Avanti Sowani & Sanvi Gupta

Abstract: The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, introduces significant changes to the legal framework governing transgender identity, welfare, and recognition in India. While the Amendment seeks to address administrative gaps and protect individuals from coercion and exploitation, it also raises important questions about the relationship between state regulation and community-based forms of belonging.

This paper examines the implications of the Amendment through the lens of the Guru-Chela system, the traditional kinship structure of the Hijra community. Historically, the system has functioned as a source of shelter, identity, and social support for individuals excluded from their biological families. At the same time, it has faced criticism for enabling forms of economic and social exploitation. By tracing the historical evolution of the Guru-Chela system, its disruption under colonial rule, and its treatment under contemporary transgender legislation, this paper argues that the 2026 Amendment risks undermining community-based support structures while attempting to address genuine concerns regarding abuse and coercion. It ultimately contends that the challenge lies not in abolishing such institutions, but in developing a framework that distinguishes exploitation from care, and regulation from criminalisation.

Introduction

The streets of Delhi are packed with protesters’ voices demanding the repeal of the Transgender Bill 2026. The said Bill is an amendment to the 2019 Act that introduced rights and protection for Trans people, making it the first statutory law to do so.  The reasoning offered in the Bill’s Statement of Objects and Reasons is twofold: first, that the broad definition of “transgender person” under the 2019 Act is susceptible to misuse by individuals falsely claiming the identity to access welfare benefits; and second, that the existing definition is so vague that it needs clarification, otherwise rendering the operation of those provisions legally unworkable.  While it is true that the 2019 Act came with significant administrative gaps that warranted legislative attention, it seems irrational to respond by narrowing the Act’s scope rather than simply filling those gaps by retaining the existing definition while introducing a verifiable certification process, with penalties attached to fraudulent claims, could have addressed misuse without redefining who the law recognises as transgender at all. For many members of the Hijra community, identity has historically been mediated not through state-issued documents but through community structures such as the Guru-Chela system. Long before governments recognised transgender persons as legal subjects, Hijra gharanas provided kinship, shelter, economic support, and social recognition to individuals excluded from their biological families. Yet at the same time it cannot be denied that this system has become exploitative, and a variant of bonded labour. At the core of contemporary debates surrounding the Guru-Chela system is a difficult question: did it emerge primarily as a mechanism of exploitation, or as a support structure for individuals excluded from mainstream society, with exploitative practices developing only over time?

This paper makes that argument through a historical lens, examining how state regulation of transgender identity, from the 2019 Act to the 2026 Amendment, has borne upon the Guru-Chela system, the kinship structure that has organised Hijra community life for centuries. It begins by tracing the system’s origins and social significance, before turning to its criminalisation under colonial rule, its erasure through the silences of the 2019 Act, and its more direct targeting under the 2026 Amendment. It closes by arguing for reform of the Guru-Chela system’s exploitative elements rather than the abolition that the 2026 Amendment effectively pursues.

