Bahuchara Mataबहुचरा माता

Bahuchara Mata rides a cockerel, which no other goddess in India does, and she is the patron deity of the hijra communities — one of the oldest and best-documented gender-variant traditions anywhere in the world.

Her principal temple is at Becharaji in Mehsana district, Gujarat, and she is one of the three great goddesses of that state, with Ambaji and Ashapura. Hundreds of thousands of Gujaratis of every background worship her, most of whom are not connected with the hijra tradition at all, and the temple is a mainstream Shakta site with a very large annual fair.

But the connection that makes her known outside Gujarat is the other one. Hijra communities across north and western India — and the related kinnar and aravani communities elsewhere — hold Bahuchara Mata as their presiding goddess, take initiation in her name, invoke her at the ceremonies where they bless newborns and weddings, and travel to Becharaji.

The story behind that is her own. In the Charan account, Bahuchara was travelling with her sisters in a caravan when it was attacked; rather than be taken, she cut off her own breasts with a sword, and cursed the attacker to impotence — lifting the curse only on the condition that he worship her dressed as a woman.

That is the origin, and it is a hard one. What matters more is what it produced: a place, continuously for centuries, where people whom Indian society has treated with contempt have had a goddess, a temple, and a standing that nobody disputes.

This page is written with that in mind. India's law now recognises the third gender — the Supreme Court's NALSA judgment of 2014 — and the encyclopedia uses current terms, records the tradition accurately, and states clearly where the tradition's own practices involve documented harm.

The Charan tradition. Bahuchara is held to have been a Charan — the bardic and pastoral community of Gujarat and Rajasthan, whose women were regarded as possessing a sacred and dangerous power, and whose self-wounding in protest (tragu) is a documented historical institution. She and her sisters were travelling near the Chunval region when the caravan was attacked by Bapiya, a local chief.

The Charan response to violation was tragu — self-harm as a sanction that carried the weight of a curse — and Bahuchara performed it: she cut off her own breasts, and she cursed Bapiya. The curse was impotence; the remission was that he should worship her in women's clothing.

This narrative is old, regionally specific, and is the foundation of the temple. It is also violent, and the encyclopedia does not present self-harm as an example. The historical institution of tragu is recorded here as history, in a society where a woman of that community had very few other sanctions available.

The site. The varkhadi (Capparis) tree at Becharaji, where the caravan was stopped. The present temple was substantially built in the eighteenth century under Maratha patronage — Manajirao Gaekwad — on a much older shrine, and it is one of the major Shakti sites of Gujarat.

The cockerel. Her vahana, and genuinely unique. Explanations vary and none is authoritative: the cock as the bird that announces dawn and drives out the night; the cock as a sacrificial bird; a pre-existing local totem absorbed into the goddess. The encyclopedia records that there is no settled explanation.

The hijra connection. Hijra communities in India have a documented history running back many centuries, with a recorded institutional presence in the Mughal court and in earlier regional records, and a broader Indian literature on gender-variant people — the tritiya-prakriti, the third nature — going back to the Kama Sutra and beyond. Their adoption of Bahuchara as presiding goddess is bound up with the curse narrative and its remission, and with the temple's location on the routes of western India.

A caution about origins. Popular accounts sometimes present the hijra tradition as created by this goddess's curse. It is more accurate to say that an existing community found, in a regional goddess whose story concerned gender and the body, a divine patron who fitted — the same process by which every other community in this encyclopedia acquired its deity.

Language. Hijra is the community's own word in Hindi and Urdu and is used here as such. Kinnar is preferred by many communities in north India, aravani or thirunangai in Tamil Nadu, jogappa in Karnataka and Maharashtra. The English slurs formerly used in colonial and Indian official records are not used on this page.

Seated on a cockerel, which is the first and last identification. No other Indian deity has this mount.

Four arms in the standard image, holding a sword, a trident, a book or an abhaya gesture, and sometimes a vessel. Red or saffron drapery; a crown.

