Excerpt: She wilfully erases the economic and political conditions they live in and weaponises their lives in the interest of a global nostalgia that has no basis in reality.
The doomed courtesan or dancing girl is a familiar figure in Indian cinema. In films like the 1972 Pakeezah set in the turn of the twentieth century or the 1981 Umrao Jaan, set in the nineteenth-century, and several others, the story is generally the same: a girl, still a child, is groomed to become a courtesan or tawaif. She learns intricate dance forms and classical singing, writes her own poetry, and is conversant enough in life and literature that she can banter and engage with the wealthy and highly educated men who come to watch her perform. Eventually, she meets a wealthy patron of the brothel who is pure of heart and they fall breathlessly in love. Their relationship is, of course, overshadowed by the differences in their stations in life and they part if not for ever then for at least several years, breathing lovelorn sighs and reams of poetry. More often than not, the courtesan dies or retires and retreats into the shadows, usually in an artistically arranged and interestingly lit broken down haveli or mansion, the space providing a metaphor for her life that simply cannot be escaped.
Courtesans have existed in various cultures and across time; some, like Mah Laqa Bai who presided over 18th-century Hyderabad, were women of multiple accomplishments and renowned public figures. Such women were cultivated, like rare hothouse orchids, from an early age for the pleasure of connoisseurs who ostensibly desire women who can do more than simply perform sex. A running theme in most discussions about courtesans is that they either perform no sex at all or that sex is merely part of the package deal, that their talents extend to being perfect companions for the educated and sophisticated customer—who is barely referred to as such. Modern day courtesans exist, as geishas in Japan or “nautch girls” in South Asia, and the latter are the focus of a recent New York Times piece by Maria Abi-Habib, titled, with all the subtlety of a rapidly-faltering Saturday Night Live sketch, “They Once Danced for Royalty. Now It’s Mostly for Leering Men.”
Abi-Habib is especially adamant about establishing that the dancing girls she writes about are not, horrors, mere prostitutes, and the entire report drips with contempt for the very idea of sex being exchanged for money. As Abi-Habib tells the tale, the men who came to watch the girls dance before “art patrons” of old who were there simply to gaze upon the courtesans of yore as opposed to, oh, heavens be, men who now explicitly demand sex from women whose services they have paid for.
She begins:
Kiran remembers the days when she shimmied confidently across rooms adorned with plush velvet pillows and fine carpets, working alongside a troupe of trained musicians and commanding the attention of Pakistan’s wealthiest men.
Now, she travels with a crusty boom box and a few CDs of electronic music to dance in front of groups of ogling men who want one thing: sex.
“It used to be more about the art, the dancing and music,” said Kiran, 28, who asked that her last name not be used because of safety concerns. “Now, after one or two songs, all the men think about is the bed.”
If Kiran is only 28, and she was drafted at 14, as the article also states, then “the days” that she speaks of would be at the turn of this century: not exactly a long-ago and bygone era. Abu-Habib’s rendering of the history of Pakistan and of dancing girls emerges through sepia-tinted and simplistic reconstructions. According to her, the “art” of dancing for men originated in the Mughal Empire, and when “British rule was established in the subcontinent in 1858, the dancers faced scorn from less socially liberal colonizing powers, but the tradition held on.” Those would be Victorian colonizing powers, people whose era literally defined conservatism, and yet Abi-Habib cannot bring herself to name white people as conservative, bestowing upon them the more capacious term “less socially liberal,” reserving the more stinging word for brown Muslims when she writes about the mid-1970s and the rise in religious conservative politicians like General Zia ul-Haq. These (evil, Muslim, conservative) men clamped down on the art, causing it to go further underground, according to her. But this narrative is complicated when she quotes Shaguftah Begum, now 65, who comes from a long line of dancers and recalls her mother and her being “treated royally.” If Begum is now 65, she would have begun sometime in the 1960s, and presumably her career also spanned the era of religious conservatism; if she has such praise for the treatment she and her mother received, we can assume that dancing girls were able to enjoy relative prosperity and freedom.
Abu-Habib’s history makes little sense, except as an easily digestible narrative of Good Muslims (of the Mughal times) supplanted by Bad Muslims (of the mid-1970s onwards) with, along the way, benign white colonisers perhaps bemused by all the dancing but not particularly antagonistic towards it. If the history is strangely rendered, her insistence that dancing girls were and are not performing sex of any sort in exchange for money (and if so, reluctantly of after deep relationship-building) results in strange contradictions that even she cannot hide. At one point, Begum perhaps inadvertently gives away a crucial detail when she is quoted saying, “There was no money in the prostitution, it was all about the dancing.”
“There was no money in the prostitution,” implies that there was in fact sex exchanged for, well, something. Or that sex was simply part of a package deal, if you will, which included having poems recited and dances danced and songs sung. But Abu-Habib clings to the fiction that in the olden days (stretching all the way back to the oughts of this century), courtesanship had nothing to do with sex.
Abu-Habib’s “history” of dancing girls/courtesans is shoddy and simplistic and perhaps deliberately convoluted because she cannot acknowledge the plainly discernible fact that dancing girls fucked and fuck their clients, then and now, even if at the end of what she describes as long “courtships.” She writes of women who were installed as “mistresses” and who bore the children of favoured men as if they were somehow engaged in versions of the marriages the men were already part of and not as regular sex workers exchanging sex, companionship, and their wombs for financial security: a form of sex work (or prostitution to use the term she and her sources throw around with such contempt).
