Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity: In search of the modern? 9780415465441, 9781315747590

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Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity

Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cinema has been adopted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh. At the same time, this has been the period for the articulation of modern nationhood and cultural identity of Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. This book analyzes the relationship between cinema and modernity in Bangladesh, providing a narrative of the uneven process that produced the idea of “Bangladesh cinema.” This book investigates the roles of a non-Western “national” film industry in Asia in constructing nationhood and identity within colonial and postcolonial predicaments. Drawing on the idea of cinema as public sphere and the postcolonial notion of formation of the “Bangladesh” nation, interactions between cinema and middle-class Bengali Muslims in different social and political matrices are analyzed. The author explores how the conflict among different social groups turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities. In particular, he illustrates the connections between film production and reception in Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim identity. Questioning and debunking the usual notions of “Bangladesh” and “cinema,” this book positions the cinema of Bangladesh within a transnational frame. Starting with how to locate the “beginning” of the second Bengali language cinema in colonial Bengal, the author completes the investigation by identifying a global Bangladeshi cinema in the early twenty-first century. The first major academic study on this large and vibrant national cinema, this book demonstrates that Bangladesh cinema worked as different “public spheres” for different “publics” throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Filling a niche in Global Film and Media Studies and South Asian Studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students of these disciplines. Zakir Hossain Raju is Professor in Media and Communication and Dean of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Independent University, Bangladesh. His research focuses on film and identity, cultural translation and popular visual culture in trans-Asian contexts, especially relating to the cinemas of Bangladesh, India, Malaysia and South Korea.

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89 Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity In search of the modern? Zakir Hossain Raju

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Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity In search of the modern?

Zakir Hossain Raju

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Zakir Hossain Raju The right of Zakir Hossain Raju to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Raju, Zakir Hossain. Bangladesh cinema and national identity: in search of the modern? / Zakir Hossain Raju. pages cm – (Routledge contemporary South Asia series; 89) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motion pictures–Bangladesh. 2. National characteristics in motion pictures. 3. Motion picture industry–Bangladesh. 4. Muslims in motion pictures. 5. National characteristics in motion pictures. I. Title. PN1993.5.B3R35 2014 791.43095492–dc23 2014016862 ISBN: 978-0-415-46544-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74759-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

For Disha and in memory of Amma

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Contents

Preface Introduction

xiv 1

1

Methods in film historiography: towards an interpretive history of Bangladesh cinema

15

2

National cinema and non-Western modernity: framework to study Bangladesh cinema

40

3

National cinema study and beginning of Bangladesh film history

65

4

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity in colonial Bengal

91

5

The Dhaka film industry and Bengali-Muslim modernity in postcolonial East Pakistan

115

6

Popular cinema: between nation-state and market forces in contemporary Bangladesh

143

7

Cultural modernity and art film discourses: towards a global Bangladeshi cinema?

172

Bibliography Index

202 219

Preface

This book—an attempt of writing a history of Bangladesh cinema—holds a history of two decades. This history is also an Australasian journey as the book developed over my stay in Melbourne, Sydney, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul during this period. From these places the project collected a lot of debts from multiple crowds of people. Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity is reworked from my PhD thesis that I submitted to La Trobe University in Melbourne in 2004. However, this book project started a decade back through a series of chance encounters—as normally happens in European art cinema films. I, as a college student and aspiring film-maker in late 1980s Dhaka was engrossed in such art films. I had no idea about Asian cinema or national cinema as a study object. Only after I met Japanese film critic Tadao Sato in 1991 at the Hawaii International Film Festival, where my first film Face in the Millions was featured and he invited me to show my film in Fukuoka—at the “Focus on Asia” Film Festival in 1992, did I have my first encounter with some forms of Asian cinema. This encounter deepened there with my chance meeting with Aruna Vasudev, editor of Cinemaya: Asian Film Quarterly and founder of NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema). Aruna immediately roped me into NETPAC and demanded that I write for Cinemaya. When I wrote a survey on Bangladesh cinema for Cinemaya in 1994, I never imagined that I would be writing a whole monograph on this subject. This process began in Melbourne in the late 1990s, when I started doctoral study at La Trobe University and I got Chris Berry as my mentor and friend. I had met Chris—also by chance in 1993—in one of the NETPAC gatherings, which was also in Honolulu. With Chris’ extraordinary support, supervision and enthusiasm—during 1997–1998—the doctoral thesis started to take shape. In 2000, Chris had to leave for University of California, Berkeley, but he was always out there with this project until I completed the dissertation in 2004, and also after that—throughout the last decade, when it took the shape of this book. I am deeply indebted to him for his scholarly guidance as well as friendly advice, especially during the hard times when I felt that I could not complete the task. This academic project would never have been possible without his support.

Preface xv Dr. Felicity Collins, who was my doctoral supervisor at La Trobe in the early 2000s, also had a profound impact on the final shape of the thesis. The painstaking suggestions made by Felicity helped me to revise the later chapters thoroughly. I also thank Dr. Adam Knee, who supervised the project for a brief period, and my doctoral colleagues and friends in Melbourne during 1997–2002: Moinak Biswas, Stephen Teo, Brian Yecies, Dharmasena Pathiraja, Audrey Yu and Jubin Hu—often over coffee or lunch—helped me rethink the role of Bangladesh cinema as an Asian national cinema. Institutionally, Universities in Australia, Bangladesh and Malaysia, as well as a few fellowships, made this project possible. Starting with a Postgraduate Research Scholarship awarded by La Trobe University in the late 1990s, an ASIA Fellowship from the Ford Foundation in 2006–2007 and a Korea Foundation Fellowship in 2012–2013—all these kept my research efforts ongoing. My workplace in Dhaka since 2000—Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) also supported the project during these years. The late Bazlul Mobin Chowdhury, vice chancellor of IUB during 2000–2010, gave extraordinary support. Our current vice chancellor, M. Omar Rahman, has also gone out of his way to support and allow me to complete it. Monash University Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, where I taught during 2008–2010, helped to turn the thesis into this book. The final revision of the book coincided with my 2013 Fellowship at the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul, where Kim Soyoung and the TransAsia Screen Culture Institute extended all kinds of cooperation. Between the 1998 Film and History conference in Brisbane and the 2013 Asian Cinema workshop in Singapore, I presented parts of this book in earlier forms at various conferences in Dhaka, Melbourne, Pittsburgh, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Erfurt, New Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and a few other places. My ideas were challenged as well as sharpened through my interactions with so many scholars in these places. I must acknowledge the enthusiasm and friendship that I received on the way from a host of Asian cinema scholars, including Ravi Vasudevan, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Earl Jackson, Manjunath Pendakur, David Hanan, Shaoyi Sun, Valentina Vitali, Brian Shoesmith, Koichi Iwabuchi, Jyotsna Kapur, S. V. Srinivas, Lotte Hoek, Gaik Cheng Khoo, Benjamin McKay, Hassan Muthalib, Ashley Ratnavibhushana, Anjali Roy, Anne Ciecko and Wong Tuck Chong. I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers from Routledge as well as the examiners of my doctoral thesis: Paul Willemen, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Nabil Zuberi—all of whom wanted to see this published as a monograph. The valuable suggestions forwarded by the reviewers and examiners were immensely helpful to me, especially enabling me to think through some difficult theoretical terrains. I also thank my colleagues at Routledge Asian Studies: Dorothea Schaefter, Jillian Morrison and Rebecca Lawrence, who have been extraordinarily patient and helpful during last few years when I took time to prepare the manuscript. I duly acknowledge that early versions of two sections from the book have been previously published. These are, “Bangladesh Cinema: Native Resistance and Nationalist Discourse,” in Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in

xvi Preface a Global Frame, ed. Anne Tereska Ciecko (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2006) and “National Cinema and the Beginning of Film History in/of Bangladesh,” Screening the Past 11 (2000), URL: www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/ firstrelease/fr1100/rzfr11d.htm (last accessed in 2009). Two people who are no longer with us would be happiest to see this book published. These are my brother Rafiqul Hasan Nepi and my children’s “godfather” Wayne Levy. Nepi(bhai) was the one who, early on my journey, made me promise that I would complete the project. Wayne and his family truly hosted Disha and I in Melbourne. Wayne’s friendship is attached to this project from beginning to end. My family, including my siblings and my in-laws, especially my late father-in-law Obaidul Islam, have always inspired my research and writing. My mentors at the University of Dhaka, AAMS Arefin Siddique, Ahaduzzaman M. Ali, Ali Riaz and Gitiara Nasreen, have been ever enthusiastic and helpful with the project on its long journey. I also remember the late Alamgir Kabir and Tareque Masud and record my gratitude to Morshedul Islam, Manzare Hassin and Tanvir Mokammel—the stalwarts of Bangladesh independent cinema—who introduced me to the world of image and sound, and how to look at it critically. I list as the last, but not the least, our children—Athai Ariana and Inesh Iravan—who missed me a lot whilst I worked on this project, but always made my days with their smiles.

Introduction

The interaction of cinema with Bangladesh began at a time when there was no “Bangladesh” at all. Film exhibition began here at the end of the 1890s and silent film production began during the 1900s. Film as a newly-invented, technology-based entertainment from Europe reached this land when it was the eastern part of Bengal under British India. This was the “Bengal delta,” a region “that roughly coincides with modern Bangladesh.”1 This was also the time when the people of the delta started imagining a modern community identity that later led them in becoming a nation-state. During the mid to late twentieth century, the area went through two national formations—through the 1947 partition of India the Bengal delta turned into the eastern wing of Pakistan state, and through the 1960s nationalist movements and 1971 liberation war, it became an independent nation-state, “Bangladesh.” How has cinema, an imported, “Western” cultural form, gone through a process of indigenization in the Bengal delta since the 1890s? What were its connections and contentions with the national and nationalist formations during this period of more than a century? This book takes up these as central questions and addresses them from various vantage points. Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity then investigates the roles of a non-Western, “national” film industry in Asia in constructing nationhood and identity within colonial and postcolonial predicaments. While cinema has been adapted as a popular cultural institution in Bangladesh throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century, this is also the period for the articulation of modern nationhood and cultural identity of/for Bengali Muslims, the majority population living in the Bengal delta and for that matter also in Bangladesh. Similar to the non-linear formation of the nation-state, cultural identities and national modernity, this book is a narrative of an uneven process that produced the idea of a cinema that can be marked as “Bangladesh cinema.” Here, I question and problematize the very notion of Bangladesh cinema and also of “Bangladesh,” one of the least discussed nation-spaces from the geopolitical area often marked as the “non-West.” I use East Bengal, East Bengal/Pakistan and East Pakistan, as well as Bangladesh and Bengal delta, to name this non-Western nation-space, especially to denote how it represented different political-cultural formations in different historical junctures.

2

Introduction

Going beyond the physical facts and figures on Bangladesh cinema, by taking cinema as social institution, I propose a model of conceptualizing this cinema. My aim is to situate the function of Bangladesh cinema texts, from production to reception, within the broader social, political and cultural domain of twentiethcentury Bangladesh. I believe that, Film and cinema . . . can only exist within social, economic, and cultural parameters. . . . Film production and reception necessarily involve a series of complex relations between cultural forms and structures, economic relations within an industrial-commercial matrix, and the socio-political realities within which production and circulation take place.2 Following this proposition, I look at the “relation between representation and reception”3 of Bangladesh cinema. In order to analyze this cinema as a social institution interacting with other social institutions, I understand Bangladesh cinema as: a site of discursive contestation for and among multiple, diverse, and unequal constituencies; . . . a potentially unpredictable process due to overlaps and conjunctures between different types of publicity and diverse publics; and . . . a category containing a more comprehensive dimension for translating among diverse publics that is grounded in material structures . . . .4 In this way, I take the dissection of the relation between cinema and “diverse publics” as the prime task of this study on cinema and national identity in Bangladesh. The interaction between cinema and the ideas of nation and modernity throughout the last century or more fostered complex modes of appropriation for the film medium in Bangladesh—a process that I aim to understand and demonstrate in this study. I take Bengali Muslims of the Bengal delta as the principal actors in relation to cinema here. This is because of the “centrality of this merged identity among the majority of the population.”5 Their identities—as Bengalis, as Muslims, as Bengali-Muslims and later as Bangladeshis, BengaliBangladeshis or Muslim-Bangladeshis—as shaped in different circumstances, have played with and upon the roles and functions of the cinema here. I focus upon various contestations and constructions that developed out of such interactions between cinema and Bengali Muslims in different historical “moments” as I go along. The emerging middle-class Bengali Muslims of colonial East Bengal fought the hegemony of middle-class Bengali Hindus in 1910s–1940s Calcutta, for constructing and expressing a certain version of Bengali-Muslim identity through cinema. Using this identity as a “cultural identity” of/for Bengali Muslims of the delta, the cultural–nationalist Bengali Muslims in the 1950s and 1960s led the development of a vernacular film industry in East Pakistan—the renamed East Bengal—under the new state of Pakistan.6 This industry produced what may be termed as the second Bengali cinema of the world (Calcutta being the first) which contributed to the sense of a

Introduction 3 vernacular cultural modernity for Bengali Muslims—a modernity that was rooted into and developed out of the East-Bengali cultural world. This paradigm of local-born modernity was also closely related to the development of a new form of identity among Bengali Muslims—what has been termed as “separate Bengaliness”—an identity that was “distinctly ‘deltaic’: it was limited to East Bengal/Bangladesh.”7 As the population of East Bengal/Pakistan started to separate themselves from the larger “Bengali” identity as developed in colonial Bengal, the imagination of such a new Bengali identity became important in late twentieth-century Bangladesh. I argue and demonstrate in this study that identity streams such as this new, “deltaic” Bengali identity—as developed from the mid twentieth century onwards, as well as the Bengali-Muslim identity that developed in early twentieth-century East Bengal—consolidated a cultural-national modernity of/ for Bengali Muslims over last hundred years or so. This modernity—as a counter-discourse to Muslim nationalism patronized by the Pakistan State and also to Bengali modernity as developed in nineteenth-century (West) Bengal— served as a major and continuing trend of national modernity in East Bengal/ Bangladesh. Under the Bangladesh nation-state, cinema institutions and texts went through commercialization during the later decades of the twentieth century. The industrializing and homogenizing drives of the postcolonial state and the rise of localbased capitalism gave rise to a vibrant national popular cinema in post-1971 Bangladesh. In the circumstances, the Dhaka-based Bengali cinema that developed as a vernacular, “cultural” cinema during the 1950s and 1960s transformed itself to meet state-national aspirations. This cinema increasingly shed the cultural marks of Bengali-Muslim and delta-focused Bengali identities in order to become a “Bangladeshi,” Bengali cinema. In opposition to the culturalnational modernity that these identities propagated, the commercializing, popular film industry that developed under the guidance and protection of the Bangladesh state of the recent decades largely advocated for what I termed nation-state modernity. So this cinema, by constructing “Bangladeshi” identity as the onesize-fits-all umbrella for all Bengali Muslims as well as non-Muslims and nonBengalis living in Bangladesh, worked towards imagining the sense of a Bangladeshi modernity. This pro-state process of forming political identity as the identity towards nation-state modernity frustrated the pro-Bengali cultural nationalists. They identified popular cinema as unsuitable and damaging to the flourishing of a cultural modernity that they had envisaged for Bengali Muslims since the early twentieth century. So, the cultural-nationalist Bengali Muslims in 1980s to 2010s Bangladesh—in opposing the formation of “Bangladeshi” modernity by popular commercial cinema and its adjoining industry-based ‘art cinema’—patronized a discourse of independent cinema, taking up notions of modernity and art cinema from the West. Through various streams of independent cinemas, they utilized the notion of art cinema to propagate a Bangladeshi art cinema on the world stage—a “global cinema” that was successful in visualizing, producing and

4

Introduction

promoting a certain “Bangladesh” for the westernized middle class in Bangladesh as well as for the art-house audience in the West. In this way, during last hundred years or so, the interactions between cinema and national modernity—in cultural-national or state-national forms—gave rise to a large, vernacular national cinema called “Bangladesh cinema” in postcolonial South Asia. From the 1960s, in terms of annual film production, it turned out to be the larger of the two Bengali-language film industries in the world (the other one is, of course, the Calcutta industry in India, which started film production in the 1920s alongside other major South Asian film industries). Addressing a Bengali-speaking “national” audience in a rapidly urbanizing Bangladesh, the late-1970s Bangladesh film industry went on increasing its annual production of films almost geometrically. For example, between 1979 and 1989, its annual production rose almost 60 percent (from 50 films in 1979 to 78 films in 1989).8 It registered 20 percent growth in next eight years, as the annual film-production rate reached 92 in 1997 and again in 2000.9 If we take 1979 as the base year, the rate of annual film production exactly doubled in 2005, when the Bangladesh film industry reached the century mark and thus produced the highest number of films (100)10 in a given year. During the 1990s and 2000s, this industry produced 90 feature films on average each year. This annual filmic crop positions Bangladesh cinema as a strong contender to the three major South Asian cinemas—Hindi, Tamil and Telugu—each producing 150–200 films annually.11 More importantly, such a level (90 films) of annual film production marks Bangladesh cinema as the most prolific South Asian cinema outside India—far ahead of Pakistani and Sri Lankan national cinemas.12 This annual filmproduction number also easily makes the Bangladesh film industry one of the ten major national and regional film industries in Asia, if not in the world. However, it did not excite as much discussion as might be expected. Though Bangladesh cinema is one of the largest and most vibrant cinemas in Asia and in the world, this is still one of the least studied national cinemas; it is never researched in a scholarly manner utilizing contemporary methods and theories of Film Studies. Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity is, then, the first major effort that presents academic scholarship on multiple contours of this cinema as a national cinema. This study on a non-Western, Asian vernacular cinema can be seen as an early step towards fulfilling a long-standing gap. It is the first endeavour to situate Bangladesh national cinema within the contemporary academic–theoretical context of cinema and media studies—especially within the ongoing debate on how to think about cinema and identity formation in non-Western, Asian nation-spaces. Let us, then, take a short detour to position this study on cinema and national identity in/of Bangladesh within the context of Asian and South Asian Cinema Studies.

