Marginalized gender-variant people, such as hijras and kothis, demanding money in public places in return for blessings is a very common sight in India. Usually assigned male at birth, hijras and kothis are transgressively feminine gender-variant or intersex people, who are also primarily working-class and/or caste-oppressed Dalit and Bahujan.Footnote 1 They raise economic demands—through cultural practices named chhalla mangna and badhai—at traffic signals, trains, shops, streets, local markets, and national highways, as well as in private residencies, hospitals, and rented units that are secured exclusively to celebrate significant life events such as weddings or the arrival of newborns.Footnote 2
Hijras—and those who identify or are socially perceived as hijras, such as kothis—consider the “conferral of blessings as their traditional ritual role” and are believed in South Asia to have the power to both bless and curse, which accords them and their economic demands a modicum of spiritual–cultural legitimacy.Footnote 3 However, demands that multiply marginalized gender-variant people raise in public, despite such legitimacy, are often misidentified as “begging,” conflated with “extortion,” and are frequently criminalized in India. This is because instead of performing absolute subservience, they enact a form of “radical dependence” in everyday life, which should neither be misidentified as “begging,” nor should it be banned and criminalized uniformly as “extortion.”Footnote 4
“Radical dependence” is embraced by gender-variant people as a socioeconomic strategy to have their need for inaccessible material resources met by the public owing to the inadequacy of policies rooted in principles of distributive and reparative justice in India geared toward their collective upliftment. “Radical dependence” is demonstrated by flouting gendered norms of civility and decency, making it distinct from universal forms of dependence or unavoidable interdependence that define the relational nature of human existence.Footnote 5 It can help us understand, destigmatize, and honor multiply marginalized gender-variant people’s calls for economic justice in India.
Laurence Preston writes that Maratha rulers during the pre-British period in India gave hijras access to state revenues in the form of cash or rent-free land.Footnote 6 But when revenues eventually stopped being granted by the British, hijras’ material resources began depleting.Footnote 7 Preston notes that this could have been one reason behind hijras’ migration from the countryside to towns and cities, where many of them took to “begging” and sex work.Footnote 8
In colonized India, gender-variant people such as hijras were collectively criminalized by the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA), and public nuisance laws were deliberately used against hijra “begging.”Footnote 9 The British also “systematically objected to the hijras’ vulgar manner of acquiring alms at births and weddings,” while middle-class commentators objected to their “indecent displays of dancing and singing” at weddings.Footnote 10 North Indian newspapers declared that gender-variant “mendicants” were “extorting” money from shopkeepers, and firmly demanded the prohibition of such “nuisance.”Footnote 11 Therefore, “radical dependence” is not a recent invention. Historically oppressed gender-variant people have been demonstrating their “radical dependence” on the public since colonial times, and have also been criminalized and marginalized because of it ever since.
1. Rage and radical dependence
Gender-variant people continue to come up against structural violence, inequity, and exclusion in contemporary India.Footnote 12 As Aparna Banerjee, a community activist, notes, “The money we take, that money you didn’t allow us to earn.”Footnote 13 Structural dependence inspires legitimate anger and its seemingly “indecent” expressions that are imbued with that very rage. “Radical dependence” names subversive enactments of dependence through chhalla mangna and badhai, which contain economic demands that are redistributive and reparative in nature. Structural economic dependence is a condition imposed externally, whose “radical,” anti-normative enactments—constituting gendered performances of purported “incivility”—are intentionally practiced by many multiply marginalized gender-variant people publicly.
Nanda observes, “The act of a hijra who lifts up her skirt and exposes her mutilated genitals is considered shameless and thoroughly unfeminine.”Footnote 14 She contends that civility and decency remain enmeshed with gendered conventions of modesty that women or feminine people remain obligated to abide by, which hijras challenge and transgress by being feminine while demonstrating immodesty—as and when required. Hall notes that hijras routinely perform “verbal insolence” through insults and curses to “compensate for their own lack of social prestige by assuming linguistic control of the immediate interaction.”Footnote 15 Moreover, hijras express legitimate anger and disgust by embodying scandalizing gestures, or those that border on “vulgarity,” when they are harassed, humiliated, or refused money. “Radical dependence” deliberately evokes shame, fear, and outrage that gendered forms of “incivility” are orchestrated to evoke. It is, however, important to mention that marginalized gender-variant people also, situationally, remain non-confrontational and cordial, to the extent possible, since they fear being assaulted or murdered for resisting majoritarian public aggression and police brutality.Footnote 16
Naming “radical dependence” necessitates spelling out the casteism and community hierarchies that govern practices of chhalla mangna and badhai. Dalit trans activist Grace Banu observes that Dalit or caste-oppressed gender-variant people are frequently assigned jobs such as “begging” and sex work.Footnote 17 Living Smile Vidya contends, “I have not seen a Brahmin [people occupying the upper-most position in the caste hierarchy] trans person resort to “begging.”Footnote 18 Scholars have noted that hijras who occupy the lowest ranks within the hijra hierarchy are often made to do the work of chhalla collection at traffic signals and on public transportation, since chhalla mangna is not considered respectable.Footnote 19 Within gender-variant communities, casteism and community hierarchies also determine one’s nature of work.
