Lahore: Hira Mandi
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A backgrounder
Mira Patel, May 12, 2024: The Indian Express
Lahore's Hira Mandi represents a captive portrait of history and how cultural trends evolved from the Mughal era to Islamization of Pakistan. Unlike the glorified version that is often depicted in movies and television, the real Hira Mandi is a battleground, where talented, desperate and resilient women compete to escape its suffocating grasp.
In Hira Mandi, a 2006 novel by French author Claudine Le Tourneur d’Ison, Shanwaz, a young boy born into a family of prostitution narrates his introduction to the Red Light District of Lahore. One night, Shanwaz was awakened to the sound of his mother screaming and upon rushing to her rescue, was confronted with the unforgettable sight of her, half-naked, fending off the blows of an enraged man. Years later, Shanwaz hears his mother singing to the same man and realises that she is in love with him.
Soon after, his sister Laila was born. On her 12th birthday, Laila debuted into Hira Mandi society, her entire body adorned with trinkets showcasing her vivacious purity to a room filled with lascivious men. While the child danced, the negotiations began. Ultimately, to Shanwaz’s shock and anger, Laila’s virginity was sold to the same man who had beaten his mother more than a decade ago.
Contradictions run abound in Hira Mandi, the famed ghetto littered with dilapidated buildings and indistinguishable Byzantine streets, tucked into the northern corner of the Walled City, next to the Lahore Fort. While Hira Mandi was once a thriving market, at times the playground of royalty, home to artistes, prostitutes and courtesans, today, its balconies are deserted, shops lie in disarray, and the melodic clinking of bangles is replaced by the silent hum of machines.
Courtesans and emperors
During the reign of Emperor Akbar, Lahore rivalled Delhi and Agra as the emblem of Mughal India. The nobility, and their escorts of women, would parade past Lahore Fort, crossing Hira Mandi (known as Shahi Mohalla then), through the Alamgiri Gate to reach the expansive, intricate grounds of Badshahi Mosque.
Even though Orthodox Islam forbids dancing and singing, the Mughals were great patrons of the performing arts, employing thousands of artistes to entertain the imperial courts. According to Louise Brown, sociologist and author of The Dancing Girls of Lahore (2005), “Dancing and singing were considered to be forms of refined culture and patronage of the arts was a symbol of Mughal status.” Rashid Makhdum, a senior consultant at the Aga Khan Development Network tells indianexpress.com that under Mughal rule between the 16th and 18th centuries, dancing and prostitution were both permitted. “Concubines have featured in Islamic culture for centuries,” he says, adding that “they were considered a part of the household, if not the family.”
Known by different names, tawaifs or royal courtesans occupied an important place in Mughal India. Trained by the top ustads, and highly skilled in music, dance, and other cultural pursuits, these tawaifs were influential, refined, and valued. As historian Pran Neville writes in Nautch Girls of the Raj (2009), “they formed part of the retinue of kings and nawabs…To be associated with a tawaif was considered to be a symbol of status, wealth, sophistication and culture…no one considered her to be a bad woman or an object of pity.”
Courtesans were also exceptionally independent women by the standards of the time. A sense of their power and social mobility can be commanded from the civic tax records of Lucknow between 1858 to 1877, which reveal that tawaifs were the largest and highest tax-paying class. While most women were not allowed to hold wealth or inherit property, courtesans during the Mughal period were financially independent, possessing agency over their lives and choices.
Diamond women
During the first half of the 18th century, Mughal power in Punjab was weakened by repeated Afghan invasions led by Ahmad Shah Durrani. Under Afghan rule, the royal sponsorship of the tawaifs came to an end, with traditional concubine culture giving way to prostitution. However, Durrani’s death saw Lahore fall into the hands of Ranjit Singh, the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, popularly known as Sher-e-Punjab (the Lion of Punjab). Tawaif culture never quite recovered from the downfall of Mughal rule but under the Sikhs, it saw a slight resurgence. Singh himself had fallen in love with a Muslim nautch girl named Moran Sarkar and risked social outrage when he married her at the age of 22. Moran is absent from most historical accounts but remains entombed in the Papar Mandi area inside Lahore’s Shah Aalmi gate.
According to legend, one day, Moran was travelling to Pul Kanjri, a village on the Indo-Pak border, for a dance performance, when her shoe fell into a canal she was crossing. She was so enraged that she refused to perform until a bridge was built over the canal. A besotted Singh obediently acquiesced and a bridge called Pul Moran stands at that site even today.
