Staging pleasures and excesses of modernity: Clubs in Urdu social films

This article examines the employment of the space of the club in Urdu social films in Pakistan as a site for staging the pleasures and excesses of modernity. Until the prohibition order imposed in Pakistan on clubs and alcohol in 1977, Urdu social films, which revolved around issues of modern life and family, often featured clubs as a part of their structure. The club was an addition to the space of the home, where social films not only staged the conflicts of modernity but also spectacularized its pleasures through song-and-dance and melodrama. Song-and-dance, in particular, became a vehicle for staging both the pleasures and excesses of modernity. This article traces such pleasures and excesses in the films of the 1960s and 1970s as a system and structure, highlighting their gendered dynamics. I demonstrate how the club mise-en-scene enabled the emergence of new forms of music, dance, fashion, and architecture as pleasures of modernity, and how the very pleasures were undermined by the excesses of melodrama. My analysis shows that the space of the club and its attendant pleasures and excesses functioned as a system and shaped the ‘social’ as a commercial film form.