Introduction 5

Bangladesh cinema within Asian and South Asian Film Studies In global film and media studies, the study of Asian or non-Western national cinemas is still an emerging area of research. Film cultures in the non-West, as the “other” of Hollywood, started to be studied in Western academia from the 1980s. Monographs on Asian cinemas also started to appear during this period. These include, Noel Burch’s To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), Barnouw and Krishnaswamy’s Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI press, 1982), Roy Armes’ Third World Filmmaking and the West (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987) and Ella Shohat’s Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). Scholarship of non-western or “Third World” national cinemas also got published as edited volumes around the same time. These include Jim Pines and Paul Willemen’s Questions of Third Cinema (BFI, 1989), Wimal Dissanayake’s Cinema and Cutural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India and China (University Press of America, 1988), John Downing’s Film and Politics in the Third World (Praeger, 1987), Chris Berry’s Perspectives on Chinese Cinema (BFI, 1985/1991) and Michael Chanan’s Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (BFI/Channel 4 Television, 1983). John Lent’s The Asian Film Industry (Christopher Helm, 1990) and Dissanayake’s second volume, Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1994) furthered this trend of anthologising Asian national cinemas. As a result of these pioneering efforts in the 1980s, Western academia saw an increasing surge of scholarly monographs on Asian national cinemas in the 1990s and 2000s. However, it is possible to locate a “David and Goliath” trend within these studies. In other words, the studies on Asian national cinemas can be demarcated into majority and minority groups depending on their objectives and spatial-temporal coverage. The small-to-medium film-producing nations such as Bangladesh, which host vernacular-language cinemas and largely depend on “national” audiences for their continuity, received much less attention than the larger nations with older film industries that had been serving as transnational popular culture. Researchers of Asian film culture seemed to be more interested in analyzing the larger national cinemas of East Asia as well as major popular industries such as Hong Kong and “Bollywood,” that is, the Indian, Hindilanguage popular film industry based in Bombay (now Mumbai). One can easily locate a number of studies that deal with the two larger and older national cinemas of East Asia: the cinemas of Japan and the People’s Republic of China. A select list of books in this category may include, Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Columbia University Press, 1995), Darrell William Davis’ Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese

6

Introduction

Film (Columbia University Press, 1996), T. Weisser and Y. Weisser’s Japanese Cinema Essential Handbook (Vital, 1998), Jerome Silbergeld’s China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Reaktion, 1999), Mark Schilling’s Contemporary Japanese Film (Weatherhill, 1999), Donald Richie’s One Hundred Years of Japanese Cinema (Kodansha International, 2001), Peter High’s The Imperial Screen (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), Poshek Fu’s Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford University Press, 2003), Chris Berry’s Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (Routledge, 2004), Yingjin Zhang’s Chinese National Cinema (Routledge, 2004), and Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar’s China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (Columbia University Press, 2006). The other group in Asian Film Studies highlights the transnational popular film industries of Asia: Bollywood and the Hong Kong film industries. This group consists of an enormous number of academic projects as developed in last two decades. Some of these are: Chidananda Das Gupta’s The Painted Face: Studies in India’s Popular Cinema (Orient Longman, 1991), Sumita Chakravarty’s National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–87 (University of Texas Press, 1993), Bey Logan’s Hong Kong Action Cinema (London: Titan, 1995), Stephen Teo’s Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: BFI, 1997), Ackbar Abbas’ Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Madhava Prasad’s Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Oxford University Press, 1998), Gokulsing and Dissanayake’s Indian Popular Cinema: Narrative of Cultural Change (Staffordshire, UK: Trentham Books, 1998), Fareed Kazmi’s The Politics of India’s Conventional Cinema: Imaging a Universe, Subverting a Multiverse (London and New Delhi: Sage, 1999), David Bordwell’s Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), Fu and Desser’s edited volume The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Vijay Mishra’s Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (London: Routledge, 2002), Dwyer and Patel’s Cinema India: the Visual Culture of the Hindi Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), Lalitha Gopalan’s Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI, 2002), Yingchu Chu’s Hong Kong Cinema: Coloniser, Motherland and Self (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), Jyotika Virdi’s The Cinematic Imagination: Indian Popular Films as Social History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), Manjunath Pendakur’s Indian Popular Cinema: Industry, Ideology and Consciousness (New Jersey: Hampton, 2003), Tejaswini Ganti’s Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), Rajinder Dudrah’s Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies (London and New Delhi: Sage, 2006), Rachel Dwyer’s Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema (Abingdon: Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2006) and Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (Tulika, 2009).

Introduction 7 While the works in these two groups represent the majority of the category called “Asian cinema,” in the process, the study of vernacular-market, younger Asian national cinemas (like Bangladesh cinema) have been pushed to the margin of Asian Film Studies. Only a handful of Asian cinema books have been published so far that peek beyond the heavyweights like the cinemas of Japan, China, Hong Kong and India/Bollywood. These books comprise the “third stream” that focuses on the workings of younger and smaller national cinemas that have, in most cases, bordered, vernacular “national” or regional markets with limited global existence. Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity is thus to be added to this emergent current of national cinema studies. The examples of this trend include, Emmanuel Reyes’ Notes on Philippine Cinema (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1988), Karl Heider’s Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen (University of Hawaii Press, 1991), Sara Dickey’s Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Krishna Sen’s Indonesian Cinema: Framing the New Order (London: Zed Books, 1994), Theaodore Baskaran’s The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema (Chennai: East West Books, 1996), Mushtaq Gazdar’s Pakistan Cinema: 1947–1997 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997), Hyangjin Lee’s Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), Dissanayake and Rathnavibhushana’s Profiling Sri Lankan Cinema (Colombo: Asian Film Center, 2000), Van Der Heide’s Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), Richard Tapper’s The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), Fran Martin’s Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), Hamid Reza Sadr’s Iranian Cinema: A Political History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), Gaik Cheng Khoo’s Reclaiming Adat: Contemporary Malaysian Film and Literature (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), Selvaraj Velayutham’s (edited volume) Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry, (Routledge, 2008), Bhaskar Sarkar’s Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in Wake of Partition (Duke University Press, 2009) and S.V. Srinivas’ Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao (Oxford University Press, 2009). Sharing the “third space” created by these studies on vernacular-based, mostly youthful national and regional cinemas, Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity—in conversation with these works on approach and methodology—presents an informed and theorized portrayal of another such cinema from South Asia. Within South Asian Film Studies, this study again represents a marginal stream—a smaller group of works that deal with non-Bollywood cinemas. There is no doubt that the publication of a huge number of books on Bollywood in recent years made this Indian–Hindi cinema the “global” cinema of South Asia. This has created a situation where only a few national cinema books that deal with non-Bollywood or non-Hindi film cultures in South Asian national/regional contexts get published. This induced Srinivas, to comment—a bit sarcastically—

8

Introduction

that in August 2008, when he searched online book distributor Amazon.com for Bollywood as well as Telugu cinema, he found 2,700 entries for Bollywood and only 30 for the latter.13 Velayutham, when introducing his edited volume Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry, rightly notes that: “the idea of Indian cinema is profoundly determined, reproduced and articulated through the lens of Bollywood.”14 In order to emphasize Bollywood’s dominance over Tamil and other South Indian cinemas, he terms Tamil cinema as “India’s other film industry” in the title of the book itself. While Bollywood is defined as the Indian cinema in many cases, the term “Indian cinema” sometimes includes a host of cinemas from/within the nation-state and thus may enlist the South Indian cinemas and the Bengali cinema of West Bengal. However, sometimes the term stands for the “South Asian cinema,” effectively pushing the cinemas of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal out of the margin of South Asia. Such an overwhelming centrality of Indian cinema within South Asian cinema is quite visible in many anthologies of “world cinema,” in which, quite often, India is the only entrant from the whole of South Asia. Sometimes if the other cinemas of South Asia are represented, these are provided with little space and some piecemeal discussion, only focusing on some noted art cinema films.15 As a result, quite misleadingly “Indian Cinema” is in vogue as shorthand for “South Asian cinema(s),” especially in the metropolitan West. Many people consider Indian cinema, or more misleadingly, only Bollywood cinema or Hindi cinema, as the South Asian cinema. Opposing such homogenizing tendencies, this study represents a step towards diversifying the notion of South Asian cinema, alongside the studies like Pakistan Cinema and Profiling Sri Lankan Cinema, which were published more than a decade ago.

Approach and structure of the book I study Bangladesh cinema here within a theorized framework. I believe that this cinema merits a well-devised framework, one adequate to its cultural and political complexity that can position this cinema with and alongside the major methodological and theoretical concerns of contemporary film and media studies. In Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity, therefore, I utilize an interpretive mode of national cinema study. By relating my analysis with the positions articulated by well-known scholars of modernity and nationalism, I formulate a theoretical framework in which such a cinema in relation to the national can be situated and comprehended as a distinct cultural practice. For the methodology of the project, I combine textual analyses, library research and field-level primary research that enable me to merge theoretical concepts with empirical findings. For example, I present textual readings of films, combined with analyses of the social and political parameters of film production and reception in Bangladesh. This is because, drawing on Elsaesser, I believe that a film is constructed on both the intratextual and extratextual level. A film exists in the text itself as well as outside the text in other discourses like exhibition, publicity, journalism, or even laws and parliamentary affairs.16 While

Introduction 9 I am deconstructing these texts, I am not analyzing them as transcendental texts, instead focusing on their contexts of production and circulation as well as their intra- and intertextual relationships; I also provide interdiscursive interpretations of these texts. I understand that such interpretations primarily rely on my subject position as researcher and the discourses to which I have access and through which my subjectivity is created. In other words, I interpret these responses through my own subject position as well as the theoretical frameworks within which I attempt to situate this study of Bangladesh cinema. Placing textual analyses of various kinds of texts within a larger context, I go against the empiricist–teleological trend of researching Asian film industries. In this way I present an engaged cultural history of Bangladesh cinema, combining film texts, film-makers, audiences and film institutions along with social, political and cultural events and trends. This history is built on the dialog between the data I came across, my own discursive practices and the texts and discourses of Bangladesh cinema and other Asian film industries. While at first glance these may appear disjointed, at a deeper level I articulate them to form a study that can make visible the paradoxes inherent in a postcolonial national cinema of South Asia that developed in interaction with a non-Western sense of national modernity. In order to accomplish this, I draw upon the academic literatures of cinema and cultural studies, media and communication studies, Asian studies, South Asian history and postcolonial theory as well as on popular writing and journalism of/on Bangladesh cinema. So, I examine Bangladesh cinema not only through its texts, but also through its institutions and spectators in interaction with nation, state and modernity. I analyze the cinema in/of Bangladesh as a vehicle of national modernity and show how slippery and constructed the “national” of a non-Western cinema and its history can be. Therefore, I identify the tensions between and within the national and the transnational of this Asian cinema. On the one hand, I deconstruct the nation-building discourse of the Bangladeshi state and its relationship with the film industry. I identify the fissures and gaps in the “nationalization” process of the film industry led by such a nationalist discourse. On the other hand, I strengthen the idea that the study of Asian national film industries needs to be “de-nationalized” as/in a trans-Asian frame. We need to look at these national cinemas as transnational discourses beyond immediate temporal and spatial borders. Following up on this framework, Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity through seven chapters explores how the conflict among different social groups turned Bangladesh cinema into a site of contesting identities throughout the twentieth century and thereafter. Looking from various spatial and temporal vantage points, these chapters identify the ways in which I rethink the relationship between cinema, nation and modernity in Bangladesh. In the process, this study illustrates the deep connections between film production and reception in Bangladesh and a variety of nationalist constructions of Bengali Muslim identity.

10

Introduction

I build the conceptual and methodological paradigm of the study in the first two chapters. I review several methodological and theoretical stances linked with film-historiography and national cinema in Chapter 1. This chapter includes an appraisal of major film-historiographic modes as well as of the existing literature on Bangladesh cinema. This body of work includes historical surveys, critical appreciation and popular writing about cinema. Here, I analyze the major methods of film-historiography as developed in the West and then situate Bangladeshi film-historiography within the international practices of cinema histories. I critique linear, teleological and empiricist histories of national cinemas and present my rationale for an interpretive and non-linear history framed by wider contextual discourses largely ignored in the nationalist and aestheticist histories of cinema and nation. Thus I begin by clarifying my position as a historian of non-Western national cinema as well as the particular kind of history of Bangladesh cinema that I am presenting in this book. The second chapter lays out a conceptual framework for studying a nonWestern national cinema like Bangladesh cinema. By questioning, problematizing and reframing concepts like nation and cinema, it continues as well as deepens and widens the critique presented in Chapter 1, of the empiricist and nationalist modes of film-historiography. I examine the possible ways of understanding both cinema and Bangladesh and thus position Bangladesh cinema as a social institution, which is part of successive colonial and postcolonial public spheres. To situate Bangladesh cinema as a public sphere, I draw on the discussions on this concept by Habermas, Negt and Kluge, Nancy Fraser, Miriam Hansen and other contemporary scholars. Here I establish my main argument that Bangladesh cinema work towards the construction and revision of modern identities for Bengali Muslims as well as for the nation called Bangladesh throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century. This cinema, as a social practice, then became engaged in the imagining of certain versions of national modernity operating within various time frames. In the rest of the study, from Chapter 3 to Chapter 7, I demonstrate how cinema in Bangladesh—under different political and cultural conditions—has been engaged in the construction of various identity frameworks as well as in the shaping of different templates of national modernity for Bengali Muslims and Bangladesh. Chapter 3 starts this journey by analyzing the early efforts of Bengali Muslims in indigenizing a Western import like cinema. I revisit the early-to-midtwentieth century, a time when Bangladesh was the eastern part of Bengal under British India. I review here how cinema emerged as a cultural institution in East Bengal society by re-reading its negotiations with dominant national-historical constructions. In particular, here I interrogate why and how a specific event of Bangladesh cinema history has been taken for granted and repeatedly used as the beginning of this national cinema by Bangladeshi film historians. This happened, as the film historians en masse believed in a certain notion of cultural identity for Bengali Muslims and also in a particular kind of national modernity for the Bangladesh nation-state. They start their histories with The Face and the Mask,

Introduction 11 the “first” sound feature produced by a Bengali Muslim in East Pakistan in 1956. They unanimously highlight The Face and the Mask as the “beginning” of the Bangladesh film history. No scholar substantially analyzed what happened before that and how Bengali Muslims of the Bengal delta appropriated cinema as a vehicle of cultural-national modernity during the early twentieth century. I reevaluate the importance of The Face in relation to the broader socio-political and cultural agenda of that time. I identify that Bangladeshi film historians overlooked or undermined earlier efforts at producing, distributing and exhibiting silent and sound shorts locally as well as of the exhibition of foreign films, as these efforts did not meet the demands of imagining their version of modernity. Only if we can look beyond the governing conditions and circumstances especially tailored by such cultural identity and national modernity, can we find a number of under-appreciated early efforts in the history of Bangladesh national cinema. I reread these other alternatives and point out that any of these also could be seen as the “beginning” of cinema in Bangladesh, provided these are considered from different national/historical vantage points. In order to add a spatial dimension to Chapter 3, in Chapter 4 I demonstrate the tension between Bengali cultural modernity and emerging middle-class of Bengali Muslims in early twentieth-century Bengal. Film-making in the 1920s to 1940s Calcutta film industry, the only Bengali-language film industry at that time and one of the two leading film-production centers in colonial India, was affected by a modernity that was initiated by the reformist bourgeois Hindu Bhadraloks in nineteenth-century Calcutta. I examine here the relationship of the Bengali cinema of that time to this Bengali/Hindu cultural modernity as developed in Bengal between British colonialism and Muslim modernism. I demonstrate how this cinema, by producing and circulating reformist “social” films and mythologicals, represented a Hindu bhadralok public sphere and marginalized the rural-based Bengali-Muslim identity both at the textual level of films and labor practices in the film industry. Here, I also show how such a deltafocused identity struggled and vied for some visibility in the Bhadralok-led Bengali cinema of Calcutta of the 1930s and 1940s. Chapter 5 takes the issue of such identity construction further. Here, I illustrate how the same identity of Bengali Muslims that is connected to the ethos of the Bengal delta drove the creation of the second Bengali cinema in post-1947 East Pakistan. In order to get to the core of the chapter, that is, how this vernacular cinema developed a Bengali-Muslim modernity, I first probe the struggles of the rural-born Bengali Muslim middle class toward the formation of a distinct Bengali-Muslim identity in the early-to-mid-twentieth century in opposition to Bengali-Hindu cultural identity and pan-Indian Muslim nationalism. Here, outlining how the rural Bengali Muslims in the early twentieth century developed a vernacular middle class among themselves, I analyze the efforts of this middle class to use cultural forms such as Bengali periodicals and novels in propagating a Bengali-Muslim identity in the 1900s–1940s. I then go on to investigate how the development of a Bengali cinema in East Pakistan contributed to the formation of the cultural-national modernity of Bengali Muslims

