The Courtesan’s Quarter

A beautiful and ambitious woman is trapped in a culture and a social order that binds her instincts and natural desires with the strictest of constraints. Her life is the business of everybody around her, and is shaped by their expectations and their censure.

The work of this novelist is shaped by the expectations and concerns of the same milieu. But his natural talents—revealed in the brilliant characterization, absorbing narrative, and passages of tender poetic quality—blaze out to proclaim him a writer of high calibre, embedded though he was in an age that promised nothing but despair to the ordinary native of his land.

This is a translation of an Urdu novel, Bazaar-e-Husn, by one of the finest colonial writers of the Indian subcontinent.