Between Gods and Genders: Rethinking Deodhani as a Precolonial Site of Gender Plurality in Assam
The Criterion An International Journal in English February 28, 2026 Rimjim Boruah
The ritual of Deodhani in Assam, where performers—often assigned female at birth but not exclusively—enter trance and dance to embody a goddess, preserves precolonial understandings of gender that existed beyond a rigid man-woman binary. Colonial ethnography, moral reform movements, and postcolonial nation-building marginalized and pathologized such traditions. By comparing Deodhani with the Jogappas of Karnataka and the Aravanis of Tamil Nadu, the paper maps broader transgenderism in India. Reclaiming Deodhani as a site of gender fluidity and divine embodiment recovers suppressed histories and critiques epistemic violence in modern gender constructions, advocating for an inclusive historiography that honors ritual, spirituality, and indigenous gender plurality.