12

Introduction

in the 1950s and 1960s. Here, I first locate the context for the development of a vernacular film industry of/for Bengali Muslims. After detailing the debates and desires around how such institutionalization happened, I look into the textual worlds of two of the earliest films produced in this industry. These films are, Mukh o Mukhosh (The Face and the Mask, 1956) and Asiya (Asiya, 1960). Analyzing these texts, I propose that the early films of the East Pakistani film industry were committed to visualizing a rural, idyllic East Bengal contributing towards a cultural modernity focused on the Bengal delta region. In the later part of the study, I move to the “Bangladesh” phase of Bangladesh cinema. In the last two chapters, I locate the role of cinema in post-1971 Bangladesh. During the last four decades of independent Bangladesh, the idea of nation has been in negotiation with three identities—Bengali, Bengali-Muslim and Muslim—a process that began in early twentieth-century East Bengal, as outlined in earlier chapters. I contended that the idea of “Bengaliness” was strongly incorporated into a rural-linked, delta-focused version of Bengali-Muslim identity during the early-to-mid twentieth century. The creation of Bangladesh as a nation-state also brought in a new identity—Bangladeshiness. The continuous contest and overlap of these identities in different ways led to the formation of a certain national modernity in which the Bangladesh nation-state played an important part. Therefore, in the industrialization of popular cinema, the role of the nation-state was quite visible. The role of the nation-state was so central in shaping a Bangladeshi popular film industry that, in Chapter 6, I position this popular cinema as part of state/ national modernity during the late 1970s to early 2010s. Here, I identify how this cinema, amid rapid urbanization, globalization and commercialization, turned itself into a vernacular, but profit-making, popular-culture industry. In order to demonstrate the relationship between this industry and nation-state modernity, I take a strategy of going from the institutional context to the textual mechanisms of the Bangladesh film industry. Beginning with the analysis of the political and economic contexts in and through which this industry functioned and expanded in recent decades, I assess the homogenizing efforts of the state and local capitalists directed to devise a national, popular cinema in 1970s– 2000s Bangladesh. I identify three different initiatives on the part of the nationstate that transformed this cinema into a “Bangladeshi” popular cinema. These are: a ban on the screening of South Asian films in local cinemas, the imposition of a taxation system that helps film exhibitors and the seed-funding of popular films through the state-run Film Development Corporation (FDC) studio. How these state/national drives shaped and maintained the vernacular nature of this cinema for the last four decades constitutes the core of my analysis here. I end Chapter 6 by assessing how the texts of this cinema respond to the state’s nationalizing efforts. Utilizing representative texts of the major genres of this cinema, I focus on how these contemporary texts at once standardize as well contest the notion of Bangladeshi nationhood on screen. In Chapter 7, the very last part of the book, I move towards art cinema discourse and its globalizing attempts. Here I outline the genealogy and workings

Introduction 13 of the notion of art cinema that developed in various forms and shapes in post1971 Bangladesh. With no visible support from the state, or sometimes opposing its wishes, this recent discourse took an ambitious turn to reach the audiences of “international” art cinema, sometimes called “world cinema.” I ask how the cultural-modernist middle classes here produced and circulated an independent cinema during the 1980s to 2010s, and also succeeded in taking a version of it to the global arena. I then demonstrate how these cinemas represent different methods of Western-educated, cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims in creating a discourse of art in the realm of cinema. More importantly, I position the development of such cinemas in contemporary Bangladesh as being in the process of indigenizing the understanding of art cinema from the West. I therefore trace how these independent cinemas, embody the cultural-national aspirations of the national middle class, the cultural-modernists who used the “Western” notion of art cinema. I identify two different, but interconnected and sometimes overlapping, trends of independent cinema in Bangladesh that I detail in the course of my analysis. The first one, that I call “artisanal” art cinema, developed as and through what has been termed the “Short Film Movement” in 1980s and 1990s Bangladesh. The other trend that developed out of this artisanal mode during the last two decades or so may be called a global Bangladeshi cinema. I outline how this trend successfully appropriated the textual and institutional norms of “world cinema,” as privileged in international film festivals, as well as how it achieved its presence on the global stage, especially showcasing a new ethnography of “Bangladesh.”

Notes 1 Willem Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. xxv. 2 Annette Hamilton, “Cinema and Nation: Dilemmas of Representation in Thailand,” in Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal Dissanayake (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 141. 3 Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere,” in Linda Williams (ed.) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 140. 4 Miriam Hansen “Foreword,” in Oskar Negt and Alexandar Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Classical-bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Edition in English 1993/First Published in German 1972), p. xxvii. 5 Van Schendel (2009) p. 38. 6 East Bengal was officially renamed “East Pakistan” in 1956. 7 Van Schendel (2009) pp. 183–4. 8 Mirza T. Quader, Bangladesh Film Industry (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993), p. 211. 9 Manik Zaman, “Now We Are All Waiters in the Film World,” Jai Jai Din 14.13 (December 30, 1997): 29; Juton Chowdhury, “Bengali Cinema: Annual Review 2001,” Weekly 2000 4.33 (January 4, 2002): 78. 10 “The Film Business in 2005,” Prothom Alo (December 29, 2005) p. 23. 11 Velayutham claims that annually 150–200 Tamil films are produced in Madras only, and Tamil and Telugu film industries together produce 70 percent of the films annually produced in India. See “Introduction,” in Selvaraj Velayutham (ed.), Tamil

14

12

13 14 15

16

Introduction Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 2 and 13. Srinivas also claims that “the Telugu film industry is the second largest in India.” See S. V. Srinivas, Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xviii. Chaudhuri mentions the annual film production in Pakistan as numbering 80. See Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 151. She and other commentators on Sri Lankan cinema did not present such numbers for the annual production of Sri Lankan cinema films. See Wimal Dissanayake, “Sri Lanka: Art, Commerce and Cultural Modernity,” in Anne Ciecko (ed.) Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006) pp. 108–19. In a personal communication, the founder of the Asian Film Center in Sri Lanka, Ashley Ratnabhibushana, mentioned that the annual production of Sri Lankan cinema was 20–25 films each year. S.V. Srinivas, Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxv. Selvaraj Velayutham (ed.) Tamil Cinema: The Cultural Politics of India’s Other Film Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 1. For example, see Shohini Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Here two chapters (out of eight) are devoted to South Asian cinema, namely, “South Asian Cinema” and “Indian Cinema.” Other than a separate chapter on Indian cinema, the 18-page chapter on South Asian cinema (pp. 137–55) also discusses Indian cinema, allocating a total of four pages for the three non-Indian national cinemas of South Asia (Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh). Thomas Elsaesser, “Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema,” in Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Rosen (eds.) Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984) p. 52.

1 Methods in film historiography Towards an interpretive history of Bangladesh cinema

This study investigates how cinema as a social institution functions in a post­ colonial society, namely Bangladesh. In this study my attempt is to rethink the history of Bangladesh cinema in a new frame. This chapter is the first step towards such rewriting. The reframing that I propose here lays the foundation for an interpretive history of Bangladesh cinema that emphasizes change over continuity. The project of writing a history of a non­Western national cinema like Bang­ ladesh cinema encompasses a number of theoretical problems at different levels of its inquiry. As Philip Rosen puts it, . . . the study of a national cinema would always have to be based on three conceptualizations: 1 2 3

. . . how a large number of superficially differentiated texts can be asso­ ciated in a regularized . . . intertextuality in order to form a coherency, a “national cinema”; a conceptualization of a nation as a kind of minimally coherent entity . . .; some conceptualization of what is traditionally called “history” or “his­ toriography.” 1

In the present study I attempt to articulate the three conceptualizations Rosen proposes. I work through these in a reverse order. In this chapter I deal with the third problem Rosen forwards: the ways to conceptualize a history of Bangla­ desh cinema. I shall address the second and first problems—conceptualizations of nationhood and national cinema—in Chapter 2. The kind of history of Bangladesh cinema I propose here attempts to combine theoretical and empirical methodologies that are usually utilized quite separately in Film Studies. As I see this history as a discourse, it is certainly not a definitive picture of the past of Bangladesh cinema. This study is rather a por­ trayal of my interaction with the past and the present of this cinema. It repres­ ents the dialog I was able to build between the data I came across and my own discursive practices, my mode of inquiry and other histories and narratives of Bangladesh cinema.

16

Methods in film historiography

I try to look at the cinema of Bangladesh in its entirety, from the production to the reception of films and their relationships and interactions with other social institutions and discourses. Therefore, I combine textual, intertextual and con­ textual analyses of this cinema. Here I attempt to delineate the complex role of cinema in constructing, disseminating and interacting with contested notions of cultural identity and national modernity for Bengali Muslims. I approach this cinema—borrowing the words of Moran and O’Regan—“as a series of different discursive constructions, . . . the discourses occupying a series of different insti­ tutional sites.”2 This history of Bangladesh cinema emphasizes discontinuities, recognizing that historical cause is non­linear and change is non­evolutionary. For this reason, I focus on a number of key film texts, institutions, personalities, trends and events in Bangladesh cinema history rather than imposing a linear model of evolution of this cinema. Situating these various “cases” and “moments” within a suitable theoret­ ical framework, I intend to make visible what were either invisible or beyond the reach of simple continuities illustrated in most film histories produced in Bangla­ desh and elsewhere. This history of Bangladesh cinema that covers the whole of the twentieth century as well as the first decade of the twenty-first century, demon­ strates that Bengali­Muslim middle classes within the nation­state frameworks of East Bengal/Pakistan and Bangladesh utilized cinema to define various identities towards forming particular kinds of “national” and/or cultural modernities. I begin this chapter with a review of different modes of perceiving and think­ ing about cinema in various junctions of nation and modernity in Bangladesh through the literatures published on cinema during the last eight decades. I examine how film scholarship began here and why a trend of Bangladesh film historiography began as late as the 1970s and 1980s. I first critique the survey histories of Bangladesh cinema assessing their strength and weaknesses. In order to situate Bangladeshi film-historiography within the international practices of cinema histories, I then review the major ways of producing film-historiography in the West—looking at practices both for “Western” and non-Western/Asian national cinema. In this way, I clarify my position as a film-historian and outline the particular kind of history of Bangladesh cinema presented in this book.

Three discourses of film scholarship Film scholarship is still an underdeveloped field in Bangladesh. Even today there is no well­equipped formal place to study cinema. While a few scattered attempts at film-making training are visible, Film Studies as such is largely absent in Bangladesh. Nowhere in Bangladesh is there a film institute or Film Studies department capable of delivering fully-fledged training on film production or film research at a contemporary global standard.3 Still, film scholarship has a long history here. Cinema has been studied here since the late 1930s through various informal means. Film scholarship was published in Bangladesh as various kinds of literatures on cinema during the last eight decades. These literatures on cinema of/in

Methods in film historiography 17 Bangladesh—published mostly from Dhaka and in Bengali—record lively evid­ ence of how the local population in a nationalizing and urbanizing non­Western setting appropriated this “Western” medium. These publications cannot be con­ sidered as academic scholarship per se. Because most publications on Bangladesh cinema make data presentations in the simplest manner, some are opinionated texts full of claims and without evidence. However, these works’ importance lies in the fact that, together, they established a vibrant forum of discussion on cinema in a society where cinema has largely been seen as mere entertainment that never can attract any serious, scholarly attention. Over the last eight decades, writing and publication on the cinema of/in Bangladesh took the shape of three different modes: popular journalism, critical appreciation and empiricist histories. Though there are some overlaps, these three trends of film scholarship developed in Bang­ ladesh in a fairly chronological manner.4 The early mode—journalistic writing and publishing on cinema—began in the late 1930s. It continues today, in most cases to meet the everyday need of filling the pages of newspapers and magazines with popular items. The second mode—critical appreciation—started in the early 1960s and is most visible in film club periodicals and anthologies authored by film club activists. Empiricist research and historical works on Bangladesh cinema form a newer trend, with such works being published only from the late 1970s. In the absence of a well­developed institutional structure of cinema study in Bangladesh, these three modes of publication made possible a certain kind of film scholarship here. Below, I appraise these texts on cinema published in Bangladesh (and East Bengal) in the last eight decades. After analyzing two early discourses, namely journalism and critical appreciation, I move on to investigate how and when the trend of film-historiography began here.

Popular journalism Popular journalism discourse on cinema was introduced in Chitrakala (lit. picture art), the first film monthly of the then East Bengal, first published in 1933, from the famous Rooplal house of old Dhaka.5 Before that, in the 1920s, a number of such film magazines, published from Calcutta and in Bengali, enjoyed a good cir­ culation in East Bengal under British India.6 After East Pakistan was established, journalistic writing flourished quickly through a number of film magazines like Cinema, Chayabani, Udayan, Rupachaya and Chitrali, published from Dhaka, Chittagong and Bogra in the early 1950s.7 Cinema was the first film monthly that also survived the longest among these cine monthlies. Fazlul Huq published this magazine first from Bogra in 1950, and then from Dhaka during 1951–1957.8 The Observer Group, publisher of the Daily Observer—a reputable English daily of East Pakistan and Bangladesh—started publishing Chitrali in 1953, the first film weekly of (then) East Pakistan. For next few decades it served as the foremost film magazine here. The Ittefaq Group, publisher of the widely circulated Bengali daily Ittefaq, started publishing another film weekly—titled Purbani—in 1965. During the 1970s and 1980s, it turned out to be a true rival to Chitrali in popular­ ity and layout. Alamgir Kabir, one of the most able commentators of Bangladesh

18

Methods in film historiography

cinema during the 1960s to 1980s, noted the approximate circulation of Chitrali to be 80,000 in 1979. He claimed a figure of 70,000 for Purbani.9 In Bangladesh, even in the last decade, the total readership for the ten most circulated newspapers is less than 1.5 million10 and the circulation of the most popular daily is around 0.20–0.45 million only.11 In the circumstances, the circulation figures of these two film weeklies (0.15 million in total) in the late-1970s indicate a popular trend of cinema appreciation fostered through journalistic writing. We also need to con­ sider that these film magazines were well read, being shared not only among the members of a family but also their neighbours. Thus Chitrali and Purbani led popular journalism on Bangladesh cinema throughout the 1950s to the 1980s. A few other strong film magazines joined the band wagon—Jhinuk in 1970, Nipun in 1975, Tarokalok in 1982, Anandabichitra in 1986, Anandabhuban in 1996 and Anandadhara in 1998. The early 2000s saw the emergence of three new fort­ nightly magazines on cinema and popular culture: Anando Binodon (2000), Bionodon (2002) and Ananda Alo (2004).12 Today, thus a host of such Bengali magazines (weeklies, fortnightlies and monthlies) on popular cinema and tele­ vision are published and circulated in and around the cities and small towns. All the national dailies in Bengali and English also devote one or more sec­ tions to gossip and news about the film and television industry, a trend that also started in the early 1950s. Quader has listed 17 Bengali and six English dailies in 1993 that were publishing a special “entertainment” section focusing on cinema and popular culture.13 Gayen and Bilkis found in a 2007 study that film reporting occupies more than 26 percent of the entertainment pages of four leading Bengali dailies.14 While the dailies have become important sites of popular journalism on film and television, magazines on popular culture are also well read, especially in rural areas. The 1998 National Media Survey placed two magazines on popular visual media, Chitro Bangla (lit. the pictures of Bengal) and Ananda Bichitra (lit. entertainment varieties), among the five most popular magazines of Bangladesh alongside three political magazines.15 In 2008, researchers found that three of the most widely read magazines in rural areas are those that are about film and television (namely Binodon Bichitra, Ananda Alo and Tarokalok).16 The popular­journalism mode of writing on Bangladesh cinema attempts two tasks. First, it reviews newly released feature films and, second, it reports on the overall situation or particular aspects of film production and, sometimes of film exhibition in Bangladesh. Alongside film reviews and reports on film production, the trivial happenings of film and television stars and other important personalities also cover significant space in newspapers and magazines. Thus the popularjournalism mode records anecdotes—at first sight insignificant events in Bangladesh film industry—that can be analyzed in relation to the larger context in order to illuminate larger questions, as is sometimes attempted in this book. The reviews, reports and anecdotes on popular cinema at home and abroad (e.g. Bol­ lywood and Hollywood) still cover a substantial portion of the “entertainment” pages of the numerous Bengali and English dailies, as well as of popular culture magazines published in Bangladesh today. Though this trend of journalistic

Methods in film historiography 19 writing presents a superficial glimpse of Bangladesh cinema, it has succeeded in reaching the ordinary readership and thus reflects the popular notion of perceiving and indigenizing cinema.

