While there are serious academic studies of prostitution in many parts of the world, including India, there is no study of this nature 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.  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 specialise 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 biradari and procurers as well as prostitutes from the kanjar biradari.  She contacts, 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 are 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 or 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 rights to her for a period or preferred rights 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.  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.  But she persisted and finally came up with this unique piece of research.  Shorish Kashmiri had spent three years from, 1949 to 1952, interviewing 600 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 focuses on the professional kanjar families and gives the readers valuable information on the lives  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 an effort 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.’  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 original and extremely significant.  It is one of those rare undertakings which a bold and enterprising researcher comes up with, once in decades.  I hope it will become as well known as Fernando Henrique’s classical (1966) study on the subject.