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

9780060740429: The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Ancient Pleasure District
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 

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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

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

From Booklist:
*Starred Review* Heera Mandi, the ancient red-light district of the Punjabi city of Lahore, Pakistan, is as distant as the moon from most Western experience, yet sociologist Brown renders an intimate portrait of one family there that is compelling in its strangeness and its humanity. Shuttling for months at a time between Heera Mandi and her middle-class world of Birmingham, England, Brown details the goings-on of Maha, her five children, and the people and places in their tiny universe. Maha, a fading singer-dancer-courtesan in her midthirties, must now depend on her eldest daughters to join the trade to help shore up the family's shrinking finances: Nisha, 14, who would literally rather die than come of age; Nena, 12, who appears to embrace the business with enthusiasm; and Ariba, 11, a dark-skinned pariah who hovers like a ghost over the household. To that end, Maha is busy making arrangements to sell Nena's virginity to a wealthy sheikh in Dubai. The family might have been spared this dilemma with help from Maha's husband, Adnan, but he is too drug addled and distracted with his other wife, Mumtaz, to care. Brown is unsparing in relating the casual violence Maha and her children inflict on one another, and that befalls them from their circumstances, but she also can't help but be invested in their futures. Readers of this excellent account will feel the same way. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherHarper
  • Publication date2005
  • ISBN 10 0060740426
  • ISBN 13 9780060740429
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages320
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780060740436: The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780060740436
Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2006
Softcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Stock Image

Brown, Louise
Published by Harper (2005)
ISBN 10: 0060740426 ISBN 13: 9780060740429
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Books Unplugged
(Amherst, NY, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition. Seller Inventory # bk0060740426xvz189zvxnew

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 27.29
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Brown, Louise
Published by Harper (2005)
ISBN 10: 0060740426 ISBN 13: 9780060740429
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Book Deals
(Tucson, AZ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. Seller Inventory # 353-0060740426-new

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 27.29
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Brown, Louise
Published by Harper (2005)
ISBN 10: 0060740426 ISBN 13: 9780060740429
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_0060740426

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 23.30
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Brown, Louise
Published by Harper (2005)
ISBN 10: 0060740426 ISBN 13: 9780060740429
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Austin, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think0060740426

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 28.01
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Brown, Louise
Published by Harper (2005)
ISBN 10: 0060740426 ISBN 13: 9780060740429
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Front Cover Books
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover0060740426

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 30.30
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.30
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Brown, Louise
Published by Harper (2005)
ISBN 10: 0060740426 ISBN 13: 9780060740429
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Wizard Books
(Long Beach, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard0060740426

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 53.47
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.50
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Brown, Louise
Published by Harper (2005)
ISBN 10: 0060740426 ISBN 13: 9780060740429
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
The Book Spot
(Sioux Falls, SD, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks83484

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 59.00
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Brown, Louise
Published by Harper (2005)
ISBN 10: 0060740426 ISBN 13: 9780060740429
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
BennettBooksLtd
(LOS ANGELES, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 1.05. Seller Inventory # Q-0060740426

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 58.82
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.91
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds