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

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 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. (Express photo by Bhupendra Rana)

Not just employment, a gift of dignity

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.

Maharani Radhikaraje. (Express photo by Bhupendra Rana)

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.

Gazra completed three years last week. (Express photo by Bhupendra Rana)

Inspired by a Maharani who blazed new trails

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.

Radhikaraje reached for Gajarabai’s name deliberately, tying the café to a lineage of women in her family who used their position to push against convention rather than sitting comfortably within it. A gajra – fresh flowers of many shapes and colours threaded into a garland that women wear in hair buns and braids – is an apt reference for a café built to hold together a rainbow community, she said.

Gazra completed three years last week. (Express photo by Bhupendra Rana)

The cafe, its food, the community that runs it

It took five years for the idea of Gazra to evolve into a working café. “I didn’t want to get into it until I was very sure, because I knew that it was a social experiment,” Radhikaraje said.

The stakes were high – “The failure of a project would not only reflect on the Udyogalay or me personally, it would be a lost opportunity for the community as a whole,” she said.

A pop-up to test the waters was followed by two years of “soft skills, grooming, hospitality training” for staff. She heard the rising murmurs questioning the choice she had made, but Radhikaraje stayed the course.

She eventually rewrote the charter of the trust, which for a century and a half had been reserved for women, to admit “anyone: men, women, adults, disabled”.

Gazra’s menu, built around “cause, community, craft, and cuisine”, presents its own quiet argument, elevating food for which the city’s elite probably would not stop in the street – vada pav, bhakri nachos, bhungra bateta from Saurashtra.

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. (Express photo by Bhupendra Rana)

“The idea was to bring the humble man’s food to this table and give it the kind of finesse and quality that it deserves,” Radhikaraje said. So chefs trained at The Bombay Canteen in Mumbai helped conceptualise how to plate the food on banana leaves or wood platters – “the same dish, no fusion or anything, just presented differently”.

The comforts of the café were initially designed with staff – not guests – in mind. “The ACs were for the community, installed for employees recovering from gender-affirming surgeries, to keep them comfortable,” Radhikaraje said.

Gazra’s profits, together with proceeds from the trust’s annual Garba fundraiser at the Lukshmi Vilas Palace, now fund what the café sees as its real work – gender-affirmation surgery, support for families living with HIV, legal aid, and mental health resources.

“Sometimes, you do not know the impact that you are making from just your own space… The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad has studied the model. UN Women has cited it as replicable,” Radhikaraje said.

‘I am Dharmendra at home, Sridevi at Gazra’

A 46-year-old chef at the café is a married father of two daughters at home. “I am Dharmendra at home and Sridevi at Gazra,” she said, referring to two iconic Bollywood actors seen by many as the epitome of masculinity and femininity respectively on screen. “It gives me the freedom to be myself without being judged or abused.”

At age 15, the chef knew “who I was”, but being the “only son in a conservative family”, did not have the language to explain it.

“I got married and had two children, but I kept looking for ways to escape,” she said. “There was no acceptance for LGBTQI in those days, and in my community I would be not just ostracised but probably even harmed.” Gazra, she said, is an inclusive space that allowed her “to live my life without feeling suffocated”.

She did feel “extremely guilty” about having to keep secrets from her loved ones, though. But the double life, she added quietly, was necessary, for there is “no other choice”.

Indeed, while Gazra can provide safety and dignity, it cannot dismantle life as it exists outside its doors – a limit that Radhikaraje recognises.

“Many people don’t come out because they fear a backlash. But I can 100 per cent say now that the Garba festivities and my vocal support to the community has helped many people find their own voice too,” she said.

The café currently employs about 20 people, about half of whom belong to the LGBTQI community, Radhikaraje said. Several members of the community work in other departments of MCSU, including the recently opened inclusive beauty parlour called Tarabai, located in the same corridor as Gazra.

But her larger objective, Radhikaraje said, is to not create a permanent dependence on a single institution.

“Education in any form that will give them employment and they can be independent is the way forward,” she said, placing particular emphasis on vocational training and mental-health support. “I would like to see them in a space where they are earning a livelihood, not in a segregated form, not defined by their identity.”

This is the reason why Radhikaraje is cautious about allowing a franchise or replicating Gazra. “This is a space that is in our control… A café can be copied, but that ethos has to continue, whoever takes it on,” she said.

Gazra’s experiment continues in small, unremarkable moments. Mid-morning on a weekday, elderly women walk in for a snack. A young couple arrives to experience the old-world atmosphere. College students at a table order vada pav. On a chalkboard is written a welcome message, “Our differences give India its colour. Our unity gives its strength.”