Cinemas and audiences in the city: Embodied and social experiences of cinema-going in Karachi

This article provides an overview of the development of film exhibition spaces, audience formation, and audience practices and experiences in Karachi from the colonial era to the late 1970s in postcolonial Pakistan. Cinema houses developed in Karachi as it grew from a colonial port city into a megacity, serving its heterogeneous population across class and ethnolinguistic boundaries. The lived culture of audiences and their embodied practices and social experiences were often not acknowledged in accounts that sought to classify them into social categories and displayed anxieties about them. Contrary to these social categories, the exhibition sites across the city provided unique experiences to their audiences situated within their social, cultural and historical contexts. This article presents how the development of exhibition spaces evolved over time in Karachi and the social and aesthetic functions those sites served for its diverse audiences. It maps the heterogeneous constitution of audiences across the sociocultural terrain of the city and explores their social and sensorial relationships with the diverse exhibition spaces and programmes in a single location of Karachi.