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The harsh response of Sulekha’s parents, as well as her neighbours who taunted her with the designation nacaniya [‘little dancer’], reflects a pervasive societal belief that the hijra, by virtue of her own impotence, will prevent family members within the household from marrying. This belief, coupled with a social intolerance for the integration of such figures, has led many parents to ask local hijra communities to take their child away from them.

Because the majority of hijras are raised as boys, they must learn ho w to perform a new gender identity when they join the hijra community - an identity which distances itself from masculine rep-resentations in its appropriation of feminine dress, social roles, gesture and language. Again, the rigidity of this socialization process has not been lost on South Asian scholars. Sharma, for instance, identifies not only how the hijras ‘legitimiz[e] the norma-tive order of the home’, but also how they teach new recruits their mannerisms. After outlining the hierarchical naturę of the hijras’ affected kinship systems, Sharma focuses on the ‘strictness’ of the socialization process: