JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, INDIA VOL. 21, 2022 marriage were governed by customs led by membership in religious communities, changing realities altered the focus of such questions and the structures they addressed. Since the 1990s, individuals and communities from even further margins became visible and began making efforts towards seeking rights and justice in the personal and private realm. Incidents of lesbian marriages and gay partnerships, and the lives of hijra and transgender communities emerged within the public discourse. In 1997, feminists felt the need, even as newer voices began expressing notions of the family and intimate partnerships that went beyond the hetero-normative, to imagine and discuss homo-relational partnerships and contracts, with rights to matrimonial home, property acquired at the time of forming the contract, responsibility for the well-being of the other partner as well as guardianship of children jointly adopted. These initial efforts raised questions as to whether these relationships were going to resemble and be institutionalised like structures of marriage and family, especially when non-heteronormative relationships did not even have legal recognition (Fernandez, 1999). Nevertheless, a discussion in the public realm had ensued about alternative forms of partnerships and familial arrangements. In the last couple of decades, the emergence of queer movements and struggle for transgender rights have furthered the debate around gender justice, rights in intimate relationships, new ways of imagining families and living arrangements. In the interregnum, the women’s movement too has changed considerably. Diverse feminist articulations and from diverse social locations have lent a complexity and richness to the debate. The heteropatriarchal structure of the family and the ideologies that support it have been called into question. The notions of family have to move beyond this to incorporate living arrangements outside of marriage, in diverse forms of partnerships and contracts, and arrangements in community formations (FAOW, 2017). In an incident of a fire in 2011 in East Delhi that killed nearly 14 members of the hijra community, the hospital staff settled on the guru-chela tradition among the hijras to draw up a list of next of kin as the Chief Minister announced Rs 2 lakh compensation to next of kin of each hijra killed (Chatterjee, 2011). Such instances are strong reminders of how we need to keep up with lived and living realities of women, transgender persons, queer individuals and learn from their lives to envision gender justice. These lived realities include same sex partnerships, communal living arrangements among 94