<p><strong>In November 2020, following the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2019, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment launched ‘Garima Greh’, a shelter home project for transgender persons, being run in collaboration with community-based organizations (CBOs) across 13 Indian cities, which seek to provide residence to transgender persons in need and impart skill development training and educational opportunities. Garima Greh becomes an important institutional space for anthropological enquiry in this regard as it provides the site of interface between the state and transgender persons and communities. Drawing on my doctoral fieldwork in Garima Greh in Patna, Bihar, and Baroda, Gujarat, I explore the everyday practices through which the experience and idea of Garima or dignity get framed and reframed in these ‘rehabilitative’ spaces of the state.</strong></p> <p><strong>Citizenship and dignity in these institutions, I argue, are contingent on several intersecting factors, importantly including that of regionality and temporality, which I intend to examine. The Garima Greh in Gujarat which has close ties with the royal family of Baroda provides an important vantage point to explore the relationship between citizenship and patronage. The meaning of the place itself changes for its residents owing to the nature of spaces that are allotted for the shelter home, which in Bihar is a government school building. The geoeconomics in which these institutions are spatially embedded determines the nature and quality of access to spaces and resources for its residents. In this paper, centering the aspect of regionality, I explore the varied ways in which the state, and its policies and programmes on gender translate in specific regional contexts, and how it, in turn, generates diverse anthropologies of the state and state spaces.</strong></p>