Critical appreciation As an alternative to the popular­journalism mode, a more serious and critical mode developed in relation to, if not as a result of, the development of what I would call “the film club discourse” during the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the situ­ ation in most countries, the cine club movement here took upon itself the task of initiating a serious mode of cinema study, alongside creating a sizeable clan of discerning audiences. The discourse developed through a number of events related to the appreciation of cinema as an art medium that happened in Dhaka in the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the establishment of the first film club of Pakistan—the Pakistan Film Society (PFS)17 in Dhaka in 1963 and the establish­ ment of the Dhaka Film Institute, a short-lived, small-scale private film institute by London-returned Alamgir Kabir in the late 1960s, helped to start a film appre­ ciation discourse. Later, the development of a number of new film societies during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the founding of the Bangladesh Film Archives in 1978 and film workshops run here in the early 1980s led by Alamgir Kabir, strengthened this discourse. The film clubs, in the absence of a statefunded film academy or institute during last five decades, served as settings that can be seen as small film study centers. Through sporadic film appreciation courses organized by film societies between the 1970s and 2000s, young and not so young cineastes could watch European and American film masterpieces. In this way, the film club discourse created an aestheticist perspective on local and international cinema through various means. The film club activists, a part of the westernized, English­educated middle class in Bangladesh, sought ways of dis­ seminating such aesthetic–critical commentary on cinema, especially to high­ light the art cinema films of European origin throughout the 1960s and 1990s. They started publishing their aestheticist thoughts on cinema on at least three fronts. First, they started writing film reviews in daily newspapers and weekly/ fortnightly magazines and second, they published specialized but irregular film (club) periodicals. Third, some noted film club activists authored and published anthologies that discussed some aspects of Bangladesh cinema and the work of a select group of film-makers of Western (largely European) art cinemas. A handful of film critics trained in film club settings started using film review sections of popular newspapers and magazines as sites of critical exploration of cinematic aesthetics in the 1960s. These reviewers largely felt their mission to be the harsh criticism of popular films and the sympathetic praising of art cinema films. Alamgir Kabir, the veteran art cinema film-maker and film-historian-critic initiated this small but distinct stream in the late 1960s by reviewing con­ temporary popular films in Weekly Holiday, an influential English-language newspaper of that time. Later, some other film critics used newspaper pages to produce serious reviews and critiques. Two of these are Sheikh Niamat Ali and

20

Methods in film historiography

Mahmuda Chowdhury. Ali, a well-known art cinema film-maker of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote reviews of local and foreign films in the, then, famous Daily Sangbad in the 1970s. Chowdhury, one of Alamgir Kabir’s students at the shortlived Dhaka Film Institute, continued reviewing popular films, mostly from an art cinema perspective, in the pages of Weekly Bichitra, the leading Bengali weekly during the 1970s and 1990s. She, like Kabir and Ali—but in a harsher tone—regularly rebuked popular films for being “unrealistic” and for not being sensitive to the artistic power of the film medium. For around two decades, her weekly film reviews effectively voiced the middle classes’ aestheticist percep­ tion of cinema and their concerns about the “degradation” of the local film indus­ try, as being published in Bichitra that was “very influential in forging a self-confident and enlightened national middle class.”18 The Bangladesh Film Society (BFS) pioneered the second stream of critical commentary on cinema in the form of serious film periodicals when it began publishing Dhrupadi (lit. Classic), an intellectually ambitious volume on cinema in Bengali in East Pakistan in 1968.19 Its latest and sixth issue has been pub­ lished in 2006, a 700­page volume covering local, European and some non­ Western cinema. In 1969, Alamgir Kabir also joined this critical periodicals stream with his English-language film periodical, Sequence.20 Sequence con­ tinued, albeit irregularly, into the late 1980s. According to Kabir, Sequence had an approximate circulation of 3,000 in 1979.21 Other influential, but sometimes irregular and short-lived, film periodicals published by film clubs include: Film Bulletin (Chalachitrapatra) by the Bangladesh Film Society; Cinema (Chalachitra) by the Cinepol Film Society; Filmmaker (Chalachitrakar) by the Bangla­ desh Film-makers’ Society; Intercut (Intercut) by the Chittagong Film Society; Cinematic (Chalachitrik) by the Chitron Film Society; Celluloid by the Rainbow Film Society; Look Through by the Chittagong Film Society; Montage by the Ritwik Film Society; Chalachitram (Chalachitram) by the Chalachitram Film Society and New Wave by the Chittagong Film Center.22 All these periodicals were published in Bengali, except Celluloid, which had been transformed into an English periodical in the mid 1990s. While all these film club periodicals— except Dhrupadi, New Wave and Celluloid—stopped publishing by the late 1990s, newcomers have joined the caravan. The Dhaka University Film Society has published Flash Back regularly since 1996, and the Gono Viswavidyaloy Film Society published 16 mm in 2001–2004.23 In the early 2000s, film club vet­ erans Manzare Hasin and Mahmudul Hossain published a few issues of Driswaroop (lit. Image-representation) focusing on film and allied visual media. In 2011, Mahmudul alone edited and published a similar anthology—Dekha (lit. Seeing). A newly established film club, Moviyana Film Society came up with their first issue of the periodical Moviyana in 2009 and with Chitraroop in 2010. In 2008, the Bangladesh Film Archive started its annual periodical, the Bangladesh Film Archive Journal, which published its fifth issue in 2012. Though this is published by a government department, the content in these issues is similar to the film club periodicals, and most editorial and authorial roles are taken up by former film club activists.

Methods in film historiography 21 These semi­scholarly periodicals on cinema, mostly published, read and dis­ cussed by film club activists themselves, mainly provide critical commentaries on art-film masterpieces and film-makers of Europe, India and the US. Some­ times they discuss some African and Latin American films with similar merits. They also sometimes discuss Bangladeshi films, especially those that were can­ onized because of their innovative visual aesthetics following international art cinema or those that achieved entry in some international film festivals. For example, the huge sixth issue of Dhrupadi presents three sections. The 320­page main section is termed the “Bangladesh phase.” It houses a good number of pieces on early cinema in East Bengal/Pakistan—as the films of that period are highly canonized—alongside two pieces on “the role of film societies.” Though the section is focused on Bangladesh, it also includes two pieces, one each on Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, two of the Bengali greats, who made major contributions to Indian cinema. This issue of Dhrupadi also presents two “sup­ plements” on Latin American and Malayalam cinema, each running for around 200 pages. Both sections contain translated pieces on and by renowned filmmakers of these two regions: ranging from Solanas, Gettino, Fernando Birri and Glauber Rocha, to G. Arvindan and Adoor Gopal.24 Film club activists busily dissecting Euro­American and Indian art cinema in the pages of film periodicals have also contributed some commentaries on local art films, especially outlining the need for the establishment of an art cinema in Bangladesh. They believe that these periodicals are of such a serious scholarly nature that they can be considered as “journals” that “remain the only hope of serious cine­criticism” in Bangladesh.25 These activist­critics feel that in “a society governed by corrupted politicians, black money and foolish administra­ tors,” a serious film periodical is “a weapon of protest” that “makes the people think about the invisible link between life and art.”26 The writers of these film periodicals criticize the popular­journalism mode of cinema for creating a “tragic” situation where the cinema is treated as “mere entertainment,” whereas it has become “an object of research around the world.”27 A similar seriousness towards understanding cinema from an aesthetic per­ spective becomes visible in the anthologies sole­authored by some renowned film club activists during last three decades. These anthologies were the bookended form of a number of articles published in film-club periodicals by a single author. Veteran film club activists of the 1970s and 1980s started this practice of anthologizing their articles on film history and aesthetics. Tanvir Mokammel’s Film Aesthetics and Twelve Directors (Chalachitra Nandantatwa O Barojon Director) and Anwar Hossain Pintu’s About Cinema (Chalachitra Proshonga)—both published in 1985 respectively from Dhaka and Chittagong— were two such early anthologies.28 The 1990s saw six such anthologies, includ­ ing Mokammel’s The Aesthetics of Cinema (1998) (Cinemar Shilporoop) and this author’s Understanding Cinema (Chalachitrer Chalchitro), which can be considered as prototypes of film anthologies of this kind.29 At least another dozen anthologies by noted film club activists, including Sajedul Awwal and Tareque Masud, were published in Dhaka in the last decade or so.30 The mission

22

Methods in film historiography

of these anthologies along with the film club periodicals—that is, of the dis­ course of critical film appreciation—is to promote film as art and advocate for a home­grown art cinema that will follow European art cinema narration, coupled with a pro­people political agenda.

Towards a Bangladeshi film- historiography The third and last group of literature on cinema published in Bangladesh is most directly linked with the current study. This is a recent stream developed during last three decades, while two other streams of film literatures—popular journ­ alism and critical appreciation—started much earlier. The histories of Bangla­ desh cinema that have been composed so far represent a primary phase in Bangladeshi film-historiography. The reason for the late start of this trend, which is still in its early phase, is twofold. The historiography stream as a serious mode of film study demands scholar-authors with some institutional support and, more importantly, a postcolonial nation-space within which such film-historiography can be articulated and sponsored. Therefore one cannot but note that the Bangla­ desh nation-state only came into being in 1971 and during next three decades, the historiography stream of Bangladesh cinema received considerable support from the postcolonial state. The journalism and criticism streams flourished rather independently despite indifference (and antagonism, in the case of film club discourse) from the state. In particular, the state­owned cultural bodies engaged in constructing and circulating the national culture of Bangladesh by promoting Bengali­language literature, the performing arts and cinema encour­ aged the writing and publishing of Bangladesh cinema history in recent decades. For example, the three state-run, national-level institutions—the Bangla Academy, the Bangladesh Shilpokala Academy (lit. Bangladesh Arts Academy) and the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC)—together produced nine—out of total a dozen or so—of the historical works on Bangladesh cinema published so far. These recent efforts at writing the “history” of Bangladesh cinema, which can be seen as contributions towards the rewriting of the national history of postco­ lonial Bangladesh, took mainly three directions: survey histories covering major areas and eras of Bangladesh cinema, area-specific histories focusing on a par­ ticular aspect of this national cinema and biographies and memorial volumes of film pioneers. The first group—historical surveys of Bangladesh cinema—is the most relevant for the current study. This group consists of five major booklength, survey­history works on Bangladesh cinema published between 1979 and 2008. Apart from one study—Film in Bangladesh (1979) by Alamgir Kabir—all other works are in Bengali. These are: History of Bangladesh Cinema (Bangladesher Chalachitrer Itihash) (1987) by Anupam Hayat, Social Commitment in Bangladesh Cinema (Bangladesher Chalachitre Shamajik Ongikar) by Chinmoy Mutsuddi, Bangladesh Film Industry (Bangladesher Chalachitro Shilpo) (1993) by Mirja Tarequl Quader, and The Cinema of Bangladesh: Socio-economic Backdrop (Bangladesher Chalachitra: Arthoshamajik Potobhumi) (2008) by

Methods in film historiography 23 Ahmed Aminul Islam. Proclaiming themselves research projects, these historical monographs sought to perform a critical survey of Bangladesh cinema history. Though non­critical and non­theorized in their very nature, these historical surveys of Bangladesh cinema enthusiastically describe the textual characteris­ tics of the films and the major tendencies of the film industry in Bangladesh. They occasionally recognize the roles of the state and spectators in developing the discourses around film production, distribution and exhibition. Thus, they have provided important landmarks that enabled the primary mapping of this research and helped sharpen my focus on specific aspects of Bangladesh cinema. They also serve as a storehouse of raw data on the film-production industry of Bangladesh for me and future researchers to draw upon. Film in Bangladesh by Alamgir Kabir—published in 1979—was the first survey­history of Bangladesh cinema. This is a revised “Bangladeshi” version of Kabir’s earlier work, Cinema in Pakistan, published in Dhaka a decade back. Film in Bangladesh was advertised in International Film Guide as a “compre­ hensive storehouse of information on Bangladesh’s thriving film industry.”31 Professor Kabir Choudhury—in his foreword to the book—called it “an important reference book . . . at home and abroad.”32 Probably because it is the only book­length survey­history of Bangladesh cinema in English to date, the major encyclopedic ventures on non­Western cinemas or Asian cinemas drew upon this work extensively. For example, Roy Armes’ Third World Filmmaking and the West (1987) and John A. Lent’s The Asian Film Industry (1990) use this book as their key source on Bangladesh cinema. Most Bengali­language survey histories of Bangladesh cinema also take Film in Bangladesh as their basic model. Kabir discusses the films produced in Bang­ ladesh straightforwardly, dividing them into two periods using the 1971 libera­ tion war as a demarcation line. While Quader also uses this periodization, Mutsuddi goes for a decade-wise division and Hayat uses no periodization as such. But all of them use the taxonomy of Bangladesh cinema established by Kabir with only limited modifications. Islam also followed decade-wise periodi­ zation (as his monograph focuses on Bangladesh cinema during the 1970s and 1980s) and utilized Kabir’s mode of demarcation (the independence of 1971) as he talks about post­independence Bangladeshi cinema. The second group of historical works—the area-specific studies of Bangladesh cinema—consists of few historical texts such as The Torn Pages of ‘The Face and the Mask’ (Mukh O Mukhosher Chera Pata) (1995) by Shoraful Islam, Cinema theke Chitrali (From Cinema to Chitrali) (2011) by Khandakar Mahmudul Hasan and Digital Film in Bangladesh: Call for a New Cinema? (2011) by Fahmidul Haq, published by an Internet-based publisher from Germany. The Torn Pages delves into the history of and around a particular film—the 1956 film, The Face and the Mask, which is presumably the “first” East Pakistani sound feature. Hasan in Cinema to Chitrali focuses on film magazines of the 1950s to the 1980s, while Haq locates digital film production in 2000s Bangladesh. Alongside the survey-histories of Bangladesh cinema and area-specific histories as discussed above, several book-length biographies of local film personalities can

24

Methods in film historiography

be located in the film-historiography stream. These were published in the 1990s and no film biographies were seen before this point. The first of these biographical works is The Memorial Volume on Alamgir Kabir (Alamgir Kabir Sharok Grontho) (1991).33 This volume compiles articles, both in Bengali and English, on Alamgir Kabir, who died in a car accident in January 1989, and whose untimely death certainly prompted the publication of this biographical volume. Bangla Academy—the national organization for promotion of Bengali lan­ guage and culture—which published Kabir’s and Quader’s historical works, also published three film biographies. These were part of their biography series, which featured biographies of many other literary and cultural personalities of East Bengal/Pakistan origin. The three film biographies were: Hiralal Sen (1993) and Abdul Jabbar Khan (2002)—both by Shaikat Ashgor—and Fateh Lohani (1994), by Anupam Hayat.34 Both Ashgor and Hayat made straightforward attempts at collating and narrating the achievements of Sen, Khan and Lohani, three important cinema personalities of Bangladesh—all of whom worked during ‘pre-Bangladesh’, that is the East Bengal/Pakistan period.35 Sen can be credited for importing cinema, a Western invention, into the rural East Bengal of the early twentieth century by initiating film screening and production in Dhaka, just after such film activities began in Calcutta in which Sen also participated. Abdul Jabbar Khan scripted and directed the first “talkie” feature film produced in (then) East Pakistan in 1956. Lohani worked as an actor–director of art cinema films in the early phase of the East Pakistan film industry in the 1960s. It is diffi­ cult to appreciate why Bangla Academy chose only Sen, Khan and Lohani, while a number of other film pioneers remain mostly unknown. Probably as a reply to this query, in the late 1990s, Hayat, the author of Fateh Lohani, authored an anthology of biographies entitled Some Film Activists of Yesteryears (Shekale Bangladesher Koyekjon Chalachitrakormi) (1999).36 It records the lives and works of 22 Bengali film personalities who worked for the development of Bengali cinema as an art medium both in Dhaka and Calcutta during the earlyto-mid twentieth century. Almost in a similar vein, Leaquat Hosain Khokon authored The Sad Tales of Film Stars (Chalachitra Tarokader Bedonar Kotha) (2010).37 Khokon compiled brief sketches of numerous film stars of South Asia in this huge volume. The most recent biographical work published is Tareque Masud: Life and Dreams (2012) edited by Catherine Masud and necessitated by Tareque’s untimely death in a road accident in August 2011.38 This bilingual memorial volume recorded the deliberations offered at a gathering of film and social activists that took place on August 26, 2011, immediately after Tareque’s demise. All seven biographies and memorial volumes discussed here are important for sketching the works of film personalities from East Bengal or Bangladesh. However, none of these claim to be well-researched historiographic works; rather, most authors or editors have gathered and presented the available data on a film pioneer in a simple, presentable manner. Since these are biographies or memorial volumes, not researched historical monographs, the straightforward method of data presentation seems appropriate here.