Evolution and Significance

One of the earliest explicit mentions of a third gender in Indian texts appears in the Kamasutra, an ancient Sanskrit text. The author, Vatsyayana, describes individuals who dress and act as women and engage in oral sex with men, often as prostitutes, and other third-nature people who appear as men, work as masseurs, and similarly provide men with sexual services. The position of gender-diverse individuals significantly transformed during the medieval period. Under the Mughal Empire, eunuchs frequently occupied positions of trust and authority within royal courts, serving in administrative and protective roles.  Although the boundaries between eunuchs and hijras weren’t very rigid, hijras remained largely outside formal political institutions and instead relied on community-based structures for social and economic survival. This dependence on collective organization gradually strengthened kinship networks within hijra communities, laying the foundation for institutions such as the Guru-Chela system, through which knowledge, livelihood opportunities, cultural traditions, and social support were transmitted across generations. The Guru-Chela relationship functions not merely as a mentorship arrangement but as the primary unit of social organization within many Hijra communities. Through this system, individuals who have been rejected by their biological families are incorporated into a chosen kinship network that provides emotional support, housing, economic security, and a sense of belonging. The Guru is responsible for introducing the Chela to community customs, rituals, and livelihood practices, while also mediating disputes and offering protection from external hostility. Relationships within the community are structured along familial lines, with fellow disciples regarded as sisters, senior members as maasis, and the Guru’s Guru often referred to as a naani (Kinship and social organization – Hijra). This kinship structure creates a social world that replicates many of the functions traditionally performed by the family unit.  The gurus, or so to say the whole community, work together for their economic survival. The Guru-Chela system also contains a distinct economic hierarchy. Lower-ranking members, particularly nati-chelas, are frequently required to engage in begging, an activity viewed as carrying relatively low status within the community. Senior members retain considerable authority over the allocation of such work and may delegate these responsibilities to junior members. Scholars have read this internal stratification through the lens of caste, describing the nayak-guru-chela-nati-chela structure as a form of graded inequality in which authority and bargaining power over one’s own livelihood increase with rank, while stigmatised labour is pushed downward onto those with the least standing.Rising in rank within the hijra hierarchy entitles those higher up to more bargaining power in choosing their livelihoods, so that the workload decreases the higher one rises (Understanding Caste and Kinship within Hijras). Additionally, some chelas engage in sex work to supplement their income. Critics argue that these arrangements can create relationships of economic dependence, while defenders contend that they arise from the broader exclusion of Hijras from mainstream employment opportunities.  Many elder Hijras defend the system as the only reason the community survived centuries of persecution. As a result, the Guru-Chela system came to occupy a central position within Hijra society, functioning simultaneously as a family structure, a social institution, an economic network, and a source of community identity. It’s historical significance cannot be understood without appreciating the role it played in enabling the survival and continuity of the Hijra community over centuries.

The Repression of the Guru-Chela System as a result of Colonial Continuation

Over 150 years ago, the hijra community began posing a threat to the British, as they failed to fit into the framework of family structures accustomed to by the British. The Hijras were not born into their own community; they were recruited into it. The guru-chela system disregarded the notion of natality, which at the time, the Britishers followed as the Bible.  Children disregarded by their biological families in accordance to non-conformity to gender presuppositions were taken in by Gurus, inducted into the Community, and found their place in this parallel line of kinship. The Guru-Chela system is how the Hijra community remained alive, through induction and found family, not through biology. 

This system thus posed itself as a challenge to the colonizers: they could not control or classify a community which derived its foundation from family structures that existed outside the state’s framework. The community, within its own governance, internal inheritance of property and non-conformance with conventional structures, existed genuinely independent of the state. The British Colonial system of governance was modelled around the sentiment that everyone was required to be legible to the State, which the Hijras were not. The Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 formalised this assault in explicit statutory terms. Section 24 required the police to maintain a register of the names, residences, and property of every “eunuch” reasonably suspected of sodomy, kidnapping, castration, or offences under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, so that even a hijra’s property had to be individually declared to and recorded by the state, cutting against the gharana’s own tradition of collective and inherited property. Section 26 made it a criminal offence, punishable with up to two years’ imprisonment, for any registered eunuch to appear in public “dressed or ornamented like a woman” or to dance, sing, or play music in public or for hire, striking directly at badhai and the community’s traditional livelihoods. Section 27 went furthest of all, criminalising the very act of induction on which the guru-chela lineage depended: any registered eunuch found keeping in their charge, or in the house in which they resided, any boy who had not completed sixteen years of age was liable to the same two years’ imprisonment.

The British intent behind this legislation was to systematically induce the complete biological and cultural extinction of the Hijras. By renouncing their rights to induction, privacy, self-determination, means of livelihood and generational continuance, the British governance began its assault against the community by attacking the one thing that kept it alive- the Guru- Chela System. Historically, ample literature from multiple disciplines, such as the Sufist tradition, Jainism, etc, prove that pre-colonial India did not have much issues with gender fluidity. It was during the colonial era that certain rules and regulations, such as the IPC, were brought in to gain control over this alleged different society.

