Silent histories, loud exclusions: Hindu inheritance and transgender personhood from Dharmaśāstras to India’s Trans Rights Act

This article examines how the silence on inheritance rights in India’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019 operates not as legislative oversight but as a regulatory technique that functions alongside Hindu legal traditions to reproduce structural exclusion. Drawing on Dharmaśāstric texts, colonial-era case law, and post-Independence legislation, this article offers a new analysis of how gender non-normative persons have historically been denied inheritance through normative configurations of the family rooted in reproductive cis-heteronormativity. Through a queer-theoretical and philological analysis of Sanskrit terms such as klība, the article challenges translations that obscure how śāstric law encoded exclusions. It also presents the first close reading of parliamentary debates and committee records to show how contemporary legislative silences were deliberately sustained. Rather than offering a reformist proposal, the article foregrounds how legal recognition is governed by what law chooses not to say and how such silences naturalize normative family forms while delegitimizing others.