ENGLISH

The dancing girls of Lahore: selling love and hoarding dreams in Pakistan's ancient pleasure district

By Brown , T. Louise

Book information

Publisher
HarperCollins;Fourth Estate
Year
2005
ISBN
9780061870712, 0060740426, 0061870714
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
606 kB (620518 bytes)
Pages
\0
Time added
2020-07-26 19:24:52
Manners and customs;Prostitutes;Prostitutes--Pakis

Description

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.

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