It's early afternoon in a dilapidated two-bedroom house in the old town of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Bengali music crackles out of an old speaker as members of the household practise their dance moves in the narrow street.

Others in the group laugh noisily as they exchange gossip, the sounds and smells of cooking wafting through the air.

Shanta meticulously applies chalk-white foundation to her cheeks and touches up the black eyeliner which frames her dark eyes.

It’s a scene of everyday domesticity but Shanta and her friends are not ordinary young women – they are Hijra, born as male but now belonging to a third gender.

There are members of this group across South Asia but in Bangladesh alone there are thought to be between two and three million.

They are the oldest transgender community in the world, with records of their existence dating back to the two ancient Hindu texts of the Kama Sutra and Mahabharata, published in around 400BC.