Intimate, empowering portraits of India’s ‘third gender’ Hijra community

In 2013, when Shahria Sharmin was undertaking a project at a photography school in Bangladesh, she chose to focus her lens on garment workers in a local factory. For decades, the sector flourished in the country, exporting clothing across the globe, but textile factory workers – the majority of whom are women – have some of the world’s lowest wages.

During Sharmin’s time there, she met a worker who changed the course of her life and work. That person was part of the Hijra community – an intersex or transgender person in South Asia who lives in a guru-chela system. Their existences are ancient, with documentation of them being found in ancient Hindu texts, while also playing important court roles during the Muslim-ruled Mughal Empire era. Despite facing persecution under British colonial rule, they are nowadays legally recognised as a third gender under Indian and Bangladeshi law.

The pair began speaking, and the worker began to explain their experiences, as well as their dreams and desires. ​“They talked as if they were male, so I walked with him, and he said: ​‘If only I could be a girl like you. If someone could come and marry me and take me to his family, and if only I could have children,’” Sharmin recalls. ​“That changed my mind. I started trying to feel what they could feel, and understood that as a woman, they could feel what I feel as a woman too.”

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Prior to the meeting, her knowledge of Hijra communities was limited to brief encounters in public spaces. Their identities often mean that opportunities are limited for them in society, and despite being officially recognised, they face marginalisation. ​“Even though they are accepted they are not mainstream – the struggle is still there. They mostly earn money collecting on the street in exchange for blessings, while some of them work as sex workers,” Sharmin explains. ​“I didn’t know anything about them [Hijras] at the beginning. The worker’s name was Hasan, and I asked: ​‘What should I call you?’ And she said: ​‘Call me Heena.’”

Call Me Heena is the title of Sharmin’s new photobook, 12 years in the making, in which she explores life for the Hijra community and identities through illuminating, tender portraiture shot in black-and-white, as well as personal stories told via gut-wrenching texts and a hidden booklet. After meeting Heena, the photographer followed her new friend to India, where she embedded herself within communities and met several others.

“Most of them go to India because they get more respect there, and hormone treatments are more accessible,” she says. ​“I’d stay with them for a few months, in Delhi and Kolkata, and I’ve stayed in the brothel and been with them on the streets.”

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Having spent so many years striking up close friendships with Hijra folk, the book provides a window into their tough existences, while shining a humanising light on a group that often exists and lives on the fringes of society. ​“One person I took pictures of was taken from the street to another village. There was supposed to be one client, but eventually eight people raped her,” says Sharmin. ​“She was senseless, and she found herself in a desert. Her belief is that she got HIV from that event.”

Those tragedies appear in the book, from first-hand accounts to a photograph of a flower. ​“There’s a rail track where someone was killed under a tree, because she was a sex worker,” she explains. ​“So I took a picture there, took a flower from that tree back from the studio and took a picture of that flower, because that flower saw the total event – it saw how she was killed.”

But among the darkness, the book is ultimately a portrait of resilience. Sharmin’s Hijra friends and sitters are placed front-and-centre in the images, encouraged to express themselves and their identities fully, while the black-and-white photos strip away excess noise, focusing instead on the people.

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“If you close your eyes and think about what is called ​‘third gender’ or what is called Hijra, or even what is called queer, you see colours, makeup and dances,” Sharmin says.” So I thought maybe I should omit those colours and go deeper inside their feelings – to see in black-and-white is more emotional.”

And the project even changed how she approached her own relationships, and those of her kids’ as well. ​“When I started working on the photography and this journey, my daughters were 11 at the time and they had two friends who were boys. When they came here, they’d change their clothes and do their makeup and found that their auntie’s home was the place that they could do anything – they felt empowered here,” she continues. ​“It changed me, my daughters and their friends. So yeah, maybe I’m a living exhibition.”

Call Me Heena by Shahria Sharmin is published by dienacht.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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