Three forms are distinguished in Gujarati worship, and the distinction is doctrinal rather than decorative: Bala (the girl), Tarun (the young woman) and Vriddha (the old woman). A goddess understood across a whole life rather than at one age is unusual, and worth noticing.

At Becharaji. The principal image, the varkhadi tree within the complex, and the yantra form — the temple's central object of worship is in part aniconic, which matters: much of what is venerated there is a diagram and a tree, not a statue.

In hijra devotional practice. Printed images, small brass icons carried by gharanas, and the cockerel as an emblem.

Distinguishing her. The cockerel settles it. Ambaji — the other great Gujarati goddess, at Ambaji in Banaskantha — is worshipped as a yantra with a lion; Ashapura at Mata no Madh in Kutch is another. The three are distinct and Gujaratis do not confuse them.

Bahuchara Mata / Bahuchar Maa / Becharaji Mata. The Gujarati names; Becharaji is also the town.

Bala, Tarun, Vriddha. The girl, the young woman and the old woman — three ages of the same goddess, distinguished in the liturgy.

Bahuchara as kuldevi. She is the family goddess of a very large number of Gujarati families across every community, which is the quiet majority of her worship.

The goddess of the hijra communities. The identity she is known for outside Gujarat.

Ambaji and Ashapura. The other two great goddesses of Gujarat; distinct deities, often named together.

Yellamma / Renuka at Saundatti, in Karnataka and Maharashtra, is the presiding goddess of the jogappa — gender-variant devotees in the Deccan — and is the nearest parallel. The Renuka page carries Saundatti, including the devadasi system there, which is a different matter and involves documented exploitation of women and girls.

Not Bahucharaji the modern town administration, and not the several institutions named after her.

The caravan. Bahuchara and her sisters, travelling through Chunval, attacked by Bapiya. The Charan sanction was tragu, self-wounding that carried the force of a curse, and she used it: the sword on herself, and the curse on him.

The curse and its condition. Bapiya was cursed with impotence. When he sought relief, the condition given was that he should worship the goddess dressed as a woman — and it is this, in the tradition's own telling, that establishes her relationship with those who worship her in that way.

The encyclopedia states the story as the tradition states it, and adds two things a reader should have. First, the narrative frames gender variance as originating in a curse, which is the tradition's own framing and is not this encyclopedia's account of gender. Second, the communities who hold her as their goddess have their own readings, in which the emphasis falls on her protection and her recognition of them rather than on the punishment of a chief.

The blessing. The best-known institution attached to her is badhai — the appearance of hijras at a birth or a wedding to sing, dance and bless the household in the goddess's name, in exchange for a customary payment. It is an old institution, it is widely observed, and it is the point at which most Indians encounter the community at all.

And it is not only benign. The same institution has, in many places, become a form of demanding money with implied disruption, and both the households and the performers are caught in an arrangement that poverty and exclusion built. The honest account is that badhai is a genuine ritual office, a livelihood of last resort for people locked out of employment, and a practice in which coercion occurs — and that the shortage of alternatives is the thing actually producing the problem.

The tree. The varkhadi at Becharaji, where she was stopped, is venerated, and the temple grew around it.

Becharaji. The temple keeps a full Shakta liturgy, with Chaitra Sud Purnima and Navaratri as its largest occasions and a substantial annual fair. Most of the people there are Gujarati families for whom she is the kuldevi, coming for the first tonsure of a child, for a wedding vow, or for the Navaratri garba.

Hijra pilgrimage and initiation. Communities travel to Becharaji, take vows there, and invoke her in the ceremonies of their gharanas. The temple's association is open, acknowledged and long-standing, and this is genuinely unusual: a mainstream Hindu temple where a marginalised community has a recognised and undisputed place.

Badhai. Described above.

A matter that must be stated plainly. The hijra tradition includes a rite of emasculation — nirvan — held to be performed under the goddess's protection. Where it is chosen by an adult, it is that adult's decision. Where it is not, it is a serious crime, and the record documents cases of coercion, of minors, of unqualified operators and of deaths from the procedure. This encyclopedia describes the rite's existence as fact and does not describe how it is performed, gives no instruction of any kind, and states without qualification that surgery belongs in the hands of qualified medical practitioners and that India's law provides for gender-affirming care through them. Anyone considering this should be talking to a doctor.

