Laundebaazi

Abstract

If there is a growing consensus on seeing the colony as a ‘laboratory of modernity’, not simply a site of exploitation, then we need to know what went into that lab experiment. In this essay I focus on the experiment around same-sex desire and on one of its major constituents – laundebaazi (habit for boys, inclination to play with them). Laundebaazi is a social register that sets same-sex desire within the idea of habit, within a language of excess, not different in kind from opposite-sex desire but in degree, and in a continuum with other kinds of excesses like music, prostitutes, cards or alcohol. The on-ground experiment between ‘homosexuality’ and laundebaazi has been a long-drawn one and has involved a measure of solubility. After establishing the general north-Indian idiom of baazi as a social frame for habit and excess, I elaborate on laundebaazi as being possible within its pool. I also work out laundebaazi as a reigning political metaphor in crisis between the ‘feudal’ and the ‘democratic’ moments in south Asia. I finish off with gaybaazi – one of the odd precipitates that result from this experiment of modernity.