Post-independence, this issue resurfaced through the NALSA Interruption that took place in 2014, when the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country, named the colonial logic as unconstitutional. NALSA v. Union of India, (2014) 5 SCC 438, a case meant to alter the oppressive legislative framework against the Transgender Community, however, simply served as a blip in the timeline, because what came after, in 2019 and 2026, was simply a slow reversal of that interruption. 

In December 2017, in Warangal, it was decided that the women who showed up for Bhavita’s body, who had taken her in, named her; were total strangers. Grief, like inheritance, like recognition, like the right to stand at a grave, moves only through blood. The guru-chela system has built families for centuries out of precisely those whom blood abandoned. The law has spent nearly as long refusing to see them. In 2019, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2019 was passed, without fixing this. 

The 2019 legislation, which was publicized as a foundational document protecting transgender rights in India, simply reinforced the colonial logic, without necessarily using the explicit language found in the CTA. The family definition, the begging provision and the certificate system under the 2019 Act, simply reworded the colonial provisions. Instead of outright calling Hijras criminals, the Act stated, in simpler terms, that Hijras don’t have families and that their occupations might be crimes. It left the community legally invisible and economically precarious, exactly where the CTA left them, just without the explicit brutality. The 2026 Act drops the politeness. It uses the same mechanisms as 1871 but labels them as modern welfare measures: anti-trafficking, child protection. India’s 2026 Act is therefore a deliberate legislative decision to restore colonial-era control over this community.

The 2019 Act and the Guru-Chela System: Erasure Through Silence

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 has made no assault on the institution of guru-chela; its omission amounts to the same thing that the prohibition does.

The key is, the definition of the family. Section 12 of the Act grants a transgender individual the “right of residence within the parents and immediate family”. Family is understood only biologically, with no mention of the gharana: the house which has, for most hijras, constituted their home and which gave them food, names, and protection after abandonment by their natal families. Neither the chela can inherit from the guru nor the guru authorizes medical care for the chela if she becomes ill or is hospitalized.

The 2019 Act, passed two years after the Bhavita case, does not amend anything about this situation. The family, in the Act, is a patriarchal, heterosexual, and casteist institution, ignoring the reality of chosen families and relationships outside biology.

Inheritance is no less silent. The non-discrimination clause of Section 3 provides an extensive list of property rights, the right to live in, acquire, sell, rent or occupy – without ever using the term “inheritance.” An examination of the legislative history makes it clear that such omission was intentional, sustained in all stages of the legislative process regardless of repeated pleas for its inclusion. The centuries-long tradition of succession within the gharana, where the guru passes down the family property and position to his chelas, has remained legally indefinable. The implicit criminalization comes in Section 18 of the law, which vaguely forbids “compelling or enticing” a transgender person into “forced or bonded labor.” The lack of a definition for terms such as “forced or bonded labor,” “compulsion,” and “enticement” renders the gurus legally vulnerable each time their chelas indulge in badhai, beg, or sell their bodies in any manner. In this regard, the Act mirrors the Criminal Tribes Act in the way the latter prevented registered hijras from performing publicly.

The 2019 Act’s method is silence rather than statute. But the colonial logic it reproduces is identical: the community is tolerated when invisible, and exposed whenever it becomes legible to the state.

The 2026 Amendment Act

According to the Statement of Objects and Reasons given by the Government along with the act, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 was introduced to address administrative ambiguities in the 2019 Act and to tackle documented instances of coercion, forced induction, and exploitation within sections of the transgender community. While these objectives are legitimate, the manner in which the Act pursues them has significant implications for the Guru-Chela system. In attempting to address genuine concerns regarding abuse and bonded labour, the Amendment simultaneously raises concerns regarding community autonomy, chosen families, and the continued viability of traditional support structures.

