Bazaar-e-Husn i.e The Red Light Area(Red-light district

Red-light district

A red-light district is a part of an urban area where there is a concentration of prostitution and sex-oriented businesses, such as sex shops, strip clubs, adult theaters, etc...

), Hindi title Seva-sadan (i.e. The House of Service) is a Hindi

Hindi

Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...

/Urdu

Urdu

Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...

 novel by Munshi Premchand

Munshi Premchand

Munshi Premchand , was a famous writer of modern Hindi-Urdu literature. He is generally recognized in India as the foremost Hindi-Urdu writer of the early twentieth century...

. Originally written in Urdu under the title Bazaar-e-Husn but first published in Hindi under the title Seva-sadan (i.e. The House of Service) in 1919 and later on in Urdu in 1924 from Lahore.

It was Premchand's first major novel; before it, he had published four novellas in Urdu of just about a hundred pages each.

Synopsis

Bazaar-e-Husn is a tale of an unhappy housewife who is beguiled away from the path of domestic virtue into becoming a courtesan but then reforms herself and atones by serving as the manager of an orphanage for the young daughters of courtesans, the seva-sadan of the Hindi title. While the Urdu title highlights the fall of the heroine, the Hindi title highlights her redemption, and it is tempting to see the two titles as widely symptomatic of their respective literary cultures.