For a few fleeting days each year, India’s often-shunned transgender community is welcomed and revered at a festival that is at once sacred ritual, celebration and a refuge.
At the heart of it is the Koothandavar Temple where ostracized transgender community members from across India come to honor the Hindu deity Aravan — and to enjoy a brief oasis of freedom.
Several thousand attend the annual ceremony in Koovagam, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, a tradition rooted in millennia-old Hindu texts that has gained prominence in the past few decades.
Photo: AFP
“I need a life like a bird,” said Thilothama, 34, who uses only one name, her voice steady amid the hum of drums and devotional songs. “Freedom — to do what I want, despite being transgender.”
Thilothama, who works for Thozhi, a Chennai-based charity supporting transgender people, has spent more than a decade helping others find work and counseling those navigating rejection and uncertainty.
Facing opposition from her family over her gender identity, she left home and built a life within the transgender community.
Photo: AFP
For the past 10 years she has returned to Koovagam, where a beauty pageant and singing contests are held alongside religious rituals.
“I believe the rituals here bring good things,” Thilothama said.
She recalled caring for a friend’s bedridden mother, only to be barred from the funeral rites after her death.
Photo: AFP
“That was the hardest time,” she said.
The festival culminates in two days of ceremonies as Koovagam briefly becomes a rare space of acceptance.
On the first day, priests tie a sacred thread around the necks of the transgender devotees, symbolizing their marriage to the Hindu warrior god Aravan.
The next day, as devotees cry in mourning for his death, the thread and their wrist bangles are cut.
South Asia has a long history of people born male, but who identify as female.
In India’s last census in 2011, more than 487,000 people were members of the third gender — a designation the Indian Supreme Court formally recognized in 2014, but whose members still face severe discrimination.
For Anuya, the change in how she is treated at the festival is striking.
“Here, people smile at me, speak kindly. The villagers who are participating in this festival believe that if they get blessing from transgender people, they will have prosperity in their life,” she said. “So I am getting more respect, and in this way I feel more proud of becoming transgender.”
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