submission to the community and a declaration of agency against the normative world.
This act of harm must be understood within broader genealogies of caste, exclusion, and survival. Hijra communities historically comprised lower-caste and class individuals, many of whom were disowned by their natal families. Their entry into hijra gharanas is often precipitated by violence, abandonment, or economic precarity. In this sense, nirvana is not just a personal transformation; it is the community’s way of formalising membership through suffering. The wound becomes a passport into kinship.
After castration, there is a ritual healing ceremony where the newly nirwan hijra person is taken care of by their hijra kin. Announcements of their nirwan status are made from their gharana networks, and friends are invited to bring gifts and fruit baskets, apply a turmeric paste, and bless them for a new life.
Laxmi Narayan Tripathi during the Royal Bath parade during Kumbh Mela 2019 in Prayagraj (Allahabad). Laxmi is a transgender rights activist and Bharatanatyam dancer from Mumbai.
During this time, Phulo lived in her guru’s dera (commune) and was provided with a specially made concoction to drink, nutritious food that is not hot and spicy, clothing and care. She could not earn any money and was completely bedridden for the first month. Some hakims and vaidyas from her guru’s networks would check up on her regularly.
“It took me almost three months to heal completely,” Phulo said and explained to me that she had unbearable pain and experienced many post-operative urological complications. However, the secretion of blood from the ‘chapta’ is symbolic of the nirvana hijra’s first menstruation and the final rites of passage signifying that their initiation into the hijra community is now complete and irreversible.
There are many risks involved in the castration procedure and after-care is critical to the healing of the wound. In discussions with hijra outreach workers working with a local NGO in the outskirts of New Delhi, common post-operative complaints from hijras included excessive bleeding, hemotoma (collection of blood in the wound), seroma (collection of fluid in the wound), urinary tract infections and poor healing of the castrated wound.
There is little literature available on the complications of castration because it is a hidden procedure due to its ambivalent legal status in India. Therefore, not much knowledge exists outside the hijra lifeworld on how to take care of the castrated wound. As such, to look after the wound becomes a communal event in the hijra community where knowledge is passed through hijra generations. This way, the wound also sustains the hijra community, with all its hierarchy.
It is here that all previous understanding of the wound is dismissed and a new meaning is given: a wound that allows for “liberation of her soul from years of entrapment inside a body” to which Phulo did not belong, as she explained to me.
The hijra individual’s mental health, then, cannot be understood through individualistic metrics. Western psychological frameworks often speak of trauma in terms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, or depression, rooted in the individual. In contrast, the hijra experience is inherently collective. Their trauma is communal, and so is their healing. The rituals, songs, shared meals, and kin networks are all technologies of collective mental health management.
In a strange way, the hijra ritual of castration reveals not just their wound, but ours — society’s inability to hold multiplicity, to allow for gender fluidity, to embrace difference without domination. Their suffering is not incidental, it is structural. And yet, in the face of that suffering, they have built temples, families, and folklores. They have made meaning. They have turned harm into hymn.
But this sacredness does not erase the risks. The ethical question then becomes: Is ritual justification enough to overlook the bodily harm? The answer is complicated.
Beyond diagnosis, toward dignity
In 2019, I went to the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest pilgrimage gatherings of people in the world, to conduct fieldwork. That year, it was being held at Prayagraj (formerly called Allahabad) in Delhi’s neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh. It was also the first time that year that the Kinnar Akhada, the first Hindu monastic order of hijras, was allowed to participate fully by taking the “royal holy dip.” I met Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, the high priestess of Kinnar Akhada and her followers, who bathed in the sacred confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and (historical) Saraswati rivers — a ritual traditionally reserved for Hindu priests, who are mostly male and Brahmin, or upper caste.
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During the festival, the Allahabad High Court asked the members of the Kinnar Akhada, particularly its high priestess, Tripathi, to take a medical test to confirm the authenticity of their identity by testifying whether they are castrated. This was because a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by a women’s rights organisation in the Allahabad High Court demanded the same. The PIL stated that cis women would not feel safe if the hijras at the Kinnar Akhada were not castrated.
Such demands emanated from transphobic sentiments from a group of local feminists who shared their ideology with those of trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), propelling them to file a complaint against the hijras of the Kinnar Akhada. In my interview with Laxmi, she said that demanding such explanations of her bodily status was against the law, as she had the right of self-determination of her gender after the 2014 Supreme Court judgement that officially recognised the hijras as a third gender.
The hijra communities themselves are not monolithic in their experiences. Some members recount nirvana as the most spiritually fulfilling moment of their lives. Others narrate regret, particularly if the decision was made under social pressure. The community’s demand for conformity sometimes manifests as coercion, particularly for younger or more vulnerable members. This duality — ritual as liberation and as discipline — must be held together in tension.
One must also consider the politics of gaze. The hijra body has been historically fetishized — by colonial administrators, by anthropologists, and now by NGOs and journalists. Descriptions of castration rituals often veer into the sensational. It is crucial, then, to centre hijra voices, to treat their accounts not as exotic testimonials but as epistemologies in their own right.
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the hijra person’s wound is not merely a physical injury. It is a symbolic site: of absence and presence, of erasure and emergence. The act of cutting is simultaneously an act of making. The wound becomes an archive, carrying memories of violence, but also of valour.
Mental health, in this frame, is not about returning to normalcy but about crafting livable realities under conditions of rejection and stigma. It is about turning marginality into method. What’s needed, therefore, is to redesign hijra health — mental and otherwise — not as a domain for mere intervention, but as a site of knowledge, resistance, and world-making. Instead of asking, “How do we help hijras heal?”, we must ask, “What can hijras teach us about healing?”
As India grapples with expanding mental health infrastructure, the hijra community offers a vital lesson: that healing is not always antiseptic or clinical. Sometimes, it is bloody, messy, and sacred. And it is time we listened. The hijra community forces us to rethink and redesign mental health infrastructure, not as an individual glitch in brain chemistry but as a collective narrative about survival, harm, and hope.
Castration, in this light, is not just a surgical event but a psychosocial pivot: an act of self-fashioning in the face of annihilation. It is both wound and womb, both loss and becoming. In a society obsessed with fixing what it doesn’t understand, perhaps the hijra communities teach us something deeper: that healing is not always about erasing the scar — it’s about naming it, honouring it, and learning to live through it together.
(This piece draws from extensive research, long-term fieldwork and intimate conversations within hijra communities across North India. Some names have been withdrawn to protect identities.)