Caste oppression and intra-community marginalization, therefore, can also explain the rage that constitutes public enactments of “radical dependence.” Through expressions of anger, disappointment, and disapprobation, multiply marginalized gender-variant people attempt to regain the power that is inaccessible in the larger world, and, at times, also remains unavailable within the groups that they are a part of. Marginalized gender-variant people’s dissenting public presence, along with their economic demands, accords them a form of “dangerous strangeness.” Their “dangerous strangeness,” as well as their radical enactments of dependence, remain subjected to state regulation in India today. The state conflates chhalla mangna and badhai with begging, and bans them frequently, thereby threatening “radical dependence” that makes modest forms of everyday redistribution and reparation possible.
2. “Begging” bans and structural abandonment
In September 2025, Delhi Traffic Police attempted to clear “disruptions” in the smooth flow of traffic caused by “beggars, transgender persons, vagabonds or hawkers at intersections” to ensure that commuters were not “inconvenienced.”Footnote 20 Before New Delhi, Indore, and Bhopal in 2025, “begging” bans were issued in Hyderabad in 2017, and in Pune, Nagpur, and Delhi in 2024, to provide just a few recent examples.Footnote 21
In April 2026, the Railway Protection Force (RPF), Central and Western Railways, organized a severe crackdown against “unauthorized” hawkers, “transgenders persons, and beggars” in Mumbai. A total of 4348 hawkers and 402 transgender persons were penalized, and Rs. 39.68 lakh was collected in fines by Central Railway. Western Railway registered 4163 hawkers and 579 transgender persons, amassing Rs. 20.74 lakh.Footnote 22 Mass “crackdowns” make the detention, criminalization, and penalization of marginalized gender-variant people a highly profitable enterprise. Without providing viable means of sustenance, when “begging” bans and “crackdowns” are uniformly imposed, dependence is not decimated but rather entrenched. Bans have not ceased radical enactments of dependence but have normalized structural and carceral violence against multiply marginalized gender-variant people in contemporary India.
Police have been arresting thousands of gender-variant people for years. In 2015, 13, 546 were arrested; 19,800 were arrested in 2016, while 18,526 were apprehended in 2017, and 20,566 were arrested in 2018 alone for “extorting money” from passengers.Footnote 23 The report stated that arrests were made on the basis of railway passengers’ complaints of harassment by “transgenders”: the term that is commonly used to refer to gender-variant people such as hijras and kothis. Without going into the root causes of “harassment” and public inconvenience, carceral measures in the form of mass arrests and overcriminalization offer short-term measures to pacify the public but fail to offer long-term structural solutions or eliminate socioeconomic injustices.
Equitable socioeconomic supports for caste-oppressed and/or working-class gender-variant people—such as reparations, food security initiatives, secure housing, free healthcare, and guaranteed income for disabled, neurodivergent, and elderly gender-variant people—are not treated with the same urgency by the Indian state as “begging” bans, incarceration, and penalization. Carceral measures normalize punishment and cause socioeconomic rifts to widen as the state’s capacities are devoted disproportionately to retributive justice, instead of to distributive and reparative justice. Structural inequities and injustices are likely to cause social conflict, which violent policing of gender-variant lives cannot end.
Furthermore, seemingly “protectionist” legislation in the form of The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, states that “whoever compels or entices a transgender person to indulge in the act of forced or bonded labour other than any compulsory service for public purposes imposed by the Government,” also risks criminalizing the practice by the state.Footnote 24 The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, declares that “whoever by force, threat, coercion, allurement, deception, inducement, or undue influence,” “employs, uses, or causes” any person “to engage in begging, solicitation, servitude, or any other form of forced or bonded labour” shall be punished and fined.Footnote 25 Under this Act, what constitutes “allurement” or “inducement” remains open to interpretation in ways that could disadvantage marginalized gender-variant people. Therefore, its seemingly “protectionist” language fails to offer marginalized gender-variant people security guarantees against police and public violence for conducting badhai and chhalla mangna. Hence, despite and because of these extant pieces of legislation, their vulnerability to public and police harassment is prolonged.
Therefore, despite the presence of rights-based legislative frameworks, multiply marginalized gender-variant people continue to be criminalized in the streets and remain susceptible to the state’s carceral measures. Legislated rights recognition frameworks have failed to ensure redistribution and reparation. Moreover, hijras, kothis, and marginalized gender-variant people may not be invested in projects of “protection” on statist terms that can take away their agency, cultural practices of significance such as chhalla mangna and badhai, and their everyday struggles for equity and justice through “radical dependence.” Therefore, “radical dependence” troubles rights-based frameworks.
Radical enactments of dependence do not merely reveal dependence but challenge and render visible structural abandonment, caste oppression, and systemic marginalization endured and resisted by hijras, kothis, and marginalized gender-variant people in India today. Uncaring states produce structural dependence and also make dependence’s radical or “uncivil” manifestations persist, which are also criminalized by the very state that produces them. “Radical dependence” seeks to reorient the Indian state’s perception of “begging” and “extortion” and demands the abolition of “begging” bans and crackdowns.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Jeffrey R. Wilson, Editor-in-Chief of Public Humanities, for his sound editorial feedback that made writing this article an enriching experience. I would also like to sincerely thank the two anonymous reviewers of Public Humanities for their intellectually generous and insightful suggestions that significantly helped shape this article.
Author contribution
Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing: S.C.
Conflicts of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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