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

A dancing girl performing in a seedy establishment

Louise Brown suffers from the same outsider's malaise: generalisation after generalisaiton about people, culture, religion, social attitudes etc, all based on her few extended visits to the county, that dull the educative value of this memoir-cum-travelogue of Lahore's Heera Mandi, the red light district. (Stereotypes in this book are somewhat subdued; the other one about sex slaves in Southeast Asia is worse). This might be a useful read as long as you can separate wheat from the chaff; but since this is aimed at a Western audience, I can see how easy it would be lose focus and go down the dreaded tangent. For a better appraisal of the book's content I will refer to Praj's succinct review.

Be that as it may, I for one welcome books that lay bare the hypocrisies and contradictions of our society where the passing of Women's Protection Bill (2015) is met with uproar from the religious right for allegedly "destroying the family unit" while the same people seem to disappear off the face of earth when civil society groups make a call for protests against honour killing, forced marriages, sexual harassment and rape which, according to each and any interpretation of Islam, are expressly verboten and, since religious cons care so much about morality, each one of these crimes should send them into one of their famous fits of rage. But none of it does! They instead create as many hurdles as they can in the name of culture and tradition while ignoring the problems that need urgent attention.

The sordid business of sexual exploitation under the cover of dancing continues without let or hindrance in the shadow of the Great Badshahi Mosque of Lahore, while we expend our energies on non-issues and hope with stars in our eyes that paying lip service to Islam and morality will magically fix all our social ills.

March 2016