Methods in film historiography 25

Bangladesh film histories: data presentation and academic mode The tendency to present a large amount of data (sometimes, not so relevant) can easily be located in the survey­histories of Bangladesh cinema. Such a trend of data presentation without conceptual backing points to a recurring weakness in the historiography of this cinema. In this way, though the survey­histories posi­ tion themselves in opposition to the fragmentary data presentation of journalism discourse, they essentially tend to primarily function as a “storehouse of information.” I find that displaying huge amount of data with no analysis is a general shortcoming in historical works on Bangladesh cinema. For example, each of the four major histories of Bangladesh cinema published in late twenti­ eth century append a “complete” list of feature films produced annually in the Dhaka film industry since 1956.39 Film historian Ahmed Aminul Islam, who published the fifth history of 1970s–1980s Bangladesh cinema as late as 2008, also followed this trend by showcasing year-wise lists of films produced in Bangladesh between 1972 and 1989.40 Kabir and Mutsuddi present data with some analytical opinions and judg­ ments; Kabir, in particular, divides his chapters, marking out “descriptive” and “critical analysis” sections clearly. Hayat, Quader and Islam are more enthusias­ tic about collecting and recording large amounts of data. Hayat states that all the data in his book were sourced from people and printed documents and that he has only collected and compiled these. Throughout half of The History of Bangladesh Cinema, he describes the “Who’s Who” of the film industry, ranging from pioneers to cameo actors. The 700­page Bangladesh Film Industry by Quader also seems a huge but disorganized body of data on Bangladesh cinema. While the first chapter starts with “film as a mass medium and art medium,” the last chapter ends with “the film society movement.” Altogether, the nine chap­ ters –with no conceptual framework, which is also true for Hayat and Islam— describe many a topics relating to Bangladesh cinema. These range from “the film pages of the dailies” to “film exhibition through VCRs.” None of the histo­ rians—Quader, Hayat or Islam—covers the depth, breadth or larger contexts of the issues, or brings out their interconnections. Similar comments can be made regarding The Torn Pages of Shoraful Islam on The Face and the Mask, the first sound feature film produced in Dhaka. It does present the script of the film and even tidbits remotely connected to the film; however it does not really attempt to analyze why and how this film could be produced only in mid­1950s East Pakistan, not before or after, and not in any other social or cultural context. In this way, I find that Bangladesh film historians’ obsession with presenting as much data as possible attempts to disguise the absence of a theoretical frame­ work within which all these data can be properly analyzed. In fact, all these survey-historical works combine, in the words of the renowned film scholar Edward Buscombe, “ ‘facts’ with idiosyncratic aesthetic judgements and gener­ alizations of doubtful value.’41

26

Methods in film historiography

In this section I have looked at three groups of texts on Bangladesh cinema published between the 1930s and 2010s. The popular journalism discourse initi­ ated the discussion on cinema for the first time in 1930s East Bengal, when no other avenue existed for the exchange of views on cinema. Critical and historical literatures in the form of film-periodicals, anthologies, biographies and historical works have been published during late-twentieth to early-twentyfirst century. The characteristics of the three published modes of cinema appreciation, espe­ cially the film-historiography mode, demonstrate that Bangladesh lacks a par­ ticular discourse of film study: the academic mode. So far, no academic researcher has studied the cinema in/of Bangladesh with due theoretical and methodological rigor as followed in contemporary Cinema Studies. There are only two historical surveys published that were done as aca­ demic studies—one as a PhD and another as an MA. However, both these lack the established norms of research in Film and Cultural Studies. The Cinema of Bangladesh: Socio-economic Backdrop (2008) by Ahmed Aminul Islam was done as a Doctoral dissertation at Jahangirnagar University near Dhaka during the early- to mid-2000s. Islam reviewed a huge number of articles, books and films in the book in order to write about the films of 1970s–1980s Bangladesh. However, he did not attempt to develop a suitable methodological and theoretical framework in which he could place and discuss the cinema of Bangladesh, as has been done with other Asian cinemas for some decades now. The bibliography lists some canonical texts of Film Studies—the authors listed range from Bazin and Bordwell (spelt as Brod­ well) to Nichols and Nelmes.42 However, nowhere in this thesis-turned-book does Aminul Islam demonstrate his conceptual conversations with such key scholars of Film Studies. On the other hand, Islam, who was trained in Drama and Dramatics at a leading Bangladeshi university, makes good use of Bengali­language sources in all the six chapters. At the end, similarly to the survey histories by Hayat and Quader, it becomes a descriptive, data­presentation history of 1970s and 1980s Bangladesh cinema, in which nearly a quarter of the book is taken up by photos as well as a list of films produced in that period. The other academic work—Quader’s Bangladesh Film Industry (1993)—orig­ inated as a minor thesis for the partial fulfilment of his MA degree in the Depart­ ment of Mass Communication and Journalism at Dhaka University in the 1980s. Quader terms this work as “descriptive research with an emphasis on historical approach” and admits the absence of a proper methodological framework in his project by stating that “no single specific method was fully utilized, because of the magnitude and diversity of the area of the study.” Still, he claims that “it was appreciated as one of the best pieces of research done in the department while undoubtedly, it was the first fully-fledged research on Bangladesh cinema and its history” (my emphasis).43 Similarly, both Kabir and Hayat44—working from outside academia—termed their projects as research works too. Similar to the “academic” works of Islam and Quader, these works also never outlines the theory and methodology relevant to their discussion and data presentation. On the other hand, Fahmidul Haq, a media academic at Dhaka University, explained methodology of his study Digital Film in Bangladesh published by an

Methods in film historiography 27 Internet­based publisher in 2011. Funded by Bangladesh Film Archive, this small-scale research sketches digital developments in the Bangladesh film indus­ try by interviewing four directors who attempted to make “digital films” in the 2000s. Though many scholars in Film Studies have taken various philosophical angles in order to understand digital cinema around the world, Haq, unfortu­ nately, does not develop a detailed theoretical framework to understand the digital film culture in Bangladesh. Rather, he takes a piecemeal approach—using Walter Benjamin’s and Samira Makhmalbaf ’s articles as only “instructive in guiding this study.”46 On the other hand, this descriptive study includes standalone textual reviews of four selected films and discusses the present trends and future possibilities of the digital medium, using one-fifth of the study to do so.47 Overall, this work lacks a detailed and in-depth view of the production, distribu­ tion and exhibition contexts of digital cinema in Bangladesh and elsewhere. It seems clear that the Bangladeshi film histories lack certain principles of contemporary film-historiography as exercised in the academic West and as fol­ lowed in parts of Asia and the non-West too. In the next section I identify and elaborate upon the methodological problems inherent in Bangladeshi film histories through the perspective of national cinema historiography. I analyze the two major modes in contemporary film-historiography as well as their methodo­ logical and theoretical concerns which shape the historiographic presentation of a national cinema. I conclude by clarifying what kind of history of Bangladesh cinema I attempt to present in this book and why. 45

Approaches in the historiography of Asian cinemas vis- à-vis my approach While books on Asian national cinemas vary widely in terms of methods and outcomes, the theoretical approach divides the works into two major clusters. The first and more popular approach is to follow an empiricist and teleological way of presenting a national cinema—in most cases, as a modernist endeavour. The early anthologies and some monographs represent this kind of empiricist survey of various non­Western national cinemas, done from a political or cultural­nationalist viewpoint. These survey works of Asian national cinemas narrate the achievements of individual film-makers mostly from an aesthetic angle, and review the artistic signatures in their films. Some scholars take an industrial angle too. They delve into the industrial and financial aspects of a national cinema, mostly to denote the state of underdevelopment of the film industry in question. Dividing into various periods and locating the birth, devel­ opment and decline of a national film industry, these surveys describe the indus­ try in the form of a human biography. Such story­like histories never detail the larger social and political context of film production, exhibition and reception in an Asian nation. While survey works are valuable in understanding the general aspects of Asian national cinemas, these political or cultural­nationalist works take a nation as a monolithic, taken­for­granted entity and see the cinema only as part of a national culture and/or as a nation­building tool. Most empiricist

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surveys on Asian national cinemas have thus ended up in taking either an aes­ theticist or an industrial angle. Since linear, sometimes organic, narratives of Asian national cinemas do not present the complexities and intricacies inherent in such cinemas and in turn dis­ appoint scholars of Film and Media Studies or Asian Studies, a critical approach developed in the 1990s and 2000s. This approach questions the simplistic narrat­ ives of national cinemas as presented in survey works, and takes a more critical and theoretical look at cinema and nation in Asia. It may be termed as the inter­ pretive social­history approach. Interpretive studies on Asian national cinemas include books like National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, Primitive Passions, Picturing Japaneseness, Ideology of the Hindi Film, Reclaiming Adat: Malaysian Film, China on Screen and few other books published in last decade or so. These works exemplify a non­linear mode of narrativizing national cinemas of Asia. They situate the cinemas of Asian nations as complex and elusive entities interconnected with identity categories such as ethnicity and sexuality as well as interacting with many other discourses, ranging from the nation­state to visual aesthetics. These works recognize that the nationhood of Asian or non­Western nations is not con­ stant or naturally given; it is always in the making. For these scholars, nations are hybrid communities that must not be named too easily and positively. The film industry’s interaction with the political-cultural agenda of the nation-state, and the process of identity formation, is evident in this trend of contemporary academic research on Asian cinemas. I follow this interpretive social­history mode in the current study. Avoiding the simplistic and piecemeal approach of the linear surveys of Asian national cinemas, I delineate the complex role of Bangladesh cinema in constructing notions of nationhood, modernity and cultural identity. Going against the aes­ theticist/industrial critiques of Asian national cinemas presented in a “bio­ graphy” format, I understand Bangladesh cinema as a discourse produced, circulated, and received/consumed alongside (and interacting with) many other discourses within a discursive field, a postcolonial nation-space called Bangla­ desh. The history of Bangladesh cinema I propose is an engaged history that recognizes that historical cause and effect is non­linear and change is non­ evolutionary. I intend to make visible what is invisible in the simple continuities found in most national film histories, and indeed in most histories of South Asian nations.

Bangladeshi film histories and traditional historiography Looking at the contemporary film histories published in the West and elsewhere, one can identify two major trends of historiography: the traditional and revision­ ist modes. In traditional film histories, including those done on Bangladesh cinema, a linear and empirical approach is readily visible. These histories create a continuity that ends in the present, indicating the inevitability of the present. They outline only those links that can be established with documents or facts.

Methods in film historiography 29 Therefore, these histories can be termed as teleological and empiricist. Further­ more, the traditional­mode historians of Bangladesh cinema tend to take their ideological frameworks for granted. These are the film histories which take “film” and “history” in their most common sense of the words, as Elsaesser noted, as if a basic and unproblematic agreement is already developed on the relationship between these two entities.48 As is so often the case with other cinemas, the traditional historians of Bang­ ladesh cinema find no difficulty in believing that they can provide an objective depiction of the past through the collection and organization of historical evid­ ence. They find and use these materials as objective documents that speak for themselves, providing a true depiction of the “real world.” This “common sense” notion of empiricist historiography is led to be teleological by an organic and linear narrative similar to human evolution, i.e. birth–growth–death.49 This history is presented in a narrative that includes an easily determinable beginning, middle and end, just like a story. Branigan calls this type of “neo­Aristotelian” history “nineteenth­century history writing,” and he further observes that: Such histories are structured as dramas of disclosure, with a stress on con­ flict and climax. . . . The linear narrative is always looking back, repeating itself, summing up grandly, reducing; and most importantly, preparing the climax. . . . Change in such histories often takes the form of an organic evo­ lution. The source of this evolution is, again, located in a point: a decisive event, the genius of an individual, a revolutionary invention.50 All the survey histories of Bangladesh cinema unquestioningly follow this empiri­ cist and teleological approach. They are intended to provide an unproblematic seamless history of Bangladesh cinema depending on available data. In the previous section, I focused on their concern with collecting and presenting data. All these authors believe that there is only one history of Bangladesh cinema and that each of them is engaged in writing that history. The fact that they all recollect the same events and follow a common chronology proves that they all share a true, common history of Bangladesh cinema. In this way they construct a descriptive and linear­chronological history of Bangladesh cinema characterized by a simpli­ fied cause–effect chain mostly attached to some pioneers. The major historians of Bangladesh cinema, Kabir, Hayat, Mutsuddi, Quader, Islam and Zaki,51 follow a common chronology starting from The Face and the Mask, the first feature produced in Dhaka in 1956. They take it for granted that this is the beginning of Bangladeshi cinema and then most of them enthusiasti­ cally portray the adventure story of producing this first feature in (then) East Pakistan. They describe how Abdul Jabbar Khan, the director-scriptwriterproducer of the film, in a meeting of cultural activists in Dhaka in 1953, accepted the challenge of Khan Bahadur Fazal Ahmed Dosani, a key film personality of the Calcutta film industry. Dosani “suggested that even East Bengal’s weather was unsuitable for film-making not to mention the absence of suitable techni­ cians, equipment and artistes.”52

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Each of the traditional histories of Bangladesh cinema depicts the production and distribution of The Face and the Mask as a perfect adventure story with con­ flict and climax. Hayat devotes a full chapter entitled “The Face and the Mask: the birth of a history,” while Mutsuddi says that “there is a story behind the filmmaking of Abdul Jabbar Khan” (my emphasis).53 Kabir and Quader elaborate how Khan, with no training or experience in film-making, bought a second-hand camera, used a home tape recorder for sound recording and collected the per­ formers, especially the female actors. They also tell the readers how the film was finally released and screened while all the film distributors of East Pakistan were panicked that the audience would damage the theater seats upon seeing the dev­ astating shortcomings of this maiden venture.54 After the tale of The Face and the Mask, Kabir begins his next section—appropriately entitled—“birth of an industry” (my emphasis).55 With The Face and the Mask, the historians of Bangladesh cinema assume that the Dhaka film industry is now born, and then through the rest of their histories they deal with the maturation (and sometimes the decaying) process of this industry. In this way, all these historians present an “organic” history depending on some key events and of course, some “great men” who made the landmark events like The Face and the Mask happen. For example, almost all of them recognize the establishment of the Film Development Corporation (FDC) studio in Dhaka in 1957–1958 as the “beginning” of the Bangladesh film industry. Thus the traditional­mode historians of Bangladesh cinema un­problematically present the past as a clear­cut story using the structure of human evolution and highlighting the achievements of certain individuals. The emphasis on indi­ viduals and their achievements in these film histories clarifies how the historians here believed in traditional historiography, which views changes in history as having always been brought by some “great” individuals. This kind of traditional historiography mostly involves the events (what happened) and the actors (who did what), sometimes accompanied by cause–effect explanations. More impor­ tantly, these story­like histories are built on and centered around historical data or material evidence only; they are histories based on available data. The histor­ ians do not take time to analyze and interpret the data they present within the larger context of society and culture, though that kind of exercise could give the readers a more comprehensive view. Bangladeshi historian Professor Sirajul Islam noted the presence of this tendency in the writing of social histories of Bengal. He terms this type of historiography “calendar method” historiography and remarks that in this way, we can come to know a lot of detailed information, but we cannot see the whole clearly.57 Going against this calendar method, he suggests that a historian should carefully detect the central tendency inherent in the development of various kinds of events. In this way all the published histories on Bangladesh cinema aim to be tele­ ological and empiricist portrayals of its past. Therefore they do not, or cannot, locate the various possible forces at work underlying the production and exhibi­ tion of The Face and the Mask and the establishment of the Film Development

Methods in film historiography 31 Corporation studio in Dhaka, other than the contributions of few individuals. They seem to be engaged in collecting and furnishing data as per the most common pattern of continuity they believe in, rather than in interpreting the data to draw out the broader and deeper meanings underlying the observable phenomena.