To it’s credit, the Amendment seeks to address problems that have long been associated with certain Guru-Chela relationships. Over time, critics have pointed to instances of economic exploitation, excessive control by Gurus, and restrictions on the bodily autonomy of Chelas. In some cases, Chelas are expected to surrender a substantial portion of their earnings, while leaving a Guru may result in the loss of community standing, livelihood opportunities, or access to traditional territories. Academic research has further documented instances of verbal, psychological, physical, financial, and sexual abuse arising from the concentration of authority in the hands of Gurus. A 2025 study conducted across three districts of Odisha found that many transgender women experienced conditions resembling bonded labour within these hierarchical arrangements. From this perspective, the introduction of stronger penal provisions targeting forced labour, coercion, and exploitation fills an important gap left by the 2019 Act.

However, the Act’s approach raises serious concerns. One of the most significant issues lies in its use of vague terms such as “allurement,” “ inducement,” and “undue influence” in relation to compelling a person to assume or present a transgender identity. These expressions remain undefined. As a result, the Act struggles to distinguish between coercive recruitment and voluntary community support. In a social reality where many transgender persons continue to face rejection from their biological families, the Guru-Chela system often functions as the first source of shelter, protection, and belonging. A Guru who provides housing, food, clothing, or emotional support to a homeless transgender adolescent could potentially fall within the broad scope of these provisions. Consequently, the same legal framework intended to target traffickers and exploitative actors may also cast suspicion upon community elders performing welfare functions.

Section 18 of the Amendment Act is inherently flawed. It fails to acknowledge a difference between a true guru, one who provides shelter, employment and emotional support to young members of the community, from a trafficker who, by their own volition, coerces people into performance of an identity with the goal of financial gain. The operative words in the section are largely vague and result in the encompassing of the entire continuum of the Guru-chela induction with no distinction between its protective and exploitative poles. 

The Amendment also reflects a broader shift from community recognition to bureaucratic recognition. The 2019 Act recognised the right to self-perceived gender identity, a principle rooted in the Supreme Court’s decision in NALSA v. Union of India. The 2026 Amendment removes this statutory recognition and introduces a Medical Board into the certification process, thereby placing identity determination in the hands of medical and administrative authorities rather than the individual concerned. For communities such as the Hijras, where identity has historically been mediated through kinship structures, Gharanas, and Guru-Chela relationships, this represents a fundamental shift in authority from community validation to state validation.

The Act further reflects a preference for biological family structures while remaining largely silent on chosen families. The Guru-Chela system emerged precisely because many transgender persons were denied acceptance within their birth homes. Although legal protection against discrimination and eviction by family members is undoubtedly important, the legislation does not adequately address situations where harassment, emotional abuse, or coercive control continue within the family environment. Nor does it formally recognise community-based kinship structures as legitimate sites of care and support. The result is a framework that places considerable faith in biological families without providing equivalent recognition to the chosen families upon which many transgender persons continue to depend.

The 2026 Amendment therefore presents a complex picture. On the one hand, it responds to genuine concerns regarding forced labour, trafficking, abuse, and exploitation within sections of the Guru-Chela system. On the other, its broad drafting risks conflating coercion with community belonging and regulation with criminalisation. The challenge, therefore, is not whether exploitation within the Guru-Chela system should be addressed, but whether the law can do so without undermining a social institution that has historically functioned as a source of shelter, welfare, identity, and survival for generations of Hijras.

Reform, Not Abolition

In order to view the guru chela system comprehensively, one must look at it through a lens of complete honesty, while acknowledging what, historically, it has provided without ignoring what today, in its uncodified form, it permits. 

