“Hijron ke janam mein bhi taali aur maut mein bhi taali,” Mumtaz*, a Hyderabad-based hijra told us one evening in April 2024. There are claps when a hijra is born, and there are claps when a hijra dies.
Hijras are a South Asian cultural group composed mostly of transfeminine people who are assigned male at birth; some hijras may be intersex. The birth Mumtaz was alluding to was reet, a ritual through which a person willing to join the hijra community is formally initiated into a gharana—household. As part of the ceremony, members of the gharana mark the person’s acceptance into hijrapan, or hijrahood, with a series of claps, accompanied by oral invocations such as “deen deen deen” (religious duty) or “sab sanat rahe” (hijras we spoke to translated this as “may all be well”).
While some other hijras disputed Mumtaz’s claim that the death of a hijra is also marked by the taali, they all agreed that the taali is integral to the hijra way of life.
As a community that transgresses gender visibly and occupies public space across South Asia, the lives and practices of hijras have been the subject of ceaseless public curiosity. Their taali is perhaps the most iconic, instantly recognisable symbol of the community.
Taali or the “hijra hand-clap” is a “marker of identity,” wrote Gayatri Reddy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in her 2005 book With Respect to Sex. “Any parodic imitation of hijras would need to include only this gesture to be recognisable as such.”
Popular media is replete with sensationalist and inaccurate claims about the supposed health gains hijras reap from their claps. Citing unnamed “yoga experts”, a 2024 News18 Hindi article declared that “the taali is acupressure therapy for them [hijras].” According to a Zee Bharat article, hijras fall sick infrequently because “the taali helps improve blood flow to the body [and] all parts of the body function better and faster.” Clapping also helps improve a hijra’s brain functioning, the Zee Bharat article added.
Public opinion largely regards the taali as the infamous calling card of a community they do not understand. For example, in a 2016 post on the social media platform Reddit, a user complained that a group of hijras was creating commotion and clapping “every few seconds” in their neighbourhood. “Is their clap a way to make us even more angry?” the user asked. In their responses, a small minority of users were sympathetic to the hijras, but most responded with suggestions that were confrontational—or violent. “Cook up a disgusting smell,” said one response. “Go on terrace and dust some mirchi powder…a LOT of it,” said another. The top voted comment simply said, “Two words: Sniper Rifle.”
What gets lost between media misinformation on the one hand and society’s disdain for hijras on the other are the actual reasons that make the taali an essential part of hijrahood.
In 2024, we embarked on a project to document and understand the different contexts in which the hijra communities in India use taali. We interviewed seven people—four from Hyderabad in Telangana and three from Kolkata, Nadia, and Hooghly districts of West Bengal. Six of them were hijras associated with gharanas, and one of them was a transgender woman who is not hijra but has close ties with the community.
Our research was also informed by nearly a decade of working with and talking to hijras as friends, researchers, and activists. Since 2017, we have written about different aspects of gender and sexually marginalised communities in India, including caste, kinship, worship, and political organising.
From our conversations, we found that the taali is a powerful tool that helps hijras assert their belonging to their community and resist the tyrannies of the normative world. In 2025, we documented these findings in an article in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies.
Paying attention to the different contexts in which the taali is used also revealed the cracks within hijra communities: some hijras were unhappy with what they see as increasingly widespread, inappropriate use of the taali. At the heart of this disagreement lies a tussle that is currently playing out in the community, between those who would safeguard the traditional norms that have long-governed the hijra subculture and others who seek to unsettle them.
A tool for resistance
Most hijras believe that the taali is an age-old custom passed down from generation to generation. However, few agree on its precise significance.
The taali symbolises the union of “two energies” in a person’s body, according to Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, a transgender rights activist and arguably one of India’s most visible hijra figures. When the “ying and yang energy” and the “male and female energy” come together, it gives out a “positive energy,” she said in a September 2024 interview. Sita Bhardwaj, project director of Kinnar Bharati, likened the taali to the claps that accompany religious songs such as bhajans, implying that it is a symbol of devotion. Kinnar Bharati is a community-based organisation in Delhi.
