Chaddi ki charcha

Illustration/Uday Mohite

The most famous person on the Indian internet right now is a content creator referred to as Chaddi Aunty or Chaddi Lady. Kamalini, as she is named on her account, has gone viral with her canny Instagram reels, where she addresses men with various chaddi related questions. "Batao na, kaunse colour ki chaddi pehneho?" "Agar pyar hi nahin karte toh bina chaddi ke photo kyon bheji?" The last time we said the word chaddi in public so much was during the Pink Chaddi campaign against right wing moral policing. This is different but also not.

What makes Chaddi Lady so popular? The answer lies in her absolute aesthetic control of a genre I like to call Hot Romantic: the framing of her videos where she fills up the screen, demurely dressed, the throaty timbre of her bedroom voice, eye-contact, and the way she merges shayrana huskiness with direct sexuality, so chaddi questions sound like Urdu couplets. Pagal kar diya ki deewana bana diya? No one can say maybe because they are speechless.

I watched some popular comedy dudebros on one of those videos mysteriously known as podcasts. They launched into the episode cackling in anticipation of the knowing jokes they would make. They watched a video of hers together. And I watched them watch it. Their expressions were helpless, mesmerised, pink, affected in a way that one can't quite label arousal. It is best described by the Hindustani word, hulchul.

At the end of the video there was silence, till one awkwardly laughed " laundon ki bolti band kardi", and a dazed return to business followed. They knew that the go-to defence mechanism of English speaking gents in the face of most things female and all things sexual - yaniki the pun - would merely expose them. But they also didn't seem to have a language, or context, to express their feelings simply.

Chaddi lady's genius lies in muddling the lines that keep sexual culture controlled through aesthetic hierarchies of what is refined or sleazy, erotica or porn, desi or classy.There has been a spurt (cough) of sex positive content creators, mostly elite, who preach of a "healthy" sexual life. Nothing to disagree with. But in a way they also create a neat and sanitary syllabus of sex, listing what is permitted, by the Kama Sutra or a science book. It's as if the uncategorizable, sometimes paradoxical world of sex, lustful as much as tender, must be managed through labels and instructions, rather than liberated through artistry.

Kamalini uses neither the fig leaf of education, nor of irony, circumventing the subtle moral policing of bhadralok aesthetics with her personal chaddi campaign. Her innuendo is sophisticated because it is not of words or actions but of registers. Is it poetry, or is it porn? Is it porn or is it romance? Is she a yearning submissive lover or an unblinking dominatrix? Her impassiveness signals that these divisions are stupid. She recognizes people's inner sexual worlds and offers them back without inflection-no euphemisms or coyness - creating a space for them to cheerfully accept themselves. So even responses to her reels are quite exuberant and creative. There are poems, songs, skits and general giggling fun.

Chaddi becomes be a childlike word, a raunchy word, a neutral or naughty word, all at once; like sexual feelings, and people.

A comfortable chaddi it seems.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com