The report also reinforces several classist tropes about the men then and now, starting with the early contention that the wealthy men of yore merely bestowed their attention upon the women while today, men without as much money or without some royal lineage dare to “ogle.” She writes: “Working conditions have become more dangerous, and the audiences have also changed, dancers say. They once included wealthy art patrons but are now filled with men who now expect, or demand, sex as part of the performance.”
Here, Abu-Habib implicitly states that wealthy “art patrons” (not clients!) would never have abused the women, that their riches made them more benign, unwilling to cause harm. In fact, it’s far more likely that their wealth insulated them from accusations if they abused women. In contrast to them, Abu-Habib contemptuously paints the great unwashed masses of modern male clients as potential abusers who think they can actually get sex for the money they pay. In her rendition of events, wealthy art patrons who gave money to watch the girls dance were merely quietly and respectfully absorbing their art, while the men who expect and demand actual sex are ogling ogres. The hidden coercion of the older form of brothel (we might wonder, what happened to the dancers who refused to sleep with “art patrons”?) is erased, and the perfectly legitimate open transaction of sex is deplored as ugly and demeaning.
Abu-Habib treats the 2000s as some bygone era of lush opulence where dance girls confidently “shimmied” across the floor, her presentation of history deliberately occludes the fact that British Victorians invented a new brand of hypocrisy and conservatism, and she ignores the fact that a courtesan creating beautiful poetry in her place of business is still a sex worker constrained in the confines of her brothel. Why does this peculiar text exist in the first place, in the pages of the New York Times?
When it comes to affairs abroad, liberals and progressives are uneasy about Trump’s stoking of the fires of Islamaphobia but still want to take comfort in the idea that there is a good Islam and a bad Islam. Reluctant to actually engage the complexities of a religion and the millions of people who practice and live it in multi-faceted and complex ways, Abu-Habib use class and a nostalgia for a fictitiously graceful and genteel bygone era to redeem a “good Islam.” In this, the figure of the genteel, wealthy, Muslim client (also presumably English-speaking), the charming art patron simply there to appreciate the dancing, becomes the literal face of an acceptable Islam. In contrast, the brown masses asking for sex in return for money become the multiple—ogling—faces of hypocrisy and lust.
Abu-Habib is using the figure of the courtesan to question the validity of sex work, of the very idea that sex or even sexual excitement, whether or not accompanied by the poetic ghazals of Mirza Ghalib, when exchanged for anything, whether social prestige as the mistress of a nobleman or hard cash, immediately becomes part of a trade, a transaction. We might reverse her maneuver and see how sex work, the idea that sex (defined as any number of acts that bring pleasure) embedded in any transaction questions the legitimacy of the idea that courtesanry or dancing is simply a pure art form, as those more invested in respectability might understand it.
Abu-Habib deliberately ignores the material realities and geopolitics surrounding contemporary dancers. She never bothers to ask, what are the economic conditions that leave a 14-year-old faced with the choice of sex work or grinding and hopeless poverty on the streets? She finds a dancing master in Lahore who insists that what he teaches is an art form and bemoans that he only has six students, most of whom were flown in from Dubai and return there or to America. These women are dancing in private clubs in Dubai, the only places where dancing of any sort is allowed, in a country where the sight of a midriff can send a woman to jail and where intense secrecy around any alternative lifestyles, which include dancing, breeds coercion and danger for performers who may well have to exchange sex at the end of performances. As for America, where I live: it’s not as if there’s a thriving market for women performing in this tradition.
But Abu-Habib avoids all such questions and instead recycles nostalgia to extract wealthy Pakistanis and an imagined, glorious semi-Royal past as exemplars of a bygone era of taste, riches, and gentility. Her account is presented as an indictment of religious conservatism, but it is itself a deeply conservative text that echoes a distrust of Islam unless presented as urbane and sophisticated and in alignment with supposed Western values of freedom of expression. Its contempt for sex work in its refusal to acknowledge that courtesans or dancing girls are not pious, untouchable queens but women using forms of sex to trade for security and money makes it part of a deeply conservative view of women’s autonomy (that they should have none). It also supports a liberal and progressive tendency to insist that wilfully trading sex for anything that is not “pure” pleasure between people embroiled in a romantic relationship is degrading and distasteful.
In the era of Trump, liberals and progressives—those who most reflect the ideology of the Times—continually revisit history to whitewash past American sins in order to paint Trump as the worst President ever, a move that dulls the pain of recognising that he is no aberration but merely a symptom of a deadly modern empire whose rot is surfacing. In recent months, the Bush family, which has yielded no fewer than two of the most war-mongering and brutal Presidents, has been resurrected as a fount of gentle patriarchs. Abu-Habid’s report on the dancing girls of Lahore is in line with this rewriting of history with more perverse ends: it deploys the women in an Islamophobic text disguised as feminism, but wants to reassure readers that, yes, there are these bad Muslims everywhere and what is required is a resurrection of an older, more genteel lifestyle where the wealthy took care of all. She wilfully erases the economic and political conditions they live in and weaponises their lives in the interest of a global nostalgia that has no basis in reality. In the end, the report serves as an exquisitely embroidered but utterly tattered shawl that barely keeps an autumn chill off the shoulders: it does them no favours at all.
Many thanks to JJP for inspiring this post, and to Gautham Reddy for generously reading and commenting on a draft.
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