But Mumtaz, the Hyderabad-based hijra, disagreed. She said that to produce the loud, resonant sound of the taali, a hijra individual stretches out their left palm and curls the right into an oval shape. Then, they beat the left palm onto the right. This “ulta taali”, or reverse clapping, is “unlike clapping during a bhajan, where people simply bring two hands together,” she said.
The hijras, including Mumtaz, we spoke to saw the taali as a gesture they routinely use for different purposes almost everyday: in their work, in banter and joy, in resisting potential violence from the normative public, as well as in navigating intra-community conflicts. For them, the taali was not only a marker of identity, but a tool for survival, self-expression, and resistance.
Rituals of exchange
In 2024, Srishti, a hijra based in West Bengal’s Nadia district, heard that a house in a locality she frequented had welcomed a baby. She visited the house for badhaai, a ritual during which hijras bless a newborn in exchange for cash and other kinds of gifts. The family members, however, turned her away. She felt dejected. If she had been alone, she said, she would have requested the family to at least give her some rice, potatoes, and sweets, and 500-1,000 rupees. “I would have been satisfied with that,” Srishti told us.
But knowing that other members of her group were around the corner looking for badhaai opportunities, she phoned them to come over. “The moment they came, they entered the house clapping loudly… people around [in the house] were scared and some more people [from the neighbourhood] gathered,” she recollected. Srishti and the group refused to accept “only rice and potatoes,” she told us. “Our ask… increased by three times.”
Several hijras we spoke to recounted that they use the taali similarly: to coerce alms out of those who do not willingly offer them. During the practice of chhalla maangna—seeking alms in public spaces such as trains—they announce their arrival with the taali, they said. This serves as a cue for the passengers to ready their alms. When someone refuses, what often follows is a series of loud taalis. The taali, in this case, Srishti said, “helps us scare people, to teach them a lesson.”
These tactics have severely tainted the public image of the hijra community. Searching Reddit for the word ‘hijra’ surfaces a litany of posts decrying such incidents and expressing outrage at the ‘extortion’ and ‘harassment.’ Even prominent transgender women have expressed similar views. Apsara Reddy, a transgender journalist-turned-politician, told the Deccan Herald in 2019 that “the community should… behave in a way that others understand us. Clapping hands and abusing people will do nothing but scare them.”
Scholarship however suggests that the framing of hijras’ monetary demands as acts of extortion is relatively recent, precipitated by British colonial rule. Anthropologist Serena Nanda in her 1999 book Neither Man Nor Woman wrote that before the advent of the British Raj, many Indian kings granted hijras a “hereditary right to collect food and small sums of money from each agricultural household in a stipulated area.” The exact reasons behind the granting of these rights are unclear. Their “claim to alms rest[ed], as with other religious mendicants, in the sacred character which [was] attached to them,” wrote colonial ethnologist R.V. Russell in his 1916 report The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India. Or it could have been to “redistribute resources to people of humble means” or “to distribute political patronage and to bind subjects to the state,” as historian Jessica Hinchy wrote in her 2019 book Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India. It could have also been a result of the “Indian concept of the king’s duty to ensure the ancient rights of his subjects,” according to Serena.
When the British took over in the nineteenth century, they refused to support “the [hijras’] right of begging or extorting money” to discourage what they saw as the “abominable practices of the wretches,” Serena added. With that, the traditional legitimacy of the hijras’ money-seeking practices vanished. What was earlier a rightful ask was rewritten as extortion.
Many hijras themselves do not see their monetary demands as extortion or even begging. When Vaibhav Saria, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, observed how hijras seek money on trains, and how the public responds to these demands, they found that chhalla maangna is distinct from other forms of traditional monetary exchanges in India—dana (donation), dakshina (payment), dalali (brokerage), bhiksha (ritual alms-seeking), and bheek (begging). Hijras’ “sense that the money collected on trains properly belongs to them” compelled Vaibhav to see chhalla “not so much as… begging… but in terms of ethical payment of taxes to which [hijras] have a right, or haq,” they wrote in their 2021 book Hijras, Brothers, Lovers. All hijras they spoke to asserted this haq and argued that it was in fact the passengers who “in refusing or hesitating to give them the money, were the ones cheating,” Vaibhav added.
This haq, once rooted in royal patronage, now appears to find its justification in how society marginalises and disenfranchises the hijra community. “We will continue to clap even if people don’t like our taali,” said Smitha, a Hyderabad-based hijra. “Everyone suggests [we] enter the mainstream and leave the hijra way of life. And yet, the implementation of schemes is zero… people say—‘you don’t have education, so no respectable jobs [for you]’,” she added, her words punctuated by a series of taalis.
By ‘schemes’, Smitha meant the Telangana government’s attempts at providing transgender people—including hijras—with skills training, job placements and subsidised loans. These schemes have not been implemented successfully, according to her. Activists have made similar claims—about Telangana and other states. The “gap between policy formulation and effective implementation remains a critical challenge that undermines the potential impact of these initiatives,” according to a Centre for Law and Policy Research blog post on similar schemes by the Karnataka government.
Systematic data on the hijra community’s educational status is lacking. However, according to a 2017 report by the National Human Rights Commission, which surveyed 900 transgender people, including hijras, in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, about 30 percent of those surveyed had never attended school. And just about five per cent had graduate or postgraduate degrees.
Even when hijras are educated, they often struggle with finding sustainable employment outside their traditional occupations. Srishti, for example, told us that she had “passed [her] ITI exams.” She was referring to India’s Industrial Training Institutes, which provides vocational training in trades such as electrical work, welding, and plumbing. Yet, she was unable to land a job and eventually embraced hijragiri “because of financial difficulties,” she said. Hijragiri is the term West Bengal-based hijras use for hijrahood.
Multiple reports published by queerbeat illustrate the slow, uneven, and often fraught progress of queer and transgender inclusion in corporate employment.
“No government or company has thought about us,” Srishti said, adding that society was leaving them no choice but to use coercive tactics to make a living. For her and Smitha, the taali was a mode of both asserting their right to sustainable livelihood and protesting against their systemic economic marginalisation.
“If we do this pesha [occupation] without disruptions, nobody will give us anything,” said Srishti. “When the taali rings out, ten people listen to us,” she added.
The taali as protection
On her daily travels in West Bengal’s local trains, Tania, a transgender woman, prefers sitting at the empty passageway near the door, even when seats are available. “That [space] is my kingdom; there is a lot more air and a lot more access,” she said. To ensure that she has her kingdom to herself, she enters the train and claps a few times. Fearing a commotion, the crowd in the passageway quickly disperses, she told us.
Tania is not formally initiated into a hijra household. However, owing to her years of grassroots queer and transgender rights activism as well as her close ties with the hijras of West Bengal, she is a frequent visitor to the Maachhua gharana, one of the three main hijra households in the state. Informally, she considers herself a “community member”, she told us.
Tania is not involved in badhaai or chhalla maangna. For her, the taali is a tool to access and occupy public space. She attributes to the gesture a power—“shakti”—that “we cannot see, but we can use,” she told us.
“The taali protects us a lot,” Tania added. Seven or eight years before our conversation with her in September 2024, Tania was on a train with a group of kothis. (Kothi is another South Asian cultural identity comprising “socioeconomically marginalised gender variant or ‘feminine’ same-sex desiring males,” according to gender studies researcher Ani Dutta.) They were all headed to Digha, a popular beachside destination in West Bengal. At one point, they heard other passengers, particularly men, mock them. “They were saying things like ‘these people do not know how to sit’ and ‘nobody knows who their father is’,” Tania recounted.
Tania lost her cool and started clapping. “I have been hearing for a long time that you have been pointing at our family backgrounds. We haven’t done anything that should make you question our family backgrounds,” she remembers telling the men while she clapped. The men “shut up and moved away,” she recalled.