Revisionist mode in international film- historiography Among the historians of Bangladesh cinema, Hayat seems more ambitious and energetic in regard to collecting data. Hayat compiles some primary findings to illustrate the history of the early decades of Bangladesh cinema, from the first screening in Dhaka in 1898 to the establishment of the Film Development Cor­ poration (FDC) studio by the government of East Pakistan in 1957. Hayat has worked hard to discover primary data and check the details of events, moving around places like brothels and old palaces in Dhaka.58 This kind of rigor in collecting data, associated with the belief that new data has to be discovered to illuminate some dark chapters in history, is the major feature of the other discourse that can be most widely found within contemporary international film-historiography. This mode of film history is not used much with Bangladesh cinema, other than some attempts located in Hayat’s work. It is exemplified in the work of David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Robert Allen, Douglas Gomery, Tino Balio and others through their contributions to the history of American cinema during last few decades. These histories, mostly North American, which have recently been termed “revisionist,” reject the traditional histories “as unscholarly, short on empirical data, and founded on unreliable hermeneutics.”59 The “revisionists” set their mission as the revision of traditional historiographic modes, and this has become a dominant trend of historiography in contemporary Film Studies. The revision offered by revisionist historians has had two main targets: histor­ ical investigation and narrative representation. In regard to investigation, they have focused on the vast archives of primary materials generated by the film businesses or companies which were hitherto unexplored, as argued by Gomery in the preface of his history of film exhibition in the US.60 They have also made the optimum use of trade journals, which the traditional historians did not gener­ ally perceive as something worth investigating.61 In this way, the revisionist historians tend to put emphasis on the discovery of new material data, which they treat as necessary to ask new questions and draw new conclusions.62 The belief in the objectivity or truthfulness of material data, associated with the understanding that the discovery of new data means new light in unknown areas of film history, effectively de-emphasizes the work of interpreting data in writing a history. Revisionist studies are concerned with the collection and presentation of as much data as possible on a specific “national” film industry, based within a par­ ticular nation-state. One can argue that these scholars are obsessed with presenting the surface realities of a film industry through the collection of “facts and figures.”

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They almost unanimously use quantitative analysis based on statistical methods mainly privileged in the business and social science disciplines. These histories normally focus on the norms of operation of/within a film-production industry. They might discuss some general audience behavior or government legislation related to film distribution and exhibition, only if those are somewhat related with the development or decline of the film-production industry in question. For example, Gomery writes a history of film exhibition in the USA com­ pletely depending on verifiable material data, derived mostly from business documents and trade papers.63 He presents here only those aspects of film exhi­ bition that can be concretely known and evidenced. So, not only does he discuss the evolution of film theaters and screening technologies along with the roles entrepreneurs play in these changes, but also all his illustrations in the book are only of theaters in the USA. There are no pictures of the people who occupied the seats in those theaters. He never mentions the spectators’ attitudes to the films or the film-exhibition system, as that cannot be studied through material data alone.64 Similar to the empiricist tendency inherent in the traditional histor­ ies, the revisionist historians’ dependency on material evidence demonstrates their emphasis on observable phenomena as well as their indifference to the unobservable mechanisms for which there is no material data readily available. In regard to narrative presentation, revisionist film history is uncomfortable with the hero–villain dichotomy and the “organic” or evolutionary narrative— the modes that lead the traditional history approach to be teleological. As Allen and Gomery put it: we cannot afford to be seduced by the story being told as history so that we neglect to ask those historiographic questions the fictional storyteller can so neatly avoid. . . . the transformation of historical personae into narrative characters glosses over complex problems of historical causality.65 In order to overcome these problems associated with presenting history as a story (as seen mostly in the traditional mode), the revisionist historians propose to utilize a non­narrative format normally used in reporting natural science experiments.66 Klenotic points out that though the revisionist historian considers this presentation structure as more verifiable than the story-like narrative, this arrangement is also concerned to organize data in a seamless pattern within the format. He notes that, in the end, this also becomes another narrative presenta­ tion of the past, similar to the type found in traditional histories.67 Back in 1979, Branigan had already identified that revisionist histories rely upon an “economic cycle (invention, innovation, diffusion).”68 Using such “cycles,” revisionist his­ torians create their own continuous past that is as teleological as the traditional histories, even though they are methodologically more serious and sophisticated. However, it would not be correct to suggest that the revisionist historians are innocent of the problems of interpretation. They call for “a film history in which ‘interpretation’ is wedded firmly to evidence.”69 Allen and Gomery advocate a “realist” approach as an alternative to the either/or binarism established between

Methods in film historiography 33 evidence and interpretation by traditional historians. Although this “realist” his­ toriography struggles to create a delicate balance between the two extremes of objectiveness or truthfulness and multiple interpretations of historical evidence, in the end it asserts that there is a “real” world independent of the historian.70 Klenotic observes that through this “realism,” the revisionist historians: want to carve out . . . a position that recognizes facts of history as empiri­ cally knowable and yet variable depending on the historian’s theoretical and ideological bent . . . . But the evidence remains the factual foundation upon which an argument can be built.71 On the other hand, they acknowledge that as there is no unadulterated documen­ tary evidence available in this world, the historian has to search for the “least mediated” material. The conclusions developed on the basis of such evidence need to be verified by the most non-contradictory position, or positions, supported by a number of investigators.72 In this way, they attempt to create a “correct” version of the past, which is itself an empiricist or “objectivist” proposition.73 But the ques­ tion remains of, as Richard Allen puts it: “why historians should in principle achieve similar conclusions as to the significance of past events.”74

Towards an interpretive history of Bangladesh cinema It seems that the revisionist historians try to portray film history as a chain of past events that can be reconstructed through correct research methods.75 Allen and Gomery identify film history as one of the three major branches of Film Studies along with Film Theory and Film Criticism.76 In this way, they place film history on a par with, but also separate from, theory and criticism. From their overtly empiricist and also teleological position, they understand historical investigation as a “scientific” inquiry, and mark the task of interpretation out as a quite different activity—to be done as part of Film Theory or Criticism. Patrice Petro points out in this regard that: a certain division of labour has come to characterize film studies as a discip­ line in which “historians” pursue the realm of the empirical, and quantifi­ able, the concretely known (the realm of history proper), and “feminists” explore the more intangible realm of theoretical speculation (the realm of interpretation).77 I reject this division, maintained by the revisionists, as an unproductive concept. No history can be written without interpreting the data, even if the historian does not intend to do so in a conscious manner. Butler, E. P. Thompson and E. H. Carr have pointed out the crucial importance of interpreting data by the historian using a coherent and suitable theoretical framework. Taking the data as objective is a trap. As all data are shaped by interactions among various discourses, there are always contested inner meanings masked behind the face of “innocent” data.

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Only analysis can make these visible. The historian and his/her interpretive framework is the most important aspect in understanding what is underneath or suppressed by the presentation of data. Therefore, the reconstitution of the past in the historian’s mind is not dependent upon collecting and displaying empirical evidence alone. On the contrary, as E. H. Carr puts it, this process relies on the selection and interpretation of the facts by the historian and his/her theoretical position.78 Therefore, I take an interpretative stance here, as I believe this determines how pieces of data are related in this history. In order to “read” or interpret the data within a broader context, I study Bangladesh cinema within a theorized framework (Chapter 2 makes this framework more explicit). The history of Bangladesh cinema proposed here is an engaged history that recognizes that historical cause and effect is non­linear and change is non­evolutionary. Following the kind of cinema history proposed by Edward Branigan, the temporality in this history of Bangladesh cinema—made up of discontinuities between elements—will signify an overall manifold order that itself has no beginning or end point.79 In this way, I intend to make visible what is either invisible in or beyond the reach of the simple continuities found in most film histories, and, indeed, in most histories. I do not pretend to portray an objective and comprehensive “past” of Bangladesh cinema that ultimately ends in the “present” following a neat, sim­ plistic and continuous cause–effect chain and using material evidence as a deter­ minant. Rather, a dependency on teleology and empiricism is a shortcoming that this study intends to avoid. I reject the traditional histories of Bangladesh cinema which are, in Buscombe’s terms, characterized by “a complete innocence of his­ toriography.”80 I deconstruct these “innocent” histories, especially to locate crucial methodological issues like the nature of the investigation, including the status of the evidence as well as the relationship of the historian to these docu­ ments and the pattern of the narrative implicit in these. I note how all these pre­ suppositions make the teleological and empiricist nature of these traditional histories quite obvious. Drawing upon Thomas Elsaesser, I rely on discourses that are always com­ peting and corresponding with each other, not on determinants that work as com­ ponents in the conventional historical narrative built up on the cause­and­effect chains.81 My version of Bangladeshi film history is explicit in demonstrating the concepts underlying historical investigation and presentation. This demonstra­ tion includes the crucial conflict assumed to exist between data and interpreta­ tion, as I outlined above when discussing the limitations of revisionist histories. In writing this history, I became engaged in a constant process of shaping the facts to my interpretations and again framing the interpretations to the facts, not assigning supremacy to one over the other. In this way, I involved myself in what E. H. Carr terms “an unending dialogue between the present and the past”82 of Bangladesh cinema. In order to develop this kind of interactive history, I drew on the “dialogic” or “conversational” model of history proposed by Dominick LaCapra. This model recognizes that historiography is a complex mode of discourse “in which an

Methods in film historiography 35 exchange with the past is always bound up with a present dialogue.”83 This implies that when writing this history of Bangladesh cinema, I was not only engaged in “dialogues” with the past, but also with my own subject position, my modes of inquiry and the discourses to which I had access, as well as with other historians and their histories. This practice enabled me to displace, as Klenotic puts it, the authoritative position offered to evidence­based accounts privileged by most histories.84 Only by using certain interpretive frameworks in this “dialogic” history of Bangladesh cinema, can I create a picture of the past that is linked with the present. For this reason, by focusing on a number of separate case studies about different aspects of Bangladesh cinema, I emphasize discontinuities inherent in the development of this cinema. For example, when I focus on The Face and the Mask in later chapters, I not only compile the literal meaning of the available data around the film, but also look for the meanings of the data within a much wider context. I did not take the production and exhibition of this film only as an adventure of Mr Khan. Rather, I raised questions like why and how this is the beginning of Bangladesh cinema, what else happened before this and why those are not considered as important as this event (see Chapter 3). I also re-evaluated the content of The Face and the Mask within the backdrop of the struggle for Bengali­Muslim cultural identity in the social, political and economic spheres of (then) East Bengal/Pakistan (see Chapter 5). In this way, I located the particular political and historical juncture that fostered this event as well as what roles other discourses played in order to make this happen. I focused on the interplay of these discourses in order to present wider functions of the film within the social and cultural context of 1950s East Pakistan. In this chapter I presented an appraisal of the existing literature on cinema in/ of Bangladesh as well as of the major film-historiographic modes. The analysis makes it clear that Bangladesh cinema is a cinema that is not yet addressed with proper theory and methodology. No serious historian or researcher informed by the contemporary theory and methodology available for studying the cinema of a non­Western postcolonial nation­space, such as Bangladesh, came forward to study the cinema of/in Bangladesh. This book is a step towards fulfilling such a gap in the existing works on Bangladesh cinema as well as on contemporary film studies. Here, I intend to take a step towards the demarginalization of Bangla­ desh cinema, offering an engaged social history of this cinema. Therefore, I approach this study from several theoretical stances linked with filmhistoriography and national cinema. This chapter clarified the major methodo­ logical and theoretical concerns that shape the historiographic presentation of a cinema and the kind of history of Bangladesh cinema I propose throughout this study. In the next chapter, by questioning concepts like nation and cinema, I lay out a conceptual framework for studying a non­Western national cinema like Bangladesh cinema.

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Notes 1 Philip Rosen, “History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch, and Some Problems in the Study of National Cinemas,” Iris 2.2 (1984): 70–1. 2 Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan, “Two Discourses of Australian Film,” The Australian Journal of Screen Theory 15/16 (1983): 163. 3 Since 2001, few film modules have been introduced in Mass Communication/Media Studies programs at the University of Dhaka and Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), two leading universities in the public and private sectors respectively. IUB started film and television specializations for undergraduates in 2007 and from 2010, at Master’s level. Stamford University, Bangladesh (SUB), a younger private univer­ sity, started Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in “Film and Media” in 2004. During 2012, a Department of Television and Film Studies was established at the University of Dhaka. In 2013–14, the Bangladesh government made efforts to establish a film institute. As emerging institutions, most of these places are not academically well­ armed and need to go a long way to be able to offer the study of film at a world standard level. 4 Interestingly, Ashish Rajadhyaksha finds that scholarly writing on the cinema in India also developed chronologically: “1970s Film Appreciation, 1980s Film Theory and 1990s Film Studies.” See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (New Delhi: Tulika, 2009), p. iix. 5 Khandakar Mahmudul Hasan, Cinema theke Chitrali (From Cinema to Chitrali) (Dhaka: Oitijjhyo, 2011), p. 40; Anupam Hayat Cinema in Old Dhaka (Dhaka: Ityadi Grantha Prokash, 2009), p. 62. 6 Mirja Tarequl Quader, Bangladesh Film Industry (Bangladesher Chalachitro Shilpo) (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993), pp. 597–8. 7 Titles of these magazines in Bengali denote the visual and illustrative nature of cinema (for example, “image and shadow,” “shadow and word,” “imageries” etc.). 8 Hasan (2011) p. 40. 9 Alamgir Kabir, Film in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1979), p. 129. 10 Md. Asiuzzaman et al. Study on Media Availability in Bangladesh, Unpublished report, Dhaka: BCDJC, 2008, p. 7. 11 The most popular daily (Prothom Alo) claims its circulation to be 0.45 million, see https://www.facebook.com/DailyProthomAlo/info (accessed June 22, 2012). Back in the early 2000s, it was 0.20 million; see Nasir Uddin Khan, “Communication Scene: Bangladesh,” in Asian Communication Handbook 2003 (eds.) Anura Goonasekera, Lee Chun Wah and S. Venkatraman (Singapore: AMIC, 2003), p. 13. 12 For details on the film magazines, see Hasan (2011) pp. 71–82. 13 Quader (1993) p. 634. 14 Gayen, Aditi F. and Humaira Bilkis, Mutual Influence between Popular Cinema and Cine Journalism in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Archive, 2009), p. 50. 15 Khalid Hasan, National Media Survey 1998 (Dhaka: Org-Marg Quest Ltd., 1999), p. 47. 16 Md. Asiuzzaman et al., Study on Media Availability in Bangladesh, p. 55. 17 Some film activists, including veteran Mahbub Jamil, claim that they formed the Stu­ dents’ Film Society (SFS) at the University of Dhaka some months before PFS started. SFS, however, survived for only a short while. For details, see Mahbub Jamil, “Dhaka University led Film Club Movement Too,” Montage 4 (1992): 73. PFS was renamed the Bangladesh Film Society (BFS) in 1972 and its existence is still evident, especially through its scholarly and voluminous journal, Dhrupadi, edited by veteran Muhammad Khasru. Throughout the 1970s to the 1990s BFS produced a number of younger offshoots, as many of its former activists went on to organize new film clubs. 18 Willem Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 187.