Rights, as the law now stands. In NALSA v. Union of India (2014) the Supreme Court of India recognised transgender persons as a third gender, with the right to self-identify and the full protection of fundamental rights. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 and its rules provide for identity certificates, prohibit discrimination in employment, education, healthcare and housing, and criminalise abuse — and the Act has been criticised, by transgender organisations and in litigation, on several grounds including its certification requirements and its penalty provisions. Both the protection and the criticism are part of the current picture.

Begging and sex work, which a large proportion of hijra people in India depend on, are consequences of exclusion from employment, housing and family — not of the tradition, and not of the goddess.

DharmSetu's position is that Bahuchara Mata's temple is a religious site of importance to Gujarat and to India's transgender communities, that the worship there is recorded here as practice with no claim of any kind attached, and that the people who worship her are entitled to the rights the Constitution and the courts have already given them.

Bahucharaji Temple, Becharaji (Mehsana district, Gujarat) — the principal shrine, about 110 km from Ahmedabad, on the Shakti-Peeth circuit that the state promotes with Ambaji and Pavagadh. The varkhadi tree, the yantra, the three-form worship, and the Chaitra full-moon fair.

Shankhalpur, adjacent, where the older shrine stood.

Bahuchara shrines across Gujarat and Rajasthan — in Ahmedabad, in Kutch, and in the homes of families for whom she is the kuldevi, which is the largest part of her worship and the least visible.

Hijra gharana shrines in Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow, Ahmedabad and elsewhere, which are community spaces rather than public temples.

Ambaji (Banaskantha district) and Mata no Madh (Kutch) — Gujarat's other two great goddesses.

Saundatti Yellamma Temple (Belagavi district, Karnataka) — the jogappa tradition's centre, and the nearest parallel elsewhere in India. The Renuka page carries it, and carries the separate and serious matter of the devadasi system there.

Koovagam (Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu) — not hers, and the other great gathering: the annual Koothandavar festival, where thousands of thirunangai women come, and which is the largest transgender gathering in Asia. Its deity is Aravan, of the Mahabharata.

A religion with somewhere to put this. India's treatment of gender-variant people has been, for most of the last two centuries, appalling — the colonial Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 classified them as criminal by birth, and the consequences of that classification outlasted the law by generations. Against that, Bahuchara Mata's temple is a fact worth stating precisely: a mainstream Hindu shrine, with an ordinary Gujarati congregation, where a community treated as untouchable by the wider society has an ancient, acknowledged and undisputed religious standing.

That is not the same as saying Hinduism has treated these communities well. It plainly has not, and the same society that goes to Becharaji excludes them from housing and work. But the standing at the temple is real, it is old, and there is very little like it anywhere.

A goddess who is nobody's wife, and nobody's mother. She has no consort and no children. The relational grammar that organises most of this encyclopedia's goddesses — wife of, mother of, daughter of — does not touch her. She is defined entirely by an act she performed and the people who came to her because of it.

Three ages. Bala, Tarun, Vriddha — girl, young woman, old woman, all three worshipped as her. Most goddesses in India are fixed at one age. A tradition that recognises a whole life in a single deity is doing something quietly unusual.

A cockerel. Elephants, lions, tigers, bulls, peacocks, swans, buffaloes, owls, rats and crocodiles — Indian deities ride all of these. Bahuchara rides a cockerel, the bird of the village yard, the one that announces that the night is over. Whatever its origin, it is the most domestic vahana in Hinduism and it belongs to the goddess with the fiercest story.

And a caution against romanticising. It is easy, from outside, to read Becharaji as evidence that India has always been accepting. It is not, and hijra people's lives in India are marked by violence, exclusion from work, housing and family, and early death. The temple is genuine, the standing is genuine, and neither of them has been enough. What has begun to change matters is NALSA in 2014, the 2019 Act, and the slow business of enforcement — law, not legend. This page records the goddess with respect and declines to let her stand in for rights her devotees are still fighting for.