India’s first trans band: ‘Don’t hide us away – don’t keep us in a cage’
The Guardian has the story about 6 Pack Band, an Indian transgender group.
Lead singer is Komal Jagtap:
“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.”
Last spring Ashish Patil – the head of Y films, the youth arm of Bollywood production powerhouse Yash Raj Films hired a choreographer, an award-winning stylist and Bollywood singing star Sonu Nigam to launch a group with “hijras”, or male to female transgender members.
The Guardian reports:
Hijras find it impossible to get conventional jobs: begging and sex work are the two main ways to make money. When Jagtap told her friends about the auditions for 6 Pack Band, they were sceptical. “They said, ‘Nobody would make a band for hijras.’ Gradually, we realised Ashish just wanted to help us.”
It helped that official attitudes towards hijras were changing. In a landmark judgment in 2014, the Indian supreme court ruled that transgender people – “the third gender” – had equal rights under the law.
Their first song, Hum Hain Happy, a cover of the Pharrell Williams hit, was released in January. It has had nearly 1.8m views on YouTube.
YouTube has also their latest hit (with English subtitles): Sab Rab De Bande