It has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to write The Dancing Girls of Lahore. As an academic at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, I’ve spent years researching prostitution and the trafficking of women and girls throughout Asia: the Thai and Filipino girls working in Japanese clubs; the sex-tourist venues of Pattaya and Angeles; the sexual exploitation of children in Cambodia’s shack-lined red-light areas; and the migration and trafficking of teenagers from Nepal’s beautiful mountains to the vast brothels of India’s congested cities. But nowhere has been quite like Heera Mandi, with its long artistic traditions, its strongly felt Muslim religion, and its sense of community, tightly bound with Shia ritual. In the late 1990s 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. For an academic, it offered unbelievably rich material for research.
This research has not always been easy. When I began working properly on a study of Heera Mandi in early 2000, I had three young children whom I couldn’t take with me to Pakistan. As they have grown, it has been even more important for them to remain at home in the comparative safety of an English suburb. The contrast between the lives of my two teenage girls and those of Maha’s daughters has often struck me forcibly and with an inescapable guilt, because while 14-year-old girls in my middle-class family in Britain go to school and to the cinema, Maha’s pretty daughters, the same age as my own, dance for men and have their virginity purchased by the highest bidder. And while Maha and her children sell sex, I live, at least in part, by teaching about what they do.
This book is taken directly from the daily diary I wrote while undertaking academic research that was partly funded first by the Nuffield Foundation and then by the British Academy. My thanks to both these institutions for their generous support.
As every author knows, books are the work of many minds and the unrecorded labor of others, and Dancing Girls is no exception. By right, a long list of names should appear alongside mine on the book’s cover. My mother and father, Julie and Peter Brown, looked after my children, uncomplainingly, while I returned repeatedly to Heera Mandi over four and a half years. Without their constant backing I could not have begun this work, never mind completed it. In Lahore, I was taught Urdu by Naveed Rehman, who, I am sure, despaired of my bad grammar and linguistic idiocy. The swear words that appear so often in this book were not the result of his tuition, and I thank him for his long suffering. My agent, Caradoc King, and editor, Courtney Hodell, have both had a profound influence on the book, prodding at weaknesses and building on its strengths. I am grateful to them both for their vision and kind encouragement.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to thank all the women and men of Heera Mandi. I thought I came here to write an academic analysis—and eventually I will do this—but this place and its people have touched me in a way that is as much personal as it is analytical. I have learned so much about the capacity to love and be joyous in the midst of cruelty and social stigma. Occasionally I have been scared here, sometimes frightened by the tamash been, but never by the people who work and live in this mohalla and who have been, year after year, consistent in their warm friendship to an odd outsider.
Iqbal, I thank you for our thoughtful, languid, funny evenings on your rooftop. Tariq, you have a family to be proud of, and Tasneem, wherever you are, I thank you for the purple suit and the sparkle that so often broke through your layers of worry.
Maha, Nisha, Nena, and Ariba, what thanks can I write for you, when words will never be enough?