Silent histories, loud exclusions: Hindu inheritance and transgender personhood from Dharmaśāstras to India’s Trans Rights Act

Lalli, Jaideep Singh ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4403-1039 (2025) Silent histories, loud exclusions: Hindu inheritance and transgender personhood from Dharmaśāstras to India’s Trans Rights Act. Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 14 (2). pp. 298-324. ISSN 2047-0770

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Abstract

This article examines how the silence on inheritance rights in India’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 operates not as legislative oversight but as a regulatory technique that functions alongside Hindu legal traditions to reproduce structural exclusion. Drawing on Dharmaśāstric texts, colonial-era case law, and post-Independence legislation, this article offers a new analysis of how gender non-normative persons have historically been denied inheritance through normative configurations of the family rooted in reproductive cis-heteronormativity. Through a queer-theoretical and philological analysis of Sanskrit terms such as klība, the article challenges translations that obscure how śāstric law encoded exclusions. It also presents the first close reading of parliamentary debates and committee records to show how contemporary legislative silences were deliberately sustained. Rather than offering a reformist proposal, the article foregrounds how legal recognition is governed by what law chooses not to say and how such silences naturalize normative family forms while delegitimizing others.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: Social Sciences and humanities > Arts and Humanities > Religious studies
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Gender Studies
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Law and Legal Studies
Vol/Issue no. published date: June 2025
Depositing User: Mr. Syed Anas Ali
Date Deposited: 23 Jun 2026 06:45
Last Modified: 23 Jun 2026 06:45
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/ojlr%2Frwaf013
URI: https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/11748

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