Like Tania, Hyderabad-based Smitha also recounted several instances in which the taali became a mode of protection, particularly for hijras involved in sex work.
For the most part, sex work among hijras is semi-organised and happens in public spaces. Hijras who engage in sex work are frequently vulnerable to both police violence and harassment from their clients. This is where the taali comes to action: during police raids, a hijra alerts others around her through loud taalis. Further, when a problematic client turns up—one who is pushing for more than what the sex worker agreed to, or one who is unwilling to pay—resounding taalis are used to make them settle their dues or chase them away.
The right to clap
While most of our interviewees spoke of the taali as a gesture that helps them survive in an oppressive world, some of them lamented its widespread use. One such person was Manju, a senior member of Badi Haveli, one of Hyderabad’s six traditional hijra gharanas. Customarily, Manju said, the norms of gharanas control the use of the taali. The right to clap rested largely with the supremos, who would sound the taali as an act of devotion towards Bahuchara Mata—the patron goddess of hijras—or to discipline erring juniors. It was only during badhaai that junior members of the households were allowed to clap, Manju told us. This, according to her, was the “systematic” form of the taali.
That changed when some hijra groups, who found the traditional gharana structure oppressive, left to establish their own communes, Manju added. She could not specify when exactly this happened, but researchers have documented such bifurcations among hijras since the turn of the twenty-first century.
Serena, the anthropologist, wrote in her 1999 book that as Indian society became increasingly urbanised, educated, and westernised, many hijras found it difficult to make money from traditional occupations like badhaai alone. This compelled some of them to take up sex work. Such hijras were “stigmatized within the community” and were not allowed to live in hijra gharanas that were traditionally considered “respectable,” she wrote.
During our research, we saw that hijras engaging in sex work often did not live in traditional gharanas. Instead, they lived in independent communal arrangements, or, rarely, alone. However, they maintained their legitimacy as hijras by paying a cut from their income to the gharanas they are associated with. Serena made similar observations in her 1999 book. In Mumbai, she wrote, “hijra prostitutes live together in flats, often in red-light districts. Otherwise…[they] are considered full members of the community.”
But it wasn’t just sex work that created ruptures in the gharana structures. In their 2021 book, Vaibhav documents how the “issue of begging divided the community.” They quote Dolly, a member of a hijra gharana as expressing “disdain and disgust” towards hijras who “beg on trains”. “They have no honor and are just gandus,” Dolly said. (Vaibhav translates ‘gandu’ as “faggots” or “sodomites”).
Manju dislikes the rampant use of the taali outside the bounds of traditional households by some hijras. “What was divine inside the haveli has now been made mundane by the hijras who moved out. Taali is now taking the character of a shaitan (devil),” she said. For her, the widespread use of the taali was an example of how the “sanctity” of the gharana system was being compromised.
West Bengal-based hijras Srishti and Titli expressed similar sentiments; they were specifically against hijras using the taali during sex work and begging. According to Srishti, commonplace use of the taali outside its customary norms began “ten to fifteen years back.” Before that, she said, “this pesha was Sati’s pesha—no hijra was doing sex work or begging.” Now, hijras “clap a lot more because of greed,” she added.
Sati, the name of Shiva’s wife in Hindu mythology, is a term used to refer to virtuous and faithful women. Hijras who use taali during sex work and begging was a sign that they were forgetting to live with “shorom” (modesty) and “izzat” (respect), Srishti recounted her guru saying. Titli too termed the use of the taali during sex work and begging as “nongramo” (profanity).
And so, some hijras see the use of the taali outside its conventional norms as a gain while others see it as a loss. For Smitha and Tania, the loosening of the gharanas’ hold over taali’s use means access to a mode of resistance that was otherwise tightly regulated. For Manju, Srishti, and Titli, it means a threat to the sanctity of hijrapan.
Ultimately, the contestation over the taali reveals the changing contours of—and the widening cracks within—India’s most visible gender-transgressing community.
*Names of all interviewees in this article have been changed upon request.