Talk:Bacchá
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In modern Persian, bache just means "child," not "catamite." --Jpbrenna 8 July 2005 18:52 (UTC)
- I understand that it also means "cub." A Persian etymological dictionary would be very useful. Haiduc 9 July 2005 01:45 (UTC)
- Recent changes doubtful. Schuyler, Eu. (1876-7) documents "(Pers. bachcheh = catamite)" in [1] Also, from the same page: "Jazayery[70] (p198n1) assumes that the terms bachchihbâz and bachchihbâzî (Persian, homosexual, homosexuality) imply the other "partner" to be "a child (bachchih), or very young boy"." Haiduc 9 July 2005 11:17 (UTC)
- It's not doubtful at all. Stop any Persian-speaker and ask him or her, and they will tell you, bache means "child" and bachat means "kids." I don't know much Persian myself, but it was one of the first words I learned.
- A search of an online Persian dictionary brings up several words for catamite, none of which match the source you mention. I can't link directly to the results page, so you'll have to go here [2] and search yourself. Unfortunately, it doesn't provide transliteration. The first term in the entry reproduced below is transliterated bache kooshgl, and the second is bache bin reesh, and the third koon. I'm not sure what the literal meanings of the adjectives are. I believe the last word means, literally "pussy" - and not the cat. (See the link to the "dirty Persian" site below.) Note that the first two terms are compound nouns or noun phrases. It's like saying that the primary meaning of "boy" means "catamite" because it's one of the words in "pleasure boy." Obviously, the "pleasure" changes things a lot.
- Results of search
- English Persian
- Catamite بچه خوشگل، بچه بي ريش، كون
- An online, Latin alphabet Persian swearing dictionary [3] gives:
- bacha bawz (noun) † young pederast note bacha = boy; this indicates a boy who submits to pederasts. Again, note that the unadorned bacha means simply "boy," and by itself has no sexual connotations whatsoever.
- What probably happened here was that the Turkic languages dropped the original modifiers in the Persian terms, so bacchá may very well mean "catamite" in Azeri, Turkish or Uzbek - but you should check an appropriate dictionary for one of those languages to make sure. In the same vein, I would suspect bachibazi is just a Turkification of bacha bawz. Again, check an appropriate dictionary. --Jpbrenna 05:27, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Bear in mind that Persian (Tajik) is still the principal language in the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand - Central Asia is not a uniformly Turkic-speaking region and people would have been familiar with the ordinary Persian meaning of 'Boy' or 'Child' for بچه I remember hearing children addressed as 'Bacheha' in Bukhara when I was there (I didn't know any Persian at the time but the word is the same in Urdu). Maybe it simply depended on the context, or the tone of voice used? At all events there seems little doubt about the derivation. Excellent article by the way - reading it I thought I would add the Schuyler reference, then I saw that it was already there! One interesting aspect of Schuyler's acount is that he states that performances by Bachas in Tashkent were suppressed by the Russians at the request of the local ulama, who strongly disapproved of the practice. This seems quite plausible to me, and suggests that the 'Victorian Values', 'Colonial Prudery' line is perhaps not the whole story. Sikandarji 08:14, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Needs references
No sources, unref tag added. --FloNight 09:26, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Not Islamic
"Though after the Russian conquest the Muslim tradition was suppressed for a time by tsarist authorities, early Russian explorers were able to document the practice. It was resurgent in the early years of the twentieth century as the boys were increasingly sought as entertainers by the new Russian (Orthodox) settlers, a practice criticized in the Central-Asian Russian press of the time.
The bacchá tradition waned in the big cities after World War I, forced out for reasons that historian Anthony Shay describes as: "the Victorian era prudery and severe disapproval of colonial powers such as the Russians, British, and French, and the post colonial elites who had absorbed those Western colonial values."[1]"
I think these two paragraphs should be edited. Referring to bacchas as "the Muslim tradition" seems to imply religious approval as well as Islamic origin. As Sikandarji pointed out, it's recorded that the ulema didn't approve of the practice. Also, referring to it as "the Muslim tradition" implies that bacchas somehow came out of religious tradition, when the practice of boy-prostitution in the East predates Islam by millenia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fouad Bey (talk • contribs) 21:47, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
- What do you suggest? Haiduc 00:21, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps "local customs" may be preferable to "Muslim tradition." Although this phrasing would obscure the fact that the comercial pederasty represented by the baccha were not locally specific to Uzbekistan or Russian Central Asia but spread across the Muslim world, not to mention the fact that the conemptorary observers and authorities thought so. This is not insignificant. While the ulema may have disapproved of the baccha, and pederasty may have long preceded Islam in the region, it is still worthy of note that the colonial powers (British, French, Tsarist and Soviet) interpreted the practice as Muslim. So when they were "stamping out" the practice, they saw themselves as "civilizing" the area by stamping out a backward, Muslim tradition. [References to this can be found in the introduction and first chapter of Dan Healey's book Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia, as well as Rudi Bley's The Geography of Perversion: Male-To-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination ]--Speed jackson 18:03, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