The most significant argument standing against the abolition of the guru chela system is  the welfare support that the state has never been able to replace. The guru chela system, through its mechanisms and frameworks, fills the documented welfare gap that exists between provisions of state and non-state institutions. For a community that is systemically excluded from natal families, Guru-chela frameworks provide moral, financial, community, as well as employment and housing support to members of the community, already struggling to find their place in society. This system has performed, for centuries, without any public funding, the exact functions that the state owed to its most vulnerable citizens. Abolishing the system, which this act clearly moves towards, makes a vacuum in this expanse of social functioning by taking away these imperative support mechanisms and offering nothing in return. 

Another point of contention arises between new and older generations of community members.. Older generations, having built their entire lives through the guru chela structure, view it as the steadfast mechanism through which the entire community has survived social exclusion, state indifference, colonial criminalization, across centuries. To them, the Guru- Chela system is the very thread that binds the community together- through thick and thin. On the contrary, younger and more formally educated members have increasingly begun seeing the system differently. The generational shift is apparent. Newer generations appreciate notions of individuality and have more of a desire to participate in the community on their own terms, in order to preserve individual autonomy. Even younger hijras, who acknowledge the limitations and shortcomings of the community, choose to remain a part of it, due to lack of formal alternative sources of sustainable remuneration. This forms the base of the reform argument. The hold of the system over its own members is not merely cultural, but also economic. The answer to ridding the economic hold is not via criminalization. It is through implementation of reservation, creation of feasible employment opportunities, access to these opportunities, social entrepreneurship, that the monopoly of the gharanas can be reduced, without diminishing their roles as cultural institutions.

The absence of legal recognition does not necessarily preserve autonomy. It can actually increase vulnerability to state intervention. Recognition can therefore be used to strengthen community self-governance rather than replace it.The registration of gharanas as legal entities,  similar to cooperatives or registered societies, would unlock an avenue of rights and procedures for them, including facilitating the opening of bank accounts, entering into contracts, appearing in courts, purchase and sale of property, etc.  The concern, however, is that formal registration may itself become a means of extending state power over gharānās whose identities and structures have historically remained fluid and internally governed. This concern can be addressed by distinguishing legal personality from regulatory control. Registration need not require the State to determine who qualifies as a hijra, what constitutes a gharānā, or how its internal relationships must be organised. Its purpose should be limited to conferring juridical capacity upon a community that chooses to register, allowing it to hold property, operate bank accounts, enter contracts and represent itself in legal proceedings. A carefully designed registration framework could therefore provide legal visibility without demanding assimilation into a state-defined model of identity. Registration should be voluntary and should impose only those requirements necessary for transparency and accountability, rather than conditions concerning gender identity, religious practice, membership, or the internal guru-chela structure.  

Conclusion

The Guru-Chela system cannot be reduced to either tradition or exploitation. It has historically provided kinship, shelter, livelihood, identity, and community to those excluded from biological families, while also enabling genuine forms of economic and personal exploitation. The answer, therefore, should not be abolition, but reform. The State must address coercion and exploitation without criminalising voluntary community structures or undermining chosen families. What the hijra community is asking for is not rescue; it is recognition; the legal standing to reform their community on their own terms, without the state’s presumptive view of every guru as a trafficker and every community induction as a crime.

Avanti Sowani is a Second-Year student pursuing her B.A. L.L.B. (Hons.) at Symbiosis Law School, Pune. She has a keen interest in legal research and is an active participant in competitive debating. Beyond academics, she is passionate about writing, critical thinking, and exploring diverse perspectives through meaningful dialogue. She is always eager to learn, challenge ideas, and broaden her understanding through new experiences and conversations.

Sanvi Gupta is a second-year B.A. LL.B. student at Symbiosis Law School, Pune. Her areas of academic interest include constitutional law, corporate and commercial law, and contemporary legal developments. She is keenly interested in legal research and seeks to examine evolving legal issues through a critical and interdisciplinary approach. Her academic work reflects an interest in understanding the relationship between law, policy, and emerging societal concerns.