Gazra, the Maharani’s café that is the pride of Vadodara

When Tanvi Parmar arrived in Vadodara after completing her Class 12, she left one life behind at her family’s home in Ahmedabad – that of a woman trapped in a man’s body. The 19-year-old found work in Vadodara with Lakshya Trust, a public charitable trust founded by Prince Manvendrasinh Gohil of Rajpipla, described as the first openly gay member of India’s erstwhile royalty for the LGBTQI community.

It helped Tanvi navigate the uncertainties that confront many young transgender people who leave their homes after finding their families unable or unwilling to understand who they are. And then she heard about an unusual new café that had opened in Vadodara – Gazra.

Gazra wasn’t just another job. Tanvi found a workplace where being a transwoman was not something to hide – but it wasn’t the sole reason for her employment either. She met Radhikaraje Gaekwad, the titular Maharani of the erstwhile Baroda State, and over the next three years, Tanvi worked as a server at the café and also at its front desk.

She served customers and greeted visitors, and became part of the daily rhythm of a space that was attempting something deceptively radical: to normalise LGBTQI inclusion, make it look ordinary. Tanvi is now preparing to undergo gender-affirming surgery, funded by Gazra.

But the café has given her much more than just financial support, she says – it has changed the way her family sees her. “They had feared that after leaving home I would disappear into the marginalised world of transgender ghettos run by maasis,” she said.

Instead, Tanvi’s family learnt that she had a dignified, public-facing job, at an establishment supported by one of Vadodara’s most recognisable families. “I had kept their phone numbers blocked for a long time because the conversations were hurtful.

But as I grew in confidence at Gazra, I began to reconnect with my family, aunts, uncles,” Tanvi said. Now, it is only her brother who has still not been able to accept her. For Tanvi, the journey since leaving home has been essentially about searching for and finding dignity.

That idea of that inherent moral worth and essential human right is the lifeblood of Gazra Café, the enterprise founded by Radhikaraje as part of her wider work with the LGBTQI community. Gazra, which completed three years last week, is located in the building occupied by the 150-year-old royal women’s trust, Maharani Chimnabai Stree Udyogalay (MCSU), overlooking the Sursagar Lake in the heart of old Vadodara.

The lake was named after the College of Music, which is now called the Faculty of Performing Arts. The premises of Gazra once served as a women’s vocational classroom, and the furniture it inherited – old tailoring tables and writing desks – has been rearranged to suit the needs of the café.

The curtains, Radhikaraje said, “are from home”, part of her collection built up over years. Nothing about the décor is accidental; the nostalgia is deliberate, an attempt, in her words, to “claim a sense of pride for an identity”, both for the city of Vadodara and for the community that runs the café kitchen.

Gazra takes its name and inspiration from Gajarabai, the birth name of Maharani Chimnabai II, the reformist queen who married into the Baroda royal family in 1885, and went on to campaign against purdah and child marriage.

In 1911, the Maharani wrote the book ‘The Position of Women in Indian Life’, and later went on to become the first president of the All India Women's Conference, the oldest nationwide women’s rights and social welfare organisation in the country.