Komal Jagtap used to work as a wedding singer in India. For about 5,000 rupees (£52), she would dance and sing when people got married or wanted to celebrate a birth. But she had big dreams. She had dabbled in film and TV, before a friend on a movie set told her about auditions for a new pop group.

Now Jagtap is a member of 6 Pack Band, put together last spring and already causing a stir across the country. It’s not an unusual story: bands are manufactured on talent shows all the time. What is unusual about the story of Jagtap and her five bandmates – Bhavika Patil, Fida Khan, Chandrika Suvarnakar, Asha Jagtap and Ravina Jagtap – is that they are all transgender. What they are doing is revolutionary in a way One Direction or Little Mix could never be.
“From the outside, I was male,” says Jagtap, remembering when she was Bhavesh, the son of traditional parents. “Inside, I felt like a girl. The way I talked and walked, everyone could see I was different. I used to feel this isn’t my family. I don’t belong here.”

People would taunt my parents saying: ‘A hijra was borin in your house’
India has an estimated 1.9 million transgender people. Trans women in the country are known as hijras, and are stigmatised and alienated. As Jagtap’s parents struggled with her gender identity, they too faced rejection. “People would taunt my parents saying, ‘A hijra was born in your house.’ Because they had to face so much trouble, they stopped talking to me.”