Lahore under Sikh rule promulgated its two legacies, becoming a vibrant centre for the performing arts as well as a hub for the illicit activities of the night. In Punjabi Century (2023), historian Prakash Tandon writes, “Hira Mandi by day was quiet and deserted, but after the sun went down it came into a dazzling and brilliant life.” By his account, life for these girls began in the late afternoon, when, awakening from their slumber, they would lounge around the streets of Hira Mandi, exchanging stories with the shopkeepers and musicians who also inhabited the space.
In the evening they would begin their extensive cleansing ritual which involved scrubbing, shaving, powdering, combing, and rouging. Once ready, they waited for instructions from their mother or mistress, hoping that they would be summoned for an evening rendezvous away from the house, or best of all, “a journey away to somewhere in Kashmir or some other distant holiday place as an ostensible wife trying to look homely and domestic.”
Like in the Mughal era, these women enjoyed considerable social status as chronicled by JNU professor Lata Singh, in her article Visibilising the ‘Other’ in History (2007). Women in Lahore ran massive establishments, training musicians and dancers alike. These women tended to be former courtesans, and having acquired wealth and fame, were able to hire and train other dancing girls. The men of the establishments — sweepers, bodyguards, tailors, and others — lived on a floor below the dancing girls and acted as their protectors. According to Singh, “the male children became the deprived gender and were entirely dependent on their mothers and sisters.”
It was also under Sikh rule that Lahore’s red light district got its current name. After the death of Ranjit Singh, Hira Singh Dogra, a prime minister of the Sikh Empire, thought that Shahi Mohalla could be used as an economic hub, a food market, situated in the heart of the city. The grain market that Hira established would become known as ‘Hira Singh di Mandi’ (Hira Singh’s market), and gradually, as Hira Mandi. While many people associate Hira Mandi with the Urdu translation of the term — diamond market — believing it to be indicative of the beauty of the women residing there, its origins were far more innocent.
Nautch girls
Sikh dominance over Punjab quickly gave way to the East Indian Company in 1849. The British did not enjoy the dancing women (whom they called nautch girls) with one edition of the Punjab Gazetteer of 1883 stating that “dancing is generally performed by hired nach girls and need not be further mentioned here than to say that it is a very uninteresting and inanimate spectacle to European eyes.”
Victorian-era conservatism also played a huge role. According to Neville, the British “made no distinction between an accomplished professional nautch girl or a devadasi and a common prostitute, dubbing both as fallen women. The educated Indians, suffering from an inferiority complex, were overcome with a sense of shame about their traditional arts.” British reformers and Christian missionaries, influenced by the writings of Ms Marcus Fuller in The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood (1900), strongly condemned the nautch institution and, Neville writes, “any sort of liaison with a tawaif was socially condemned.”
Although some tawaifs continued to operate due to patronage from the princely states, most were forced to eliminate the dance aspect from their livelihoods, confined to sex work under a cloak of secrecy instead. According to Saad Khan, the director of the documentary Showgirls of Pakistan (2010), the British eliminated the cultural aspect of traditional dance performances in an attempt to showcase their social superiority and undermine the legacy of the Mughal Court. Eventually, Khan says in an interview with Foreign Policy Magazine, “mujra (Mughal dance) was conflated with sex work and dancers with prostitutes, a supremely generalized narrative that exists and affects the lives of women in the business till now.”
Contradictorily, it was under the British that Hira Mandi became known as a den for prostitution, with the Company and crown recognising the need for, in the words of British General Henry Montgomery, “essential horizontal pleasures for tired fighting gentlemen soldiers.” Makhdum says that the red light district emerged in 1914 when the British established a brothel in Hira Mandi to cater to the servicemen stationed at the garrison in Lahore Fort. Most of the buildings that remain are from that time. Thus began the transformation of Hira Mandi and tawaif culture. As Indian playwright Tripurari Sharma wrote in A Tale from the year 1857 (2005), “that these women were treasure houses for culture and expressions are devalued, conveniently forgotten and consequently lost, and they are seen merely as entertainers and available for sex work.”
