A Blessing That Is Also a Claim

Badhai is the ceremonial performance by which hijra communities of South Asia bless a newborn child or a new marriage, arriving, traditionally uninvited but expected, at a household where a birth or wedding has occurred to sing, drum and dance, invoking Bahuchara Mata, the goddess hijra tradition holds as its particular patron and source of religious authority, before receiving a customary payment from the family in return for the blessing performed. The badhai is, within hijra religious self understanding, the substantive core of the hijra community's claimed religious authority and social role, since the blessing is held by tradition to be especially powerful and efficacious precisely because it comes from hijras, understood within Hindu religious frameworks that hijra identity itself draws on as occupying a distinctive, liminal and in specific ritual contexts spiritually potent social and religious position, neither straightforwardly male nor female in a society's ordinary gender categories.