Methods in film historiography 37 19 Hasan (2011) p. 76. On p. 234. 20 Anupam Hayat, History of Bangladesh Cinema (Bangladesher Chalachitrer Itihash) (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Development Corporation, 1987), p. 145. 21 Kabir (1979) p. 129. 22 Quader (1993) pp. 629–31. Hasan (2011) p. 224. 23 Hasan (2011) pp. 222–23. 24 Muhammad Khasru (ed.), Dhrupadi, Volume 6 (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Society, 2006). 25 IFCAB “State of Cine Criticism,” Celluloid 18.1 (1996): 63. 26 Rafique Kaiser, “Letter,” Chalachitrapatra 10.1 (1986): 107. This and all other trans­ lations are mine, if not indicated otherwise. 27 Shamol Dutta, “What is the Magic of Film Entertainment,” Chalachitrapatra 10.1 (1986): 81. 28 Tanvir Mokammel, Film Aesthetics and Twelve Directors (Chalachitra Nandantatwa O Barojon Director) (Dhaka: Suborno Prokashoni, 1985); Anwar Hossain Pintu, About Cinema (Chalachitra Proshonga) (Chittagong: Look Through Prokashoni, 1985). 29 Zakir Hossain Raju, Understanding Cinema (Chalachitrer Chalchitro) (Dhaka: Chal­ achitram Film Society, 1990/Second revised edition, Jagrity, 2012a); Ayub Hossain, Alternative Film Movements (Prothabirodhi Chalachitra Andolon) (Dhaka: Shilpotaru Prokashoni, 1991); Mahbub Jamil, Subject: Cinema (Proshonga: Chalachitra) (Dhaka: Shanondo Prokash, 1994); Tanvir Mokammel, The Aesthetics of Cinema (Cinemar Shilporoop) (Dhaka: Agami Prokashoni, 1998); Tareque Ahmed, Patriotic Thoughts in Cinema (Chalachitre Swadesh Bhabna) (Dhaka: Porag Prokashoni, 1998); Shaibal Chowdhury, At the Backdrop of Cinema (Chalachitrer Potobhumikai) (Chittagong: Chittagong Film Center, 1994). 30 Muhammad Khasru, Film Club Movement of Bangladesh (Bangladesher Chalachitra Sangshad Andolon) (Dhaka: Parua, 2004); Mahbub Alam, Films I Watched (Amar Dekha Chobi) (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Society, 2008); Nurul Alam Atique, Towards a New Cinema (Notun Cinema, Shomoyer Proyojone), (Dhaka: Pandulipi Karkhana, 2009); Mahmudul Hossain, Cinema (Cinema) Dhaka: Mahmudul Hossain, 2010); Sajedul Awwal, Film Art (Chalachitra Kala) (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2010); Tareque Masud, In A Film Journey (Chalachitra Jatra) (Dhaka: Prothoma, 2012). 31 International Film Guide (1981): 74. 32 Kabir (1979) “Foreword.” 33 Kabir Chowdhury (ed.) The Memorial Volume on Alamgir Kabir (Alamgir Kabir Sharok Grontho) (Dhaka: Bangladesh Federation of Film Societies, 1991). 34 Shaikot Ashgor, Hiralal Sen (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993); Shaikot Ashgor, Abdul Jabbar Khan (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2002); Anupam Hayat, Fateh Lohani (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1994) 35 See Chapters 3 and 4 of this study for my detailed assessment of Sen, Khan and Loha­ ni’s role in Bangladesh film history. 36 Anupam Hayat, Some Film Activists of Bangladesh of the Yesteryears (Dhaka: Bang­ ladesh Arts Academy, 1999). 37 Leaquat Hosain Khokon, The The Sad Tales of Film Stars (Chalachitra Tarokader Bedonar Kotha) (Dhaka: Anindya Prokash, 2010). 38 Catherine Masud (ed.) Tareque Masud: Life and Dreams (Dhaka: British Council and Prothoma, 2012). 39 Kabir (1979) pp. 136–42; Hayat (1987) pp. 276–84; Mutsuddi (1987), pp. 180–93; Quader, Film Industry, pp. 185–206. 40 Islam (2008) pp. 337–49. 41 Edward Buscombe, “Introduction: Metahistory of Film,” Film Reader 4 (1979): 11. 42 Islam, The Cinema of Bangladesh, pp. 354–6. 43 Quader (1993) p. 14.

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44 Kabir (1979) “Preface”; Hayat (1987) pp. i, iii and iv. 45 Fahmidul Haq, Digital Film in Bangladesh: Call for a New Cinema? Germany: LAP, 2011. 46 Haq (2011) p. 15. 47 See pp. 74–93 of Haq (2011). The monograph runs for 100 pages. 48 Thomas Elsaesser, “Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema,” in Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Rosen (eds.) Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984) 48. 49 Edward Branigan, “Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History,” Film Reader 4 (1979): 29. 50 Branigan (1979) pp. 17–8. 51 Syed Salahuddin Zaki, “Bangladesh Cinema: A Brief Review” ((Bangladesher Chala­ chitra: Ekti Sankhipto Porjalochona) Celluloid 20.1 (1997). 52 Kabir (1979) p. 22. 53 Hayat (1987) p. 43; Mutsuddi (1987) p. 20. 54 Hayat (1987) pp. 43–55; Mutsuddi (1987) pp. 20–2; Kabir (1979) pp. 22–4; Quader (1993), pp. 96–7, 103–19; Mofidul Hoque, “The 21st February (the language martyrs’ day) and Bangladesh Cinema,” Intercut 4 (1989): 97. 55 Kabir (1979) p. 24. 56 Kabir (1979) p. 25; Hayat (1987) p. 58; Quader, Film Industry, 323–4; Huq, (1989) 96. 57 Sirajul Islam, “Introduction,” The History of Bangladesh 1704–1971, Vol. 3 (Social and Cultural History), ed. Sirajul Islam (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1993) 9–10. 58 Hayat (1987) “Preface”. 59 Alison Butler, “New Film Histories and the Politics of Location,” Screen 33.4 (1992): 414. 60 Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States, (Madison, USA: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. x–xi. 61 Tom Gunning “Review of The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960,” Wide Angle, 7.3 (1985): 74. 62 Gomery (1992) p. xii. 63 Gomery (1992) pp. xxii and 303–56. 64 Gomery (1992) pp. v–viii and 3–302. 65 Allen and Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985), pp. 45–6. 66 Allen and Gomery (1985) pp. 47–8. 67 Jeffrey F. Klenotic, “The Place of Rhetoric in ‘New’ Film Historiography: The Dis­ course of Corrective Revisionism,” Film History 6 (1994): 50. 68 Branigan (1979) pp. 21 and 29. 69 Stephen Bottomore, “Out of This World: Theory, Fact and Film History,” Film History 6 (1994): 21. 70 Allen and Gomery (1985) p. 14. 71 Klenotic (1994) 50. 72 Allen and Gomery (1985) pp. 16–21. 73 Klenotic (1994) 45–55. 74 Richard Allen, “Review of Film History: Theory and Practice,” Wide Angle 8 (1986): 56–8. 75 Butler (1992) 413. 76 Allen and Gomery (1985) pp. 4–5. 77 Patrice Petro “Feminism and Film History,” Camera Obscura, no. 22 (1990): 9. 78 E. H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1961; second ed. 1987), p. 14. 79 Branigan (1979) p. 24. 80 Buscombe (1979) 11.

Methods in film historiography 39 81 Elsaesser (1984) 55. 82 E. H. Carr (1987) pp. 29–30. 83 Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 44. 84 Klenotic (1994) 57.

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National cinema and non-Western modernity Framework to study Bangladesh cinema

This chapter outlines my theoretical stance in relation to cinema and the nation of Bangladesh as I utilize these to address the problems of studying such a non-Western national cinema. I approach this cinema as a discursive entity and, in turn, as a public sphere that intersects the life- and systemworlds of the community it addresses. I understand this cinema as produced, circulated and received/consumed within a discursive field, a postcolonial space located in the “non-West”—as per the geopolitics of today’s world— called Bangladesh. This study thus looks at the cinema in/of Bangladesh primarily as a vehicle of national modernity for various groups of Bengali Muslims. This chapter establishes the framework for locating this cinema in this way. I aim to demonstrate that cinema in Bangladesh (and then East Bengal/Pakistan) worked as different “public spheres” for different “publics,” as various groups of Bengali Muslims conceived and utilized cinema and the concept of national modernity differently in different social and political junctures throughout the twentieth century. I consider the cinema as a public sphere: . . . a general social horizon of experience in which what is really or supposedly relevant for all members of society is summarized. . . . It is something that has to do with everyone and which only realizes itself in the heads of human beings, a dimension of their consciousness.1 I therefore deal with the complex role of cinema as a cultural institution in constructing contesting and overlapping identities of/for Bengali Muslims in this study. I argue that during the twentieth century, the film industry here constructed such identities for Bengali Muslims under two rubrics of national modernity: cultural-national modernity and nation-state (Bangladeshi) modernity. In order to consider Bangladesh as a “nation,” I use the postcolonial understanding of nationalism and colonialism in the present study. Nationalism, as defined by Fox and Miller-Idriss, is the project to make the political unit, the state (or polity) congruent with the cultural unit, the nation.2 In their view, nationalism is:

National cinema and non-Western modernity 41 [T]he historically contingent outcome of modernizing and industrializing economic forces [. . .], a cultural construct of collective belonging realized and legitimated through institutional and discursive practices, and a site for material and symbolic struggles over the definition of national inclusion and exclusion’.3 Such a postcolonial way of understanding nation and nationalism enables me to make visible and accommodate the ambivalence inherent in the “nation” called Bangladesh. In the words of Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “postcolonial theory allows us to reconceptualize colonialism itself, in the light of our current knowledge of global capitalism.”4 Through this kind of postcolonial approach I understand the “Bangladesh” nation as a discursive entity that is not so easy to define. It is an “imagined community” (in Benedict Anderson’s term) or an “artificial construct” (as Gayatri Spivak puts it).5 I take nation-ness as, in the words of Sumita S. Chakravarty, “an attempt to override difference in the name of difference.”6 In this way, I intend to avoid the three worlds discourse that could limit my analysis within an either/or binarism. This discourse essentializes Bangladesh in such a black-and-white manner that the complexities of colonial power dynamics cannot be analyzed within its framework. As put by Yoshimoto, it “reinforces the imperialist logic under the guise of liberal humanism.”7 Rather, here I use “postcoloniality” as a descriptive category, both specific and flexible in usage, that does not claim the status of a pure concept like the three worlds theory. Drawing on the postcolonial notion of the formation of the “Bangladesh” nation, and outlining the ways of articulating national modernity for this nation through various cinemas, I am concerned here with examining the interactions between cinema and different groups of Bengali Muslims in different social and political matrices. I argue that the development of Western-educated Bengali Muslim middle classes in early-to-mid-twentieth-century East Bengal, and their search for a distinct cultural identity, affected the development of cinema as a cultural institution in postcolonial East Pakistan and Bangladesh. My main argument is that the different groups of middle-class Bengali Muslims used cinema in order to construct different kinds of identities towards articulating different templates of national modernity for the populations of Bangladesh. Here, I take non-Western modernity as, in the words of Partha Chatterjee, “an always incomplete project of modernization . . . essentially a pedagogical mission” led by “an enlightened elite.”8 The “enlightened elite,” that is, the Western-educated, middle class in Bangladesh and (then) East Bengal/Pakistan—representing the majority, Bengali Muslims—while imagining a modern nation (“Bangladesh”), also envisaged a particular kind of cultural identity for themselves and the entire population. They wanted cinema to function as part of this imagination of national modernity. They wanted cinema to be, in the words of Partha Chatterjee, “a space where discourse would be modern, and yet ‘national’.”9 However, similar to other media and cultural forms, the conflict among different groups of middle-class Bengali Muslims turned cinema into a site of contesting identities and modernities in postcolonial

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Bangladesh. I identify two notions of national modernity that westernized middle classes pursued through the medium of cinema in twentieth-century East Bengal/ Pakistan and Bangladesh: cultural-national modernity and nation-state modernity. Throughout the current study, I demonstrate the role of cinema in the development of these two contesting but overlapping notions of national modernity. Using these two templates of modernity, I engagingly present a non-linear but still interactive and rational history of cinema in Bangladesh. The anti-colonial, cultural-nationalist Bengali Muslims in 1910s–1940s colonial India and in 1950s–1960s (post-)colonial Pakistan created the discourse of cultural-national (i.e. Bengali-Muslim) modernity. Despite the fact that at that period, there was no nation(-state) imagined on behalf of East Bengalis as such, these anti-colonial middle classes were quick in their indigenization and appropriation of cinema as a worthy part of East-Bengali culture that could forward a cultural-national modernity of/for themselves. The early twentieth century was the period when—within and against the hegemonic discourses of BengaliHindu identity and pan-Indian Muslim identity—the emerging middle classes of the Bengali Muslim community of East Bengal struggled hard to imagine and define a version of East-Bengali cultural identity that was suitable for them. This defining process induced them to support the formation of the Pakistan state in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950s and 1960s East Pakistan, these cultural-nationalist Bengali Muslims became engaged in critiquing and opposing the (post-)colonial state of Pakistan and its rhetoric of pan-Islamic Muslim modernism. They—as Bengalis, not as Muslims—led the political formation of an independent nation-state called “Bangladesh.” They mobilized ordinary East Pakistanis (largely Bengali Muslims and some non-Muslim Bengalis) before and during the 1971 liberation war against the pro-Islam Pakistani military junta on the secular notion of Bengali identity. Historian Willem Van Schendel articulated this shift from “Muslimness” to “Bengaliness”: In the late 1940s it was an Islamic vision that had fuelled the sense of nation. The people of the delta were joining other Muslims of South Asia to create the homeland of Pakistan. . . . By contrast, the national identity that animated them in the early 1970s was a regional one. They were Bengalis first and Muslims next. . . . Within twenty-five years, they had moved from an image of themselves as Bengali Muslims to one of themselves as Muslim Bengalis (emphasis in original).10 I understand that these two forms of identity—Bengali Muslims and Muslim Bengalis—are still at work to date in Bangladesh and I take them as belonging within the cultural-national modernity of Bengali Muslims. After Bangladesh became an independent nation-state, the imagination of national modernity took new routes. As the national-modernist agenda of the middle classes got further divided, the state and the political-nationalist Bengali Muslims used the popular film industry to define national modernity in the form

National cinema and non-Western modernity 43 of nation-state modernity. In 1970s–2010s Bangladesh, they opted for a “Bangladeshi” modernity highlighting the territoriality and identity of the Bangladesh nation as well as de-emphasizing the secular notion of Bengali identity. Bangladesh cinema became a vehicle towards that goal. At the same period, the cultural-nationalist middle classes in Bangladesh worked towards forming a Bangladeshi art cinema. This cinema became their vehicle to construct a modern Bengali identity based on the supremacy of local, regional culture as a way towards their envisaged cultural-national modernity in opposition to the notion of state-national modernity. As part of outlining the theoretical and methodological framework of the current study, I analyzed the local and international modes of film-historiography in Chapter 1. This chapter explores the framework further by examining the ways in which both cinema and Bangladesh can be understood. How I locate cinema and Bangladesh clarifies my conceptualization, within which I am situating Bangladesh cinema and its history. In this task, I first proceed with the concept of “cinema.” In the next section, I look at how to understand “Bangladesh.”

Understanding “cinema”: binaries and beyond Understanding cinema, interestingly, depends upon some binary concepts both inside and outside academia. The works on national cinemas done in academic Film Studies represent a tendency of film scholarship to encourage the either/or notion of what “cinema” is. These studies mostly develop a division between text and context—cinemas were textually dissected as/within film texts, or analyzed as a body of texts situated within their contexts. Before the acceptance of cinema as an academic discipline, and outside that boundary, the major approach to cinema located it as an art form, in most cases in opposition to the approach that looked at cinema as an industry or business. This binary approach produced aesthetic and industrial discussions on cinema— in separate camps—both in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Throughout the 1970s, these approaches were somewhat transformed in Western academia into textual– theoretical and empirical–historical analyses of cinema, with much more sophistication and rigor by the theorists and historians in Film Studies and allied disciplines.

Cinema as aesthetic/industrial text: the mode of film study of/ in Bangladesh In Bangladesh, written pieces on cinema from the 1930s till today are either industrial or aesthetic. The genre of black-and-white reviews and reports in newspaper pages that I termed “popular journalism,” is explicitly biased towards the dominant, capital-driven commercial film industry, and in this way represents the “industrial” standpoint. This is the oldest and the most circulated mode of commentary on Bangladesh cinema to this day. This

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journalistic stream of writing on Bangladesh cinema assumes cinema to be an “industry.” Shahriar Kabir, a noted author and journalist of Bangladesh points out that cine-journalists as well as film magazines and film pages of the dailies are directly linked in a complementary material relationship with the popular film industry. For example, some cine-journalists also write scripts for popular commercial films.11 Alamgir Kabir, Bangladesh’s pioneer film historian-critic complains that the cine-jouralists only write and publish the reports and reviews which “please the producers, who are potential advertisers.” He condemns “the film critic who has to review for the sake of earning a livelihood film after film,” not only for presenting “a formula review of a formula film,” but also for manipulating “the course of a ‘review’ ” in relation to gaining some material benefits.12 The International Film Critics Association of Bangladesh (IFCAB), established in 1995 and mainly composed of film club activists, attacks these newspaperbased critics of popular films as “home-bound critics,” indicating that they are regularly paid by film producers to promote their films.13 On the other hand, the aestheticists look at a film as an autonomous art-work or as a literature with pictures. They take it as their mission to upgrade the prestige of cinema in Bangladesh against the more prevalent “industrialist” approach. They treat a film as a creation of an individual artist, generally seen as a genius, and tend to examine the unique artistic characteristics of the film text. In this way, they separate the film from its industrial context and outline its formal innovativeness in a bid to emphasize its transcendental nature as a piece of art. They produce mostly textual, formalist and aesthetic discussions with few or no references to the broader context. The major tendencies are auteurist emphasis and aestheticist judgment aimed at the creation of a more “cinematic,” “artistic” and “realist” cinema, which is generally referred to as alternative cinema, largely following the ideas and ideals set by the European art cinemas of the 1950s and 1960s. Writers on Bangladesh cinema—mostly film club activists and historians—have always expected the establishment of such an art cinema, never demonstrating how it could practically happen and be viable in the economic, political and cultural context of Bangladesh. They unanimously rejected the popular films, as a bulk that provides only cheap entertainment, and then happily engaged themselves in detailed appraisal of the handful of “alternative” or art films produced in Bangladesh to date. However, it should be acknowledged that the aestheticist writers on Bangladesh cinema started discussing cinema with a serious attitude in a society where it is still considered to be a low-grade entertainment. Importantly, they performed this kind of writing practice mostly to express their urge for a Bangladeshi art cinema. This was out of a sense of social obligation to promote artistic film culture, not for some material benefit, as happens with the writers of popular journalism. In a bid to upgrade the status of cinema in the cultural sphere of Bangladesh—largely governed by the middle-class intelligentsia and their social values—the film writers mostly tended to privilege art cinema films, implying that the popular films are not objects to be scrutinized seriously.

