The Sakhī: An Ascetic Alternative for “Transgender” Women

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Mathieu Boisvert for a presentation of his research on the sakhī, a community rooted in a Hindu devotional tradition in which spirituality, asceticism, and gender identity intersect. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork, he will offer original insights into forms of gender fluidity and religious practices in Northern India.

"Sixteenth-century Hinduism underwent a major transformation through the development of a very distinctive devotional tradition (rasik sampradāya), in which a man cultivates the feeling of being a woman in order to form either a very close friendship (sakhī bhāva) with a female deity —homosociality requires that the two (adult) friends be of the same sex—or to form an erotic bond with a male deity—as heteronormativity dictates. Although most texts in this tradition explicitly state that this state is a bhāva—that is, an emotion or feeling—some ascetics of the 16th and 17th centuries actually lived (by dressing and behaving) as women. This presentation is part of a broader research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and titled “Multiple Identities, Sexualities, and Spiritualities: The Sakhī Community and Imaginaries in India,” a project in which F. Pasche Guignard (ULaval) and D. Dimitrova (UMontréal) are also collaborating. The objectives of this article are to present the results of 21 months of fieldwork (spanning a five-year period) in northern India, devoted to “research on contemporary sakhīs” in various strategic locations such as Vrindavan, Barsane, Ayodhya, Chitrakoot, Bhopal, and during the most recent Kumbh Mela.  Five sakhī were interviewed at length, and I accompanied two of them to the Kumbh Melā in Allahabad in 2025. Based on our discussions and observations, we were able to identify distinctive characteristics of the “sakhī community” and conclude that one of these characteristics is fluidity, both in terms of gender and purity status."

Mathieu Boisvert is a full professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal and the founding director of the Center for Studies and Research on India, South Asia, and Its Diaspora. He holds a Ph.D. (McGill) in South Asian philology (Sanskrit, Pali) and is primarily interested in the intersection of religion with the political and social spheres in contemporary India. He has also conducted extensive field research in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, and Bhutan, focusing on contemporary religious practices such as pilgrimage and asceticism, while also working with various marginalized communities. Since 2012, he has been studying Indian hijra (“transgender”) communities. In 2018, he published *Les Hijras: A Socio-Religious Portrait of a South Asian Transgender Community*.