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The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Ancient Pleasure District | 
 enlarge | Author: Louise Brown
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 289285
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0060740426
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.742095491
EAN: 9780060740429
ASIN: 0060740426
Publication Date: July 1, 2005
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Product Description
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. Maha, a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to a powerful Arab sheikh at the age of twelve; when her own daughter Nena comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the sheikh come calling once more.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Stunning, heartbreaking view of life in Pakistani red light district August 14, 2005
Laurel962 (Cleveland, Ohio)
17 out of 22 found this review helpful
A stunning, heartbreaking and amazing book, that reveals the shocking depravity that lies beneath convential Islamic Pakistani society -- the generation prostitution, sexual slavery, abuse of underage children of both sexes, appalling poverty, filth and disease.
Besides making one profoundly glad to be have been born into Westernized civilization, this book raises many very relevant questions about modern Islamic society -- especially the contradiction between the very strict and upright interpreation of the Qu'ran resulting in extreme female modesty and chasity and the resulting opposite, which is a society based on degrading sexual abuse and slavery of an utterly dominated female "second class" of citizen.
Ruthless, wealthy older men prey on young women...paying great sums of money for the virginity of girls as young as 12. By the time these girls have "aged out" to their 20s, they are virtually worthless and must in turn raise their own daughters to be prostitutes. Without any ability to earn money from anything but sex (with the very youngest girls), this degradation carries on from generation to generation, often with grandmother, mother and daugther all prostituted to the same depraved wealthy men.
With a absurdly exaggerated "cult of virginity" and a tradition of polygamy, men are able to not only accumlate several wives but keep mistresses who are a kind of second-class wife or concubine. They are also able to marry women on a "short term, renewable" contract, which is accepted as a kind of marriage and legitimacy for children, while enabling the men to continuously disgard women as they age into their 30s. Under this arrangement, children concieved this way must be supported by their fathers, leading to families comprised of children who are all treated very diffently based on the status of their fathers...the lowest caste children being horrifyingly neglected, even to the point of dying of easily treatable medical problems. Virtually all the women and children are entirely illiterate, with no way out of their situation.
This excellent, no-holds-barred book raises a lot of questions about Islamic tradition and Pakistani society in particular. Why does this go on? Why is nothing being done about it? Where are the missionaries and social agencies while all this is going on?
It also calls for us to take a closer look at our own culture -- don't we have some of the same source problems, with our obsession with youth and physical perfection? the way we dismiss women when they are no longer young and beautiful? the way "no fault" divorce allows men to enjoy "sequential monogamay" with progressively younger and younger partners throughout their lifetime?
A treasure trove of fascinating ideas and arguments here...a fabulous book which demands more than one reading, and discussion if at all possible in a group. HIGHLY recommended for book clubs!!!!!
A unique and vitally important insight into a hidden world August 15, 2005
Rebecca (UK)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Unique, important and beautifully written. Louise Brown is clearly an expert in her field. Not only are we transported to life in Heera Mandi, the ancient brothel quarter of Lahore, but we are introduced to Maha, a middle-aged courtesan and her children, Nisha, Nena, and Ariba, who take to Brown immediately.
It seems at one moment we are heartbroken and devastated by the reality of these women's lives, and at another intrigued and in awe of their ability to have some happiness, however small.
Brown's flair for description, and wondrous sense of humour brings this Walled City and its activities to life, creating a invigorating and wonderful read.
It is amazing that one human-being can find the courage, bravery and determination needed to record Heera Mandi, a world un-known to western culture, and its inhabitants. This book should be read for its sheer importance, not only for Brown's exquisite novelist's touch.
Excellent Account of the life of the lowly in Pakistan November 26, 2005
Zee (Toronto, ON)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
This book had me captivated within its first 10 pages. Rarely have I come across a book that is so unforgiving in giving me the actual violence and filth that befalls one of the most pariah segment of a Pakistani society.
Most of the Pakistanis will not talk about the Heera Mandi. In one of the many complex and idiosyncratic treatments towards sex, the Pakistani society will waste no time in classifying them as lowest of the lows, yet will also use them to help their essentially messed up sexual lives. This book spares nothing in portraying the almost unbelievable living conditions that the "tawaifs" are facing on a daily basis. You will also get to see the poor as they struggle to live on a day to day basis. The treatment of city sweepers, who are generally relegated to be treated as almost untouchables, is an eye-opener. This is not Rohington Mistry's account of a low class Sub-Continent fiction; this is very real, and it happens every day in the Red Light District of Lahore.
I love this book. Louise Brown lived in wretched conditions to observe the life of Maha, a woman in her 30s who has retired in an industry where rookies are as young as 10 years old. Occasionally, you get to see the dilemma that Ms. Brown passes through; when a young 14 year old is shipped to Gulf to be a mistress for an old Arab, who has a thing of young virgins, the author wonders whether she should actively get involved in stopping that illegal and dangerous trade from taking place. Another interesting part is the social hierarchy that exists within the Heera Mandi prostitutes, where one is "Shareef" or respectful because she commands 10,000 Rupees per night, and not 200.
Above all, this book is an ode to the human spirit. Ms. Brown spent months with the women and eunuchs at the Heera Mandi, yet had nothing but praise for their hospitality and respect towards her. At the end, they are humans who had the misfortune to be born in that part of the society, and they are doing the best they know of; keeping their traditions alive, and surviving on a day to day basis.
Living on Beauty and Brains April 12, 2006
EternalSeeker (Albuquerque, NM USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book is a riveting, bittersweet insider's look at a vanishing culture.
Through the grace of Louise Brown's writing, I found myself immediately caught up in the lives, laughter, tears, history, gossip, ambition and sheer guts of Maha, an aging, Lahore "dancing girl", and her family. It is a fascinating journey into a side of Indo-Pakistani culture usually, carefully hidden from view.
The traditional "Dancing Girls of Lahore" do not perceive of themselves as prostitutes, but as proud artists, living precariously on the "unclean" fringe of Islamic Pakistani society.
Maha, a waning beauty and highly trained dancer, and her daughters know that youth and beauty are short-lived and must be capitalized on as much as possible, to put aside money for the uncertain future. Meanwhile the skills of dancing must also be developed and strenuously maintained in order to enchant the [male] audience once the first bloom of youth has passed, and to bring in money by performing at weddings, feasts and private parties.
Exotic, shocking, utterly alien to Western sensibilities, "Dancing Girls" springs to life with the color, intrigue, danger and the grinding poverty which surrounds the Diamond Market, a crumbling, ancient quarter of Lahore where Maha and her family live. While their dreams are filled with echoes of past splendor, being paramours of emperors and rajas, revered as true artists, the present is much different, as the women struggle to improve their lot and remain free of pimps and money-lenders in their squalid surroundings.
From the donkeys in the street to delicate male prostitutes; from the contrast between the rigid seclusion of proper wives and the dubious status of women who work in the cheap sex trade, to how to choose and wear the proper clothing for the street, I found this book compelling reading, sparing nothing and no one.
Through it all runs the sad desperation of women who need to - who MUST - captivate and entertain men who will support them, either as wives or mistresses: it is the only way to survive, the only way to prosper. Appealing, cajoling, feuding and flirting, they go to the highest bidder, as did Maha herself, usually first as wives in brief, temporary marriages; later in unions less formal. Yet the women are stubborn and indomitable, especially Maha, who manages to dance, scheme and even bewitch her way into our hearts.
Read this book only if... July 11, 2006
Rai Chowdhary (Austin, Texas)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
you have the stomach to digest the extremes of how mankind can suffer, bear the pain, and still find a reason to live. Written from first hand witness accounts of the author, it takes you into depths few will venture to go. It is hard to believe that such conditions exist anywhere in the world, that caste system (spoken or otherwise) can destine multiple generations into being little more than lust objects.
I happened to chance on this book while browsing in one of the national book retailers during a visit to Boston - and could not stop once I got started. The narrative grips you, and even without any pictures in the book the author paints a vivid image of what it is like in the dark areas of Pakistan.
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