Fouzia Saeed, Taboo!
The Hidden Culture of a Red Light Area (Karachi: Oxford University Press,
2001), pp.324. Price Rs. 595/--.
While there are serious academic studies of prostitution
in many parts of the world, including India, there is no such study of this
phenomenon in Pakistan. The only book-length study is Shorish Kashmiri’s Us Bazaar Mein [In that Bazaar] which is
not well-researched and tends to be tiresomely moralistic. Kashmiri tries to
find out the causes of prostitution but does not succeed in doing so. Fouzia
Saeed, on the other hand, does come up with a theory of prostitution by going
deep into the counter-culture of professional prostitutes i.e women born in the
traditional families which specialize in entertainment.
The author uses the ethnographic method of research. She
paid several visits to Shahi Mohalla, the Red Light Area of Lahore, talking to
musicians from the Mirasi biradri and procurers as well as prostitutes from the
Kanjar biradri. She found contacts with individual men and women who started
trusting her to the extent that they told her the well-kept secrets of this
covert sub group. Her study was conducted in the late 1990s and is, therefore,
the latest scholarly work on this subject.
Fouzia found that the Mirasi men keep their own women
away from the Shahi Mohalla itself. They do not even give them lessons in music
and dancing so as to maintain the societal distance between themselves and the
Kanjars. To ply their trade they hire studios, called baithaks, in the Shahi Mohalla and that is where the kanjar
households send their young daughters to learn the art of singing and dancing.
They are respected as teachers (or ustads
as they are called) and are the backbone of the entertainment industry in Pakistan.
As the government has banned prostitution but still allows dancing and singing,
the prostitutes call themselves dancing girls. They are allowed to entertain
customers between eleven at night to one o’clock in the morning. After this the
customers are supposed to leave and police patrolling increases. However, even
during these hours, not everybody is merely listening to songs and watching
dances. Some men, maybe the majority, indulge in fornication in garishly
decorated secret rooms. After the closing hours very powerful people, whom the police is also scared of, take
over. This is the most dangerous time in the bazaar. This is the time when
drunken parties of men wander around picking fights with each other and even
murders take place.
The kanjar families apparently invert the usual
male-female relations in Pakistani society. In most Pakistani families men are
dominant and sons are valued as guardians of the family, upholders of family
honour and providers of old age insurance for the parents. Among the kanjars,
however, female managers (naikas) are
dominant. They control the finances and lives of dependent men, who are
generally unemployed, as well as the younger women. The daughters-in-law, who
are duped into marriages with sons, are made to take care of the home providing
free labour for the whole extended household. They are not, however, forced
into prostitution. The daughters are highly valued and their births are
celebrated while those of sons are not. The daughters are sent to be trained by
an ustad and not having an ustad entails loss of prestige. Then,
when the girl reaches puberty and sometimes even before that, the naika or a male manager arranges her
‘marriage’. This ‘marriage’ is no more than a contract for either exclusive
right to her for a period or preferred right in lieu of a sum of money or a
maintenance allowance. Eventually the ‘marriage’ lapses, or even while it is in
place, the young woman is encouraged to earn as much for the family as she can
from dancing and singing as well as prostitution.
The kanjar households have values as do all sub-groups
and one’s prestige depends upon how one adheres to these values. For instance,
the higher a girl is paid for her ‘marriage’ (i.e loss of virginity), the more
prestigious is the family. If her ‘marriage’ is delayed, the family loses face.
Similarly, the more a girl is offered for her mujra (singing and dancing), the more prestigious she is. Nowadays,
however, girls are considered lucky if they get into the film industry. They
also go for variety shows instead of the traditional mujra which involved classical singing and dancing---arts which are
on the decline even in traditional kanjar families. For such families the
elopement of a girl with a client, even if she marries him, entails loss of
face. Similarly, prostitution without singing and dancing represents a descent
in the social hierarchy. The most despised members of the profession, says the
author, live degraded lives indulging only in prostitution in hired rooms. Such
women are looked down upon in the more prestigious kanjar social order.
Fouzia Saeed’s research was extremely difficult and
risky. First, she had to defy the bureaucracy (of which she was a member being
an officer in the Institute of Folk Heritage, Islamabad) to proceed with the
research at all. Secondly, she had to face hostility from the police and lastly
she had to endure degrading insinuations and proposals from members of the
kanjar community and others. In spite of all this she persisted and finally
came up with this unique piece of research. Shorish Kashmiri had spent three
years from 1949 to 1952 interviewing six hundred prostitutes of whom 80 had
joined the profession out of poverty and 116 were from the professional
families of prostitutes. The others had drifted in for other reasons such as
bad company (45), failed love affairs (57)
and abduction (22). However, he is so intent upon blaming the men for
intemperate lust that he tells us nothing about their culture. Fouzia
concentrates her attention to the professional kanjar families but tells us
much about the lives and values of the prostitutes and their sub-culture.
Fouzia does not choose to write in the conventional
academic style complete with notes and references. However, she is academically
trained and has made efforts to refer to all aspects of prostitution. She
chooses the case-study method to study prostitution. The study reads like a
novel with real life details about conversations, hospitality, humour and
temper making for highly interesting reading. In the end she suggests that
prostitution is the outcome of men’s desire to control women. As this involves
controlling the sexuality of one’s own women, it also requires the creation of
‘sub-cultures for their own entertainment’ (p.308). The kanjar community
provides such a sub-culture and is as much a victim of the power of patriarchy
as are the respectable women in society. In other words, ‘respectable’ women
and prostitutes are both victims of the patriarchal system which, however,
blames women for prostitution.
While this conclusion as well as the details of the
research are extremely useful and the narrative is most interesting, this
method of research is far too subjective to yield quantifiable results. One
feels that such results, on the lines of Kashmiri, might have been insightful.
The other problem is that Fouzia Saeed has not mentioned Shorish Kashmiri, the
only person who has done research like hers, however flawed it might be,
anywhere. She has also missed out a fairly large number of novels, stories,
films and journal articles on prostitution which could certainly have provided
her with a comparative dimension which the book lacks. However, despite these
omissions and the non-academic style, Fouzia Saeed’s work is an original,
significant and outstanding work of research. It is one of those rare
undertakings which a bold and enterprising researcher comes up once in decades.
I hope it will become as well known Fernando Henrique’s classical (1966) study
of the subject.