For all its effortless evocation of time and place and filling in of historical gaps, [The Dancing Girl] is, above all, a moving testimony of love in a time of change.

London Times Literary Supplement

The Dancing Girl

by Hasan Shah

Written in 1790, Hasan Shah’s autobiographical romance, The Dancing Girl, is remarkable for both its lyrical prose and its fine recreation of a time, a place, and a culture––India in the 1780s, a tolerant, affable era before the full establishment of British colonial rule. The Dancing Girl tells of the doomed love of Hasan Shah (aide-de-camp to a British officer) and Khanum Jan (a courageous and gifted dancer of the courtesan caste) whose secret marriage could not prevent their separation. At Khanum Jan’s death, her grief-striken husband turned his raw emotion into a surprisingly modern, first-person narrative “without realizing,” as leading Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder observes in the foreword to her translation (from the 1893 Urdu translation of the original Persian), “that he had become a pioneer of the modern Indian novel.”

Paperback(published Nov, 01 1993)

ISBN
9780811212564
Price US
9.95
Trim Size
5x8

Hasan Shah

18th century Indian writer

For all its effortless evocation of time and place and filling in of historical gaps, [The Dancing Girl] is, above all, a moving testimony of love in a time of change.

London Times Literary Supplement

For all its effortless evocation of time and place and filling in of historical gaps, [The Dancing Girl] is, above all, a moving testimony of love in a time of change.

Aamer Hussein, London Times Literary Supplement