In Sangeeta’s Society Girl, sex work is all work

In a flour mill, a young girl in pigtails winnows wheat when her manager drunkenly stumbles into frame. The camera cuts to his shoe sinking into soft mounds of fine grain. Against those same piles, he rapes her while wheat rains down on their bodies. This is how Julie becomes a society girl.

Society Girl, Sangeeta’s 1976 directorial debut, stars Sangeeta herself as Julie, a sex worker pushed into the trade by circumstance and violence. Already an established actor before becoming one of Pakistan’s earliest woman filmmakers, she directs herself here without vanity. Julie is not a courtesan in the tragic-ornamental style of Anjuman (1970) or Umrao Jaan Ada (1972). She is something far less romantic: a salaried woman. By day, she works a clerical job in a shalwar kameez; by night, she becomes a call girl in a mini dress and a blonde wig.

Sangeeta’s understanding of the society girl as a sex worker is a creative liberty. According to Rekhta’s Urdu dictionary, society girl merely translates as ​“aazad, bebaak, betakalluf larki”: a free, bold, uninhibited girl. Though the phrase has fallen out of Pakistani usage, it has always carried a certain sexual ambiguity. The society girl is bold and free in the pragmatic sense, but in Pakistan, ​“bold and free” is also a sprawling category of sin, where every liberty for women is seen as ending with vice.

Much of this ambiguity can be traced to the decade itself. Between 1971 and 1977, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became a patron saint of a certain glamorous ​“modernity,” alongside his socialist ambitions. Free-flowing liquor, pseudo-jazz bands, and chirpy chanteuses formed its visual grammar. In films like Noukar (1975) and Zubaida (1976), the nightclub becomes the staging ground for this excess, doubling as an indictment of corruption. The society girls in these films are not sex workers, but wealthy women who drink and party at nightclubs – their freedoms cast as a repudiation of tradition and, eventually, as their ruin.

But even this usage only partially reflects the phrase’s initial meaning. In the February 1891 issue of ​‘The North American Review’, anti-suffragist writer Kate Gannett Wells describes the society girl as a creature assembled from ​“parentage and money” in the correct proportions. In Pakistan, however, the phrase thickens with a different set of assumptions. Rather than denoting pedigree, society girl comes to literalise girls who move through high society. That this movement appears fundamentally averse to marriage owes something both to the phrase’s original usage and its local context, and helps explain Sangeeta’s pointed transformation of the society girl into a prostitute – a leap that resembles puritanical hysteria. Wells’s society girl is ​“serene, self-poised, free, brilliant, wise, unmarried.” She knows too much of the world and its ambitions to care for men or marriage. From there, it is only a short step from refusing marriage to being refused it. And in Pakistani cinema, the sex worker remains the unmarriable woman par excellence.

What remains a potent threat in Noukar and Zubaida, that these women will be too ruined to build a family, Society Girl sheds almost immediately. Like many of its contemporaries, it offers little futurity to women sexually ​“dishonoured,” whether by choice or force. In this imagination, all public space is eventually corrosive: every step outside the home leads women toward the nightclub, and every step inside risks their sexual purity. One thinks of Tehzeeb (1970), where a husband’s attempt to modernise his wife transforms her into a nightclub socialite while her marriage steadily disintegrates. But where Tehzeeb succumbs fully to reactionary panic, Sangeeta’s film is far more interested in the making of the society girl.

The flour mill flashback at the outset – wheat as the visual sign of Bhutto’s socialist promise of ​“roti, kapra aur makaan” (food, clothes, and shelter) – makes explicit what the film keeps returning to: Julie’s body is a site of extraction long before she enters the nightclub. The manager who rapes her in the present is revealed to be a leprous beggar, his downfall a simultaneous allusion to karma and the mounting debt and inflation under Bhutto. The now-familiar ​“sex work is work” formulation is usually taken to mean that it is liberatory and pleasurable like all work. But for Julie, sex work, like all work, is emotionally and physically extractive labour with diminishing returns. 

“In a society girl’s company, even monsters cry and become men,” Julie tells Asif early in the film. ​“We gather their grief and leave them with joy.” Asif arrives at her nightclub, grieving, believing his wife dead, and pays not for sex but for company. Their relationship grows romantic, which makes it all the more devastating when Julie learns his wife is alive near the film’s end. But this revelation does not come as betrayal, for Julie’s dispossession is too total for any single loss to feel like a surprise. If sex work soothes her clientele at her expense, alcohol is what keeps her going. Her two jobs support her younger sister Muna and their mother. Muna, a devout Catholic, despises Julie’s profession so intensely that one wonders whether she goes to church primarily to negotiate her sister’s salvation. ​“Christ, show her the right path or give her death,” she pleads.

As it turns out, the right path is also the path toward self-annihilation. When Julie finally quits drinking and sex work, withdrawal and depression push her body to the brink of death. Sangeeta’s decision to make Julie and her family Christian opens sex, religion, and labour into exchangeable terms. By sidestepping the Muslim majority altogether, the film commits a safer blasphemy to insist upon its bleak premise: everything is up for sale, including salvation. Only drinking can save Julie, her doctor tells Muna. With barely any income, the sister is forced to sell her crucifix to buy a bottle of whiskey.

The pain of the transaction is unmistakable. For the better part of the film, Muna refers to Julie as a ​“pile of filth”, a phrase that intensifies until Julie, too, describes herself as such. This vocabulary of waste gathers the stickiness of disposability in the titular song sequence, when another glittering society girl sings, ​“Ik katti patang hoti hai society girl” – a society girl is like a severed kite. As the song ends, Julie claps bitterly: ​“Mock the society girl, who is no one’s wife, sister, daughter, or mother. She is merely a spare room in the house that anyone can enter and leave at any time.”

A pile of filth, a spare room, once a mill worker, now a clerk, and a society girl: the categories accumulate until even the category of ​“girl” begins to break. When she speaks, the club erupts in laughter. ​“Weren’t you happy just being a society girl?” someone asks. ​“Yes,” she replies, ​“until I stopped drinking and the woman inside me came back to life.” A former client pushes a glass toward her. ​“Drink this. It will kill the woman and bring back the society girl.”

While Anjuman kills its courtesan with a final dance and Noukar drives its socialite to suicide following an unwed pregnancy, Society Girl arrives at the less flattering conclusion that some bodies simply wear out. Diagnosed with cancer, Julie goes to the mountains for treatment, where luck (or a lack thereof) leads her to Asif’s wife. She reunites the couple and dies shortly after, as though the film has run out of ways to make her useful. There is no moral left to extract from her, only the fact of depletion.