By – Siddarth Poola
Abstract
Gender diversity in Karnataka did not arrive with LGBTQ+ Twitter. What arrived with Twitter was a string of debates about it. Karnataka’s history of gender variance runs through temple traditions, devotional communities, and folk practices that predate the colonial state by several centuries. This article.traces how throughout history, from pre-colonial religious spaces through the Jogappa community and into present-day legal battles over who gets to define gender in the first place. The argument focuses on how contemporary debates are not about introducing new identities. They are about deciding whose history is considered real enough to deserve legal protection.
Introduction
Almost every week, someone discovers that gender diversity exists in India and responds as though they were asked to take over for Atlas. A Western import, we are told, a modern confusion if you will. The popular misconception is that it is something that happened after Netflix arrived and corrupted the youth.
The region’s history of gender variance is not obscure or buried. It runs through temple sculpture, through the Bhakti movement, through communities like the Jogappas who have organised their lives around devotion to Yellamma for longer than most of the state’s current institutions have existed. The insistence that gender diversity is somehow foreign to Indian culture requires a fairly aggressive relationship with the historical record. It is not impossible to maintain that position. It is just effortful, and requires looking away from a lot of walls.
The consequences of this selective memory are practical rather than merely academic. When gender-diverse communities get framed as historically anomalous, their demands for legal recognition become demands for novelty rather than restoration. Asking for something new is a much weaker argument politically than “give us back what was taken.” Karnataka’s history supports the second argument quite comfortably, even if public discourse rarely lets it make the case.
Flexibility of Sacred Bodies
Pre-colonial South India did not have a gender studies department, nor did it require one. The understanding that gender was complicated was already built into the architecture.
Temple sculptures across the state depict androgynous figures, same-sex intimacy, and bodies moving between masculine and feminine forms, as part of ordinary religious cosmology. These were not hidden in corners. They were on the walls, in stone, at the entrance. Historical studies of religious representation in South India show gender as something expressed through devotion and spiritual relationship rather than fixed biology. Bhakti saints adopted feminine voices while addressing the divine. Gods took multiple gendered forms depending on context. Ambiguity was not a problem that required resolution. It was a recognised mode of being with its own cultural logic.
None of this means pre-colonial Karnataka was a caste-free, egalitarian utopia. That particular fantasy belongs to a different kind of historical revisionism, and it is not the argument being made here. Gender variance existed within structures of caste hierarchy and patriarchal organisation, not outside them. The point is that it existed, visibly, in sacred spaces the wider community considered legitimate. That is precisely what colonial administration later worked very hard to dismantle, reclassify, and file away.
The Jogappas: Devotion as Identity
The Jogappa community offers a clear illustration of how gender diversity in Karnataka has functioned as something beyond individual identity. Jogappas are devotees of the goddess Yellamma, and their community has historically occupied roles as ritual performers, healers, singers, and spiritual mediators between communities and the divine. What makes Jogappa identity significant for this discussion is how stubbornly it resists translation into contemporary legal categories. Ethnographic research has argued that understanding Jogappa lives primarily through modern Western transgender frameworks risks flattening a complex relationship among spirituality, kinship, caste, labour, and community recognition into something the modern state can tick a box next to. This is not an argument against solidarity or shared legal protections. It is an argument that administrative categories make poor historians, and even poorer descriptions of actual human lives. Many Jogappas today engage with transgender frameworks and activist networks while their traditions continue to carry meanings that those frameworks only partially capture.
Caste permeates through all sections of society; that remains true here. Many Jogappa community members come from Dalit and otherwise marginalised backgrounds, meaning caste exclusion and gender marginalisation have historically reinforced each other rather than taking turns politely. You cannot look at gender in Karnataka without also looking at caste. Jogappa communities have survived colonial regulation, postcolonial welfare categorisation that treated them primarily as a problem to be managed, and persistent social stigma. Their existence is itself a form of archive. The state’s own records mostly describe them as an administrative inconvenience.
The Colonial Binary and Its Very Successful Afterlife
British colonial administration was not subtle. Victorian moral frameworks treated the male-female binary as both natural and obviously correct, which made gender-diverse communities a classification problem first and a human question at no point. The Criminal Tribes Act 1871 and colonial legislation targeting so-called “eunuchs” attempted to surveil and control communities that had previously occupied socially recognised roles, however complicated and unequal those roles may have been. The colonial state was not interested in complication. It was interested in ledgers.
The colonial state’s greatest long-term achievement was convincing later generations that its own categories were natural. That the binary was always there. That people who fell outside it were always considered deviant. This is historically false, but it has proven remarkably durable as a political claim.
Independent India inherited much of this apparatus without thoroughly examining where it came from. Legal debates about transgender recognition have moved between progress and restriction with considerable irregularity. Karnataka’s recent proposed amendments on transgender rights drew serious criticism from activists and community organisations who argued that several provisions expanded bureaucratic oversight while quietly hollowing out protections for self-identification. Community organisations pointed out that the legislation risked rolling back earlier legal gains while creating new documentation barriers for people who had already cleared several previous sets of documentation barriers.
The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 is a great illustration of this problem. The NALSA judgment in 2014 had recognised self-identification as the basis for gender recognition, which was a genuine advance. The 2019 Act then introduced a District Magistrate certification process and, in its original draft, a screening committee to verify whether someone’s gender identity was sufficiently convincing to deserve official acknowledgment. This is the legal framework’s recurring ploy: extend recognition with one hand, attach conditions with the other, and call the whole arrangement progress while furthering documentation and authoritarianism.
The critique here is not merely that bureaucracy is slow or frustrating. It is that bureaucratic categories are designed to produce neat, countable units, and lives are not neat, countable units. Communities whose identities emerge through religious vocation, kinship networks, or devotional practice do not map cleanly onto boxes that were designed by people who were mostly trying to solve a paperwork problem.
Statistical methods used to estimate transgender populations have faced widespread criticism for significant underreporting, partly because many individuals avoid official registration and because existing categories fail to capture how communities actually understand themselves. The undercounting feeds directly into policy, producing welfare and healthcare allocations calibrated to a smaller, fictionalised population. And even where formal legal progress has occurred, structural inequality persists across other legal systems entirely. Tax law, for instance, continues to produce unequal financial outcomes for queer couples and gender-diverse households by treating the heterosexual nuclear family as the obvious default unit. A court judgment recognising gender identity does not automatically reform tax codes written in a different decade by people who were not thinking about this at all.
Conclusion
Karnataka’s historical record does not support the claim that gender diversity is a recent import or a foreign confusion. It supports something much closer to the opposite. Gender was understood with considerably more complexity here before the colonial state arrived with its ledgers and its strong opinions, and the process of overturning that simplification is still incomplete, still contested, and still being made deliberately difficult by institutions that inherited colonial categories without inheriting any particular interest in questioning them.
The Jogappas are not a recent invention. Temple sculptures did not appear because of Western influence. The binary is not a fact of nature. It is a colonial administrative tool that outlived its inventors and is still, very diligently, doing their work for them.
About the Author:
Siddarth Poola is an undergraduate student doing law in Jindal Global Law School, with a deep interest in Water Sports and a Compunctious regard for Sports Law.
Image Source : https://www.deccanherald.com/india/karnataka/bengaluru/walk-with-pride-for-lgbtqia-rights-3290242#google_vignette