In 2000, Louise Brown, a sociologist at England's Birmingham University, set out to investigate prostitution in Lahore, Pakistan. She didn't adopt a typical academic route toward her subject; instead she spent four years, on and off, living in the city and immersing herself in its culture, observing firsthand the complexity of the place and its people.
The result of her time there is "The Dancing Girls of Lahore," a wide-ranging look at class, gender relations and family life in a place where the ancient constantly bumps up against the modern, often in harrowing ways.
Inside Lahore is Old Lahore, an ancient walled city just a square mile in size but whose tenements and shops support a population of 250,000. Within the walled city is Heera Mandi, the Diamond Market, where courtesans for centuries sang, danced and seduced emperors in elaborate rituals and which is now a decidedly more seedy district, an area in sad decline. Although Brown has spent years researching prostitution and the trafficking of women in Asia, she finds Heera Mandi especially intriguing for its long, illustrious history. Once, she writes, the "dancing girls" found patrons in intellectual Lahori men and the Punjabi landed gentry; now Heera Mandi is considered unfashionable and hardly elite. Where the local bazaar was once filled with "function rooms" for the dancers, Brown reports that many have closed because "customers demand much less dancing these days and rather more basic sexual servicing."
In the late 1990s, she writes, "it was clearly a community in transition, moving swiftly from an old-world brothel district steeped in artistic performance and the romance of purchased love to a more modern red-light area, stripped of elite pretensions and reliant upon the sale of sex."
The story she tells is grim. She follows the lives of Maha, a dancer-courtesan, and her five children to illuminate the plight of Heera Mandi's sex workers. At times, Brown's work life blurs with her personal one, and she serves more as a sympathetic friend to Maha than detached observer. She chronicles Maha's domestic dramas and even becomes part of them. Indeed, Brown's narrative is more novelistic than academic -- full of vivid descriptions of her surroundings and of her interactions with local characters. Her experiences are sometimes comical; such as when a stranger on the street repeatedly tells Brown, "I very, very love you," and tries to pay her for sex.
