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.

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

The Dancing Girls of Lahore

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

"We Were Artists . . . Not Gandi Kanjri"

(Hot Season: April - June 2000)

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 affluentand 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 itcarries the city's soul.

Old Lahore can't have changed much for centuries. The moatwas 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 agelessand invisible presence. The thirteen gates into the city remain too,channeling pedestrians and traffic from the wide roads of contemporaryLahore into the narrow lanes and alleys of the Walled City.Rickshaws, horse-drawn carts called tangas, motorbikes, and smallvans compete with pedestrians for space inside the walls. No vehiclesof any kind enter the narrowest alleys. Neither does the sun.Only in the wider lanes and the bazaars does the sun shine directlyon the ground. Most of the small passages running through the citylie in perpetual, dusty gloom.

Early morning is the best time to see the old city. During the hotseason there are a couple of hours before the temperature soars andthe lanes become too congested. The city wakes up and life unfoldsin much the same way it must have done hundreds of years ago. Theshopkeepers are busy: the butchers slice up chickens and goats, thetea shops open and the bakers prepare halva and fry puri for the firstmeal of the day. The fruit and vegetable sellers arrange their producein a kaleidoscope of bright colors: plump aubergines, mooli, redcarrots, sweet firm tomatoes, bundles of spinach, fresh okra, andleafy bunches of coriander and mint. Donkey carts rattle and creakdown the galis, the narrow lanes, delivering goods: large roundmetal pots carrying milk from the villages; another piled high withsacks of flour and rice. A rickshaw whose only passengers are adozen frantic hens stops and the goods are thrown, squawking, intothe back room of a butcher's shop. In the little workshops men andboys are already at work by seven o'clock, grinding bits of metal,heating syrupy liquids over open fires, sticking unidentified itemstogether. It is gray, dirty, repetitive work and it lasts for most oftheir waking day.

Heera Mandi -- the Diamond Market -- is a crumbling ghetto ofthree- and four-storey buildings tucked into the northern cornerof the Walled City, right next to one of the greatest forts of Mughal India and its biggest, most perfectly proportioned mosque. The oldwomen living here say it has been the red-light district for as long asthey can remember and it flourished long before the British arrivedin the mid–nineteenth century. Heera Mandi, also known as ShahiMohalla, was important then, and in its heyday it trained courtesanswho won the hearts of emperors. The old ladies insist that thingsused to be different in those times: women like them were respected.They were artists, not gandi kanjri -- not dirty prostitutes.

I have a room in the home of Shahi Mohalla's most famousresident, Iqbal Hussain, a professor of fine art who paintsportraits of the women of Heera Mandi. When I came to Lahorepreviously it was Iqbal who taught me most about prostitution inPakistan and about life in the mohalla. He is an authority on the subjectbecause he lives and breathes it: it's in his blood. He is the son ofa courtesan and has spent over half a century in Heera Mandi, growingup in this house that lies in the shadow of the mosque and in thelonger shadow of social stigma. His friendship gives me some protectionnow that I've returned to stay in the mohalla and witness itslife first-hand.

Iqbal's house expands, month by month, as he scours the constructionsites of the Walled City, collecting windows, doors, statues,and tiles from ancient, demolished havelis -- the gracefultraditional homes of the rich. He incorporates these fragments intohis home, so it has become an eclectic fusion of Hindu, Muslim, andSikh design. My room, on the third floor of the house, overlooks thebiggest courtyard in Heera Mandi. It's the most beautiful room. Ithas three bay windows, each fitted with tiny panes of colored glass.The furniture and doors are of carved wood and the giant floorcushions, bolsters, and heavy curtains are made of golden and burgundybrocades. This room, like the whole house, has been assembledfrom pieces and images of old Lahore.

On the ground floor of the house Iqbal runs a restaurant whereyoung couples meet for forbidden romantic liaisons during the afternoon. They sit in the back room and drink bottles of 7-Up inthe summer and cups of coffee in the winter. The boys talk a lot andthe girls giggle without reason or pause. In the evening most of thevisitors are groups of well-heeled, arrogant men. At other times entirefamilies come for an outing bringing Grandma, the babies, andassorted uncles and aunts. They dine at long tables and then traipseup to the roof to look at the Badshahi Masjid and the fort. As theypass my room I hear them puffing and complaining that the climb issteep and that there are a crippling number of steps.

Continues...
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