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The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Ancient Pleasure District

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Overview

The dancing girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond Market in the shadow of a great mosque. The twenty-first century goes on outside the walls of this ancient quarter but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: Beloved by emperors and nawabs, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern-day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music, and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, though tolerated; but they are gandi, "unclean," and Maha's daughters, like her, are born into the business and will not leave it. Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of a Lahori dancing girl. With beautiful understatement, she turns a novelist's eye on a true story that beggars the imagination.

Editorial Reviews

Generally, it is not a good idea to publish one's field notes before the scholarly work is complete, as the notes depend on the idiosyncratic view of the researcher, who is still swimming in details. Yet Brown (sociology, Univ. of Birmingham, England) has apparently chosen that route. Ranging from rats in the parlor to abortion by kicks in the belly, her account of the raw minutiae of one prostitute family in Lahore, Pakistan, is structured according to the chronology of the author's visits from 2000 to 2004. The historical and sociological context for these sad, gaudy lives is never properly spelled out, so readers are left baffled by events and customs that are mentioned but never explained or revisited. As a result, the book is painful, verging on the voyeuristic, and unedifying. Libraries with an audience interested in women's roles or prostitution in Lahore should select instead Jasmin Mirza's Between Chaddor and Market and Fouzia Saeed's Taboo!: The Hidden Culture of a Red Light Area.-Lisa Klopfer, Eastern Michigan Univ. Lib., Ypsilanti Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Louise Brown

Louise Brown is an academic at Birmingham University, England, and the author of several books on Asia. She frequently returns to Lahore, Pakistan.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

1.26 MB

Number of Pages

336

eBook ISBN

9780061160448

Awards

  • Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award

Excerpt from: The Dancing Girls of Lahore by Louise Brown

Lahore is a wonderful city with rich character and a worn charm. The Mughal Empire has bequeathed some glories to the modern city: the awe-inspiring Badshahi Masjid; the imposing Shahi Quila, or Royal Fort; the pretty Shalamar Gardens; and the now dilapidated tombs of Emperor Jahangir and his empress, Nur Jahan. Grand buildings inherited from the British raj sit in stately, shabby order on the broad, leafy Mall Road running through the center of town. New suburbs have grown -- some affluent and some not. The streets and markets bustle and hum with life and the mosques and mausoleums are always busy. Best of all, though, is this ancient place -- the Walled City -- a quarter of a million people squeezed into a square mile of congested tenements and shops. It is the heart of Lahore and it carries the city's soul.

Old Lahore can't have changed much for centuries. The moat was filled in long ago and the defensive walls have gone, but the residents, constrained by ancient land boundaries and historical memory, continue to build their houses as if the walls still exist: an ageless and invisible presence. The thirteen gates into the city remain too, channeling pedestrians and traffic from the wide roads of contemporary Lahore into the narrow lanes and alleys of the Walled City. Rickshaws, horse-drawn carts called tangas, motorbikes, and small vans compete with pedestrians for space inside the walls. No vehicles of any kind enter the narrowest alleys. Neither does the sun. Only in the wider lanes and the bazaars does the sun shine directly on the ground. Most of the small passages running through the city lie in perpetual, dusty gloom.