The Dancing Girl: A Novel (New Directions Paperbook)

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811212564
• ISBN13: 9780811212564
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 111 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.0"