Dancing with the stars
In the 1950s, dancing girls were legitimised as artistes by a Pakistani High Court Order, permitting them to perform for up to three hours every evening. Hira Mandi retained its culture for the performing arts, producing some of the most famous stars of Pakistani cinema. Entertainment was considered beneath women from higher class backgrounds, so it was the traditional performers of Hira Mandi who became professional singers and dancers. Artistes such as Noor Jahan, Mumtaz Shanti and Khurshid Begum were all trained in the now infamous neighbourhood.
Prostitution, though looked down upon, also retained a slightly more acceptable character in the immediate decades after Partition. Some women even practiced the mut’ah system of Shia Islam, wherein they were permitted to sign temporary marriage contracts with multiple men. Under the mut’ah system, the length of the union could be specified in advance, ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of years. During the marriage, the husband is required to support his wife financially, and in turn, the wife provides sexual and domestic labour. When the contract ends, so do the obligations, although the man is required to support any children born from the marriage.
In a 2017 interview with the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, a woman Jugnu describes her experience with mut’ah marriages. Jugnu has been married multiple times, often only for a single night. The men would arrange the marriage with her father, paying roughly Rs 2,500 per contract.
“It was not easy for a man to come too close to a woman in a kotha back in those days,” she told Dawn. “We were surrounded by our tabla player, sheesha player, dhol wala, naika, and the flower man would come and so did the money seller,” she says. “There was a courtship ritual in getting to know the woman first and then coming closer. The man could not just use and abuse. We were protected by our community.”
That changed with the Islamization of Pakistan under President Zia-ul-Haq. Between 1978 and 1988, Zia introduced a series of laws banning music, dance, and other ‘illicit activities’. This, in turn, drove many families away from Hira Mandi, leaving behind only the lowest classes of women, including refugees from neighbouring Afghanistan. Hira Mandi was cemented as an area of ignominy, with Makhdum stating that as a child, he was not allowed to enter the bazaar. As per 2016 estimates from the UN Development Council, 12 per cent of women in Pakistani jails are imprisoned under charges of commercial sex work.
Social media sensation
Zerka Tahir, the founder of Communal Hub, a non-profit catering to the children of Hira Mandi, spoke to indianexpress.com about what remains of the historic neighbourhood. Tahir is adamant that while Zia’s policies did contribute to prostitution being spread away from Hira Mandi, it wasn’t the crackdown alone that transformed the area. “Technology, education, changes in family structure, and disease all impacted the industry,” she says, leading to the demise of the old Hira Mandi. Describing the neighbourhood today, Tahir paints a bleak picture. Women of all ages can be hired, with women over 60 often selling their services for as little as Rs 50. “If they have a stomach ache they go into the streets,” she says, “and earn just enough money to buy one tablet of paracetamol.” Gone too are the days of Hira Mandi serving as a pathway to Lollywood. Even talented performers can no longer become actors and singers as stigma and chronic drug use prohibit them from crossing social barriers. At most, they can become famous on sites like TikTok and Instagram according to Tahir.
According to Brown, an ambitious girl who wants to succeed in Hira Mandi today will settle for a dancing tour in the Gulf. Like the tawaifs of the Mughal era, these women become less and less valuable as they age, often confined to a life of destitution after multiple pregnancies and venereal diseases ravage their once youthful bodies.
They are also sent away at a very young age. Tahir describes their predicament as “prostitution by consent through conditioning,” with girls who are born into a hereditary system, forced in many ways, to continue the family business. It is not uncommon for family elders to falsify birth documents to send girls as young as 13 to dance troupes in the Gulf, India and Ukraine.
Recounting her conversation with one of the families in Lahore, Tahir says she was told a joke: “When a girl is born in Hira Mandi, she should be named cheque, because she represents the future income of her family.” Tahir responded, “That’s fine. Just make sure the cheque isn’t cashed before the age of maturity.”
The Hira Mandi of today is starkly different from the nostalgic dramatisation depicted in films and television shows. However, according to people like Tahir, the lives of women living there have always been romanticised, often to their detriment. From the tawaifs of the Mughal era to the nautch girls of the British and the aspiring actresses of Partition, the prospects of Hira Mandi women are painfully grim.
Some become rich, almost respectable, and move their families out of the area. Some get married or become permanent vassals to men with many wives. Some experience brief fame and fortune in faraway lands. Most, however, end up where they began, veiled by the night, ensconced in the shadows, captive to the dismal magnetism of Hira Mandi.
