The Dancing Girls of Lahore : Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District by Louise Brown (Harper Perennial

In The Dancing Girls of Lahore, Lousie Brown, an academic who works and teaches at Birmingham University in England, spends four years living amongst the women who work in Heera Mandi, a neighborhood and bazaar located in Lahore, Pakistan. It is also Lahore’s red light district. In the day, the bazaar is like any other in Pakistan, full of food stalls, small shops selling musical instruments and khussa, a traditional hand-crafted footwear, but at night, brothels located above the shops open for business.

In the past, Heera Mandi was a place “that trained courtesans who won the hearts of emperors”. These courtesans were known as tawaif, professional women who were taught to sing and dance, but times have changed. The women say that things were different back then, that women like them were respected. “They were artists, not gandi kanjri - not dirty prostitutes.”

The tawaif is similar to Japan’s geisha. They were women who were trained to sing and dance or recite poetry. Their main purpose was to entertain the nobility. Once the British annexed the area, the tawaif’s services declined and they made ends meet by selling their bodies, often serving the British military and thus they were defamed and branded as prostitutes.

We are witness to the life in the Heera Mandi as seen through the eyes of Brown. She introduces us to Maha and her family. A lady in her mid-thirties with five young children. Maha was sold as a bride at the age of twelve. She was a successful dancer in her twenties but after becoming the second wife of a man and having many babies, she has become plump and no longer dances for a living. Her meager existence with her children is poorly supported by her husband Adnon, who comes to Heera Mandi, only to smoke his opium in peace away from his “proper” family, meaning his first wife.

For the next four years, Brown shares the story of Maha’s family. It is very heart-wrenching and sad but is also a grim reality that there are more families such as Maha’s. Women who are born into this life and cannot escape it. The nighttime world of Heera Mandi which Brown describes is very difficult to imagine. In Heera Mandi, we are also introduced to khusras, transgenders who live on the fringe of society. We are taught words in Urdu and Punjabi that are frequently used in the business such as dalal, which translates to promoters, agents, or simply - pimps. We learn the slang for men and women’s private parts, and derogatory terms for prostitutes such as taxi and kanjri.

Brown does admit to feeling a bit of guilt sharing the story of Maha and her children as she is also a mother with children of her own who are about the same age as Maha’s. She tells us while her fourteen year old daughters in her middle class life in Britain go to school and to the cinema, Maha’s daughters “dance for men and have their virginity purchased by the highest bidder.” 

The Dancing Girls will make you laugh and cry and at times will make you angry. The abuse these women endure is unimaginable. What’s even more unimaginable is the vicious cycle in which the mother becomes her own children’s agent soliciting sex with them to potential customers. A tragedy whose story needs to be read by everyone. ~Ernie Hoyt