Today’s Sanatan Dharma Prefers ‘Trad’ Bhisma

RESURRECTING FAITH

- Devdutt Pattanaik Mythologist, Author, Speaker

In the Mahabharata, right in the middle of the war at Kurukshetra, Bhisma said Shikhandi is a woman because he was born with a female body.

He refused to fight Shikhandi. Krishna said Shikhandi is a man because Shikhandi saw himself as one. Bhisma did not respect Shikhandi’s self-identity. Krishna did. The Trans Bill signed by the President of India aligns with the commander of the Kauravas, not Krishna. The Kauravas were more aligned to Christian Evangelists, not “woke” Krishna. Sanatan Dharma did not imagine the world in rigid boxes. It made room for ambiguity, transition, and in-between states, not as deviations but as part of the sacred order of existence.

Gods themselves embodied fluidity: Ardhanarishvara was neither solely male nor female, Narasimha neither human nor animal, Ganesha human yet elephant-headed. These forms were not anomalies. They were symbols that helped society accept complexity and cosmic mystery.

What we today call transgender identities were traditionally understood within this wider civilisational imagination.

Difference was not immediately medicalised or criminalised. That impulse came much later, particularly under colonial rule, when European frameworks of law, medicine, and morality sought to classify all bodies into fixed categories.