Heera Mandi, today invoked as shorthand for moral decline, once occupied a far more complex and culturally central position in the city’s life. Before colonial rule, it functioned not merely as a red-light district but as a recognised centre of artistic training, patronage, and pedagogy. Its residents, the tawaifs, a term that once denoted courtly performers rather than the modern category of “prostitute”, were accomplished practitioners of classical music, dance, poetry, and etiquette, shaping the tastes of nawabs, princely families, and elite courtiers across North India.
Going further back, dance in the subcontinent did not originate as spectacle or seduction, but as a religious ritual. From temple traditions such as the devadasi system to courtly kathak lineages, movement was historically embedded in divine devotion and cosmology, treated as a disciplined art form long before it was recorded as a moral threat.
This history is neither trivial nor accidental, as it underpins everything that follows. The reduction of Heera Mandi into a moral stigma was not inevitable, nor indigenous. It was the outcome of a deliberate colonial reordering of space, gender, and morality—a sad, and dare I say, pathetic, transformation whose effects continue to shape Pakistan’s cultural policy and public imagination today.
In pre-colonial Lahore, tawaifs occupied an ambivalent but respected social position. They were not wives, but neither were they social outcasts. Their value lay in cultural labour: the transmission of classical forms, linguistic sophistication, and social etiquette. Young men from feudal and merchant households were sent to them to learn adab-o-sukhan (civility and comportment) and shayari (poetry); basically, the art of refined conversation, which served as an informal schooling that wove music, poetry, and manners into daily life.
Heera Mandi’s economy operated through well-established patronage. Women exercised relative financial autonomy and professional authority. Patrons would provide support in exchange for private performances, lessons, and music and dances. This system allowed women to maintain their own households, retain earnings from performances and gifts, and manage apprentices, giving them a degree of financial autonomy rarely seen elsewhere in society at the time. While hierarchies and exclusions certainly existed, the system did not define these women solely through sexuality. Their legitimacy derived from skill, lineage, and cultural capital.
Culture does not survive through imported ideas, but through local people… often those whose presence makes us uncomfortable, and whom we therefore prefer not to remember
However, Victorian moral frameworks, shaped by anxieties about sexuality and public order, could not accommodate indigenous institutions and blurred boundaries between art, intimacy, and commerce. Colonial policy introduced the Contagious Diseases Acts in the late 1860s, and related regulations forced women to register with the state and submit to invasive weekly medical examinations, often involving speculums (invasive to the point of violating dignity), under the guise of disease prevention.
These measures went far beyond routine oversight: tawaifs were confined to specific brothel zones, monitored constantly by officials and local intermediaries, and threatened with fines, imprisonment, or expulsion for stepping outside prescribed boundaries. In a bitter irony, many accounts suggest the same British officers enforcing these rules regularly exploited the women themselves for sexual access.
The question that inevitably follows is why the British did it. The answer lies less in morality than in management. The actions primarily protected their army from venereal disease, focusing not on policing their soldiers but the Indian women, who were mostly the victims. Regulation also reinforced racial hierarchy: by marking indigenous women as vectors of contagion and immorality, the crown state preserved the fiction of European moral and bodily superiority, even as it depended on the very intimacies it condemned. A perfect crime that safeguarded soldiers, promoted ethnocentrism, and converted social complexity into administrative control.
Imperial rule also selectively extracted music and dance for sanitised elite consumption, reframing art as a commodity for the upper classes rather than a shared cultural practice. Performances were curated for nawabs, British officers, and urban elites, stripping them of the social context that had nurtured them. Women who had sustained the art were marginalised, their expertise transformed into entertainment consumed at a distance, monetised but morally divorced from them. Socioeconomic hierarchies ensured that access to culture depended not on ability or interest but on wealth and social status.
One of the most enduring British legacies in the subcontinent has to be cultural amnesia. Classical music and dance survived, but their custodians were erased. Performance was relocated to concert halls and later television studios, stripped of its social genealogy. Postcolonial Pakistan inherited this contradiction. The state celebrates heritage through festivals and curated nostalgia, while remaining uneasy about the bodies and labour that produce that culture. The result is a persistent split between aesthetic appreciation and moral acceptance.
Heera Mandi remains frozen in public imagination as a moral shorthand. At a moment when provincial policies and district-level regulatory authorities in Punjab have, in recent years, imposed punitive restrictions on dancers on grounds of “obscenity” (including widely reported lifetime bans), revisiting this history becomes analytically urgent. It allows for a reassessment of how colonial-era moral governance continues to inform contemporary cultural regulation, often in tension with internationally recognised frameworks for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage.
This certainly is not an argument for romanticising the past or ignoring sexual exploitation. It is a call to recognise how moral absolutism, when embedded in policy, narrows cultural possibility. More than the arts, colonial rule reshaped the criteria of respectability itself. Those criteria continue to determine who is granted legitimacy, protection, and most importantly, voice.
Lahore’s cultural history cannot be fully told through its monuments alone. It also resides in the vanished performances of women whose contributions survive without their names. To revisit Heera Mandi, then, is to confront uncomfortable questions and acknowledge that what Pakistan dismissed as moral decay was once central to our cultural life. Culture does not survive through imported ideas, but through local people… often those whose presence makes us uncomfortable, and whom we therefore prefer not to remember.