Gods Beyond Gender: Transgender Identity and Mythological Fluidity in Indian Traditions

Abstract

Hindu mythology is entirely a different realm and its impact on modern day India has formed an intricate face which this paper tries to elucidate. Sometimes, judicial or parliamentary references to mythic gender‐style figures such as Ardhanarisvara, Mohini, and Sikhandi have been framed to bring into play notions of civilizational tolerance for this form of gendered multiplicity. Much of this era interpreted these characters as exemplars that colonial modernity had shattered a time‐honored tradition of stable concentric circles of tolerance in Indigenous societies. However, this celebratory vision cannot truly contend with how myth—digested into the already tender and tidy infrastructure of regulatory normalization—is coming to embody Woman‐Gender‐change as legalized/legitimated. This paper uses the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, and its associated Rules of 2020 to talk about a class of linguistic regimes that act as intermediaries between narrative plurality and administrative stability. Theoretically, it draws on queer critiques of recognition, CDA, and Foucauldian genealogical analyses. Through a detailed textual reading of select Puranic and epic narratives, pertinent Supreme Court jurisprudence—particularly National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India (2014) and legislative deliberations on the subject between 2014 and 2019—the study unveils how this symbolic fluidity gets arrested within legal categorization. These results suggest that myths function as a form of dual cultural technology. Recontextualizing transgender identities within an archive of civilizational continuity, it expands the field of intelligibility even as it performs a process by which gender is rendered legible through certification and documentary verification. Thus, legibility is the condition for recognition; postcolonial legal modernity fragments rights inwardly while also outwardly reproducing its bureaucratic infrastructures—hierarchy and surveillance. This paper questions recognition as a potential emancipatory endpoint and examines it as a negotiated modality of governance.