Posted by Raza Rumi
A TV journalist prepared this bold documentary for a news channel but it was never aired for obvious reasons – electronic media remains conservative about taboo subjects. The documentary provides great insights into the way women live, work and identify themselves as sex-workers in Lahore’s oldest red-light district known as Heera Mandi (Diamond Market) ironically next to the great Badshahi mosque. Coverage of Multan in the later parts is also interesting.
The narrator obviously has his biases – the usual refrain of middle class Muslims of the subcontinent – but he tries hard to remain neutral and investigative. There is a good dose of Mujras inserted into the series for the viewers; and tit bits of the Hollywood/Bollywood melodrama on the oppressed ‘tawaif’ (prostitute). Whilst tragedies bring these women to the sex-trade, not all of them lament their lives. If anything, Mirza Ruswa’s Umrao Jan (way back in the nineteenth century) was pretty comfortable and empowered by her profession. Similarly, one of the interviewees says: “money is the father, mother and everything for tawaifs”. The head of Kanjar biradri says that girls are taught to be ‘men’, earning ‘horses’ fooling their clients! Not to be missed.
My favourite is the ‘client’ who confesses how intoxicating it is to be “in love” with a sex worker. One gets tired of ‘using’ a wife all the time he says. Wish this documentary had been aired.
The language of these videos is Urdu so it might not be accessible to all the visitors here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyRYGczqsQo&feature=related
Are you familiar with the book “The Dancing Girls of Lahore” by Louise Brown,a British sociologist who spent four years in Heera Mandi with a dancing girls family. I tried to contact the author for interview but she seems to have left no trace. A worthwhile read!
Who is the most beautiful sex coordinator in the Diamond MARKET/ AND IF SHE CAN TYPE 60 WPM … I WILL ACCEPT HER AS HONORIS CAUSA STAFF ON A PART-TIME BASIS. May be this way she can be reformed and redeemed. Barrister Syyed Iqbal Jafree
tharki!
I also tried (and failed) to contact Louise Brown after reading her book. I have a question that I would love to have answered: In early maps the area that is now regarded as Heera Mandi (the area north of the old road from Taxali Gate towards Delhi Gate etc) is shown as open land. Even the 1927 map shows it as open, without the existing street pattern. The houses that were built on the grid of streets that came up on that land are uniformly grand. A large one facing the Badshahi mosque has an inscription saying that it was named ‘Gobind Niwas’, and built in 1934 by ‘L. Narain Das Mehra, son of Gobind Ram Mehra, a Vakil of Lahore’. What was this upstanding citizen (and many others) doing building in Heera Mandi when it had such a reputation? It was already a recognised area for courtesans, but were they in a slightly different area and then moved into some of these grand houses vacated by people such as the Mehras when they left at Partition? Or what??
heera mandi is the most cheep market of the world m muslim nd i hate this market