National cinema and non-Western modernity 45 For example, the most competent aestheticist writer on Bangladesh cinema, Alamgir Kabir, in his Film in Bangladesh (1979), illustrates the achievements of all the auteurs in Bangladesh cinema till 1979 as well as advocating the ‘offbeat’ films (the term he coins for art cinema). He critiques popular cinema, naming it “camera theater,” and discusses such films en masse, determining some general elements in them, such as “religious” and “feminine” sentiments. Kabir continues his aestheticist fascination for “auteurist” heroes till the end of the book, where he provides a list of the films under each director’s credit.14 Chinmoy Mutsuddi, another confident aestheticist among the survey historians of Bangladesh cinema, also lists the directors and their films in this way. Still today, the aestheticists of Bangladesh cinema continue to mark all popular films as formulaic, full of sex and violence and plagiarized from “Bollywood films,” meaning the Indian Hindi-language, popular commercial films produced in Bombay. These films are portrayed as a social evil. It seems that they believe in a simple taxonomy of cinema that easily divides films into two opposite groups—“good” (i.e. art or alternative) and “bad” (i.e. popular) films. They find no problem in assuming that popular films are harmful to the social order, while art films are educational for the masses. Though contesting each other, both the aesthetic and industrial discourses on Bangladesh cinema are text-based. The meaning of cinema for both groups is limited to the production and exhibition of films within an industrial setting. They never elaborate on the multiple roles of spectators or the diversities of film reception. The audiences of popular films are considered nameless, faceless consumers who, in the industrialists’ view, have to be lured to buy cinema tickets; the aestheticists treat them as infants: the uneducated poor people, the illiterate poor masses, who want only cheap entertainment. In this way, both trends consider spectators to be a passive, monolithic and homogenous entity. This leads them towards a primitive theoretical position with regard to the role of cinema in Bangladesh society. In particular, the aestheticists, with their belief that “good” films can do good and “bad” films can do harm, assume that cinema has a strong and direct influence on its audience. This view was espoused by the “magic bullet” or “hypodermic syringe” theory of mass communication, which, throughout the USA in the 1920s and 1930s, spread a belief that films have a “special capacity for harm.” Later research done in the 1950s and the 1960s clearly showed that films are not privileged vehicles for attitude change.15 However, writers on Bangladesh cinema have found no reason to change their attitude towards cinema and its spectators.

Confronting the popular binaries in Film Studies This kind of dependency on film texts—ignoring the contexts of the production, circulation and appreciation of such texts—is also omnipresent even in the works on cinema in Western academia, especially in Film Studies since the 1970s. Jackie Stacey argued that Film Studies’ allegiance to Literary Studies made it easy to take textual analysis as its canonical method as well as an anti-empiricist

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standpoint against sociology and communication studies, both of which fostered and rationalized the marginalization of the study of spectatorship within the discipline.16 Textual analysis tended to focus on the film text, or a body of film texts, and to interpret it mostly drawing on theories such as psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminism and Marxism. Often referred to as 1970s film theory or apparatus theory, these works done by scholars such as Metz, Baudry, Bellour, Heath, MacCabe, Wollen and Mulvey, relied heavily on the works of Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.17 This trend of theoretical-textual writing on cinema can be related to conventional discussion on art-pieces centering on texts and their meanings that appropriated cinema as a high art. On the positive side, these works established cinema as a distinct discipline and demonstrated that a film text can be analyzed within a much larger theoretical backdrop than had been done generally. In reaction to, or at least to complement, the theoretical-textual works, Contextual Studies arose. The mission of these works was to develop an empiricalhistorical footing against the textual-theoretical trend based on 1970s film theory. This empirical-historical model can be broken down into two groups of film scholarship. The culturalist group of works analyzes cultural and political affairs, while the industrialist-formalist group focuses on the institutional and industrial determinants of, in most cases, a national cinema. Culturalist works are generally situated outside the discipline of Film Studies, by researchers from other disciplines from the humanities and social sciences like sociology, anthropology and history. They generally consider film as a part of the wider socio-political atmosphere—in the words of Anna Lawton, “a cultural object shaped by politics as well as the reality of the industry and the market.”18 However, they are so engaged in looking at the cultural context of film production and, in some cases, consumption, that the specificity and diversity of film texts, as well as of the spectators, almost never receive attention from these scholars. Shlapentokh and Shlapentokh’s Soviet Cinematography: 1918–91 (1993), Heider’s Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen (1991), Dickey’s Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (1993) and Lawton’s Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (1992) exemplify this kind of “culturalist” film scholarship in recent years.19 Most of these scholars place an over-investment on the all-encompassing nature of context, and in particular they privilege culture as the determinant of all the texts. This approach thus never elaborates the stylistic patterns of a particular text and ultimately erases the autonomy of the text, which is generally over-deployed in textual studies. Desser describes such works as “unconcerned with aesthetics” and not proceeding from any discussion on “films as cinematically particular texts.” He considers these works as “book(s) about film” which lack “some sense of the cinema.”20 The other group of empirical-historical studies—that is, contextual works— industrialist-formalist works, are being produced within Film Studies, especially over the last two decades. This trend of scholarship is much more developed in opposing the textual-theoretical model than culturalist works and strongly

National cinema and non-Western modernity 47 presents itself as a viable alternative. It does not shift the focus almost beyond the films as the culturalist works do. Rather, it looks at cinema through and around the texts and institutions and rigorously privileges the empirical-historical model. Butler outlines the “three strategies” adopted by the industrial-formalist scholars: first, cinema is separated from its broader sociocultural context and treated as an autonomous artistic-industrial practice; second, questions of thematics and representation are displaced by detailed analysis of form; third, individual films are rarely subjected to interpretive critiques.21 For this group of works, films are products to be sold in the market. They are commodities of a particular type, that are industrially produced and bought by spectators for their enjoyment.22 They look at cinema as a profit-making business within the capitalist economic system, including the means of production, distribution and exhibition of films. They place an emphasis on the relationship between these activities and changes in film styles and technologies. On the positive side, it is argued that they “have shown the crucial value of studying the industrial context . . . to explain the history of movies.”23 However, this formalistindustrialist pattern is also critiqued for privileging a circumscribed context. Dana Polan argues that this group of works focuses on the regularities within the discourse of cinema as an industry, and in this way, keeps the issues of this discourse’s role in the greater social perspective almost out of their frame of reference.24 This kind of ignoring of the larger context is characteristic of the empirical-historical trend of film studies. For example, Andrew Britton complains that this trend studies Hollywood cinema, taking it apart from the social role of twentieth-century American capitalism as a whole.25 Therefore, film scholars like Janet Wasko accuse formalist-industrialist works of returning to stylistic or textual analysis, instead of moving toward other discourses operating in society as a whole.26 In this way the textual-theoretical and empiricist-historical streams of works on cinema maintain the most common binary split in Film Studies. On the one hand, there is a strong trend of taking cinema as an object for theoretical exploration, while the other trend considers cinema as an object of historical or empirical study. The textual-theoretical and empirical-historical models in Film Studies, similar to the aesthetic and industrial works on Bangladesh cinema, define “cinema” mostly in terms of its texts or its institutions. Therefore, the study of the broader social setting in which films are produced and exhibited, as well as circulated and appreciated, is marginalized by both of these trends. In my work I analyze text and context side by side: I outline what the films articulate as well as the context in which they are produced and received. Such separatist emphasis on and demarcation between film theory and film history has produced blind spots in Film Studies. In this study, at the theoretical level, taking cinema as a concept in relation to national modernity, I attempt to

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avoid these blind spots. I demonstrate that cinema works as different kinds of public spheres for different groups of people in different social and political matrices. My contention is that various social groups of Western-educated middle classes in Bangladesh assume different roles and perceptions of and around cinema in a bid to form different national-cultural identities. Following American film scholar Miriam Hansen, I too contend that thinking of the cinema in relation to the public enables me to adopt an approach that cuts across theoretical and historical as well as textual and contextual modes of inquiry.27 As I outlined above, these modes of studying cinema are normally used quite separately in the study of national cinemas—a tendency that I wish to disobey, taking on board the roots and routes of the concept of the public sphere. This concept provides a theoretical matrix that encompasses different levels of inquiry and methodology. On the one hand, the cinema establishes a public sphere of its own depending on its modes of production, distribution and exhibition, along with forms of film style. On the other: cinema intersects and interacts with other formations of public life. . . . In both respects the question is which discourses of experience will be articulated in public and which remains private; how these delineations are organized, for whom, by whom and in whose interest; how the public, as a collective and intersubjective horizon, is constituted and constitutes itself under particular conditions and circumstances.28 (my emphasis) Therefore, for me, cinema is a process, not a product and I intend to present it through its texts and institutions as well as through its intertextual and contextual relations. Understanding cinema in terms of the public sphere as well as in accordance with the idea of cinema as a sphere intersecting both the system- and lifeworlds, I treat it as a combination of texts and contexts. While most film scholars privilege one of these over the other, I approach cinema in its entirety. Following Elsaesser, I locate cinema as one of the discourses (or a certain combination of several discourses) competing or interacting with other discourses and/or combinations of discourses within the social organization; of many other aspects of social formation, like power, pleasure, knowledge, sexuality, representation, etc.29 So, in this study I make it a task to document the cultural, political and economic forces that support or hinder the production, distribution and exhibition as well as the textual patterns and reception modes of Bangladesh cinema.

Understanding “Bangladesh cinema”: a non-Western cinema in a (post)colonial nation-space Since I have discussed the key issues like historiography in Chapter 1, and the ways of understanding cinema above, one final question remains: what “Bangladesh” is as a conceptual entity and how I will be looking at the cinema in/of/by it. This study approaches Bangladesh and Bangladesh cinema through the postcolonial understanding of nation and national identity. Although I am working

National cinema and non-Western modernity 49 within what may be called a Western epistemological framework, postcoloniality enables me to devise, in the words of Yoshimoto, “a non-dominating way of knowing and understanding the Other.” 30 This way seems useful in retaining the specificities, diversities and complexities of Bangladesh and Bangladesh cinema as well as suggesting that the idea of a nation and a national cinema are to be evaluated within the broad perspective in which they are deployed. I am aware that postcoloniality is a broad and general term that can refer to all the places and cultures affected by the imperial process and, in turn, any kind of colonial experience, either as the colonizer or the colonized, from the beginning of colonization to date.31 Therefore, here I attempt to articulate postcoloniality as a common but inconsistent and ever-changing configuration, which is not a homogeneous category either across all postcolonial societies or even within a single one.32 I take postcoloniality as a descriptive category that is, at the same time, specific and flexible in usage. It is not the expression of a pure concept; rather, for each case, its application is particular. In this way, moving beyond a generalized and homogenized account of the dynamics of postcoloniality, following Chris Berry, I would locate Bangladesh cinema in a complex and specific matrix that accommodates ambivalence at a number of levels.33 Through this kind of postcolonial approach I understand “nation” as a discursive entity that is not easy and straightforward to define. For example, as Anderson proposes, nation has to be understood by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which—as well as against which—it came into being.34 As Philip Rosen has said, “[n]ations are made, not born. Or rather, to exist they must be made and remade, figured and refigured, constantly defining and perpetuating themselves.”35 In the same vein, Bhabha points out—with his concept of “DissemiNation”—that, there are no nations as unified entities as such. Rather, there are hybrid communities that must not be named too easily and positively.36 For Bhabha, nation is “a cultural space . . . with its transgressive boundaries and its ‘interruptive’ interiority.”37 He relies on the “ambivalent, antagonistic perspective of nation as narration” and elaborates that: The “locality” of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as “other” in relation to what is outside or beyond it. The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity. . . .38 Defining “nation” and in turn a “national cinema” in today’s postcolonial world is problematic because, in the words of Wimal Dissanayake, “the political signposts and cognitive markers . . . are proving to be less than helpful today. We have nations without states and states without nations.” Following what Dissanayake said, I also use the idea of nation as a human construct, created by people over a period of time and aimed at achieving the status of the natural.39 Therefore, I look at Bangladesh not as a given “nation,” but as a cultural artifact of a

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particular kind, and in this way I recognize that the issues related to the nationhood of Bangladesh are not natural givens. The postcolonial approach enables me to escape the essentialist and Eurocentric discourse that still constitutes the major trend in studying national cinemas. This discourse of national cinema study is characterized by a tendency to locate nations within the three worlds theory, which unquestionably marks the nations and their relationships or configurations as fixed and rigid. The three worlds theory makes no space for internal differences within a “nation” as well as among the “nations” either of the First World or the Third World. Because of this kind of unquestioning uniformity imposed on and within groups of nations by the three worlds model, this model does not recognize that, “One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison”—as put forward by Arjun Appadurai.40

Locating Bangladesh cinema as non-Western national cinema: essentialist-Eurocentric approach An essentialist and Eurocentric discourse, like the three worlds theory, takes the status of an entity like Bangladesh as a nation for granted, and in so doing imposes an imagined (or imaginary) coherence on the films produced within its boundaries. As Philip Rosen puts it the discussion of a national cinema assumes not only that there is a principle or principles of coherence among a large number of films; it also involves an assumption that those principles have something to do with the production and/or reception of those films within the legal borders of a given nation-state. That is, the intertextual coherence is connected to a sociopolitical and/or socio-cultural coherence implicitly or explicitly assigned to the nation.41 While I question these imposed coherences, all the existing works on Bangladesh cinema and most of the works on other national cinemas take up these imagined coherences as valid and suitable for their theoretical frameworks. Therefore, the most common theoretical standpoint adopted for studying national cinemas including Bangladesh cinema is characterized by essentialism, in most cases, coupled with Eurocentrism. This essentialist and Eurocentric position on national cinemas is found mainly in two distinct groups of writings. I wish to mark these two as “colonial model political-nationalist” and “neocolonial cultural-nationalist” groups. The first group takes the nation as a politically given entity following the model of European enlightenment, generally from a “First World” or Western platform. The other model works from a “Third-Worldist” or “anti-colonialist” position. It considers the nation as an existing cultural entity that was (or has to be) liberated from the colonizers and/or to be strengthened to fight the anti-colonial struggle with more articulation and rigor.

National cinema and non-Western modernity 51 Most of the existing literature on Bangladesh cinema, either by Bangladeshi or non-Bangladeshi writers, reflects the clear-cut inclination to politicalnationalism derived from a Western or colonialist outlook. It is surprising that in respect of Bangladesh, which was colonized for more than two centuries, and which achieved its nation-state status through a bloody liberation war accompanied by genocide as recently as 1971, these writers find no problem in taking the status of the Bangladesh nation for granted. For all of them, whether Bangladeshi or non-Bangladeshi historians and critics, the nationhood of Bangladesh as such is a given fact, an unquestionable phenomenon. Then, situating Bangladesh cinema in a marginal position in relation to other cinemas, they automatically and unquestioningly reproduce a colonialist perspective on Bangladesh’s nationhood. These political-nationalist film scholars consider Bangladesh as a nation and Bangladesh cinema as a national cinema so straightforwardly and unproblematically that they never even spend a word to justify the coherences they impose on these two entities that are so diverse and complex. No survey historian finds a problem in assuming that there is a nation called Bangladesh, and that it was “born” in 1971, and therefore they have undertaken a project of writing on the films produced and circulated within the political boundary of Bangladesh. For example, when writing about Bangladesh cinema, Alamgir Kabir presents a long list of “national” affairs throughout his writings (e.g. “national wealth,” “national liberation,” “plagiarized films against national culture,” even the “national average” of cinema seats in Bangladesh) implanting the notion of the nation as very concrete and physical, as if only marked by its length and width.42 Similar to Bangladeshi writings on Bangladesh cinema, the majority of nonBangladeshi critics based in the West rely on political-nationalism combined with an implicit colonialist outlook and explicitly take a “First-Worldist” Eurocentric view towards Bangladesh cinema. The lack of representation, and therefore, the marginalization of Bangladesh cinema in Western publications and academia itself reflect such colonialist treatment. Only a handful of research articles—only a dozen or so scholarly papers—were published on Bangladesh cinema in international (read Western) journals and edited volumes to date, and all of these were published in the 2000s and 2010s.43 Other than these scholarly papers, the critical pieces on Bangladesh cinema by international film critics are also few in number. Some reviews of Bangladeshi films that have earned some critical acclaim at international film festivals, interviews with the directors of those films, and “country profiles” or historical survey chapters in anthologies or encyclopaedias, belong to this critical, but non-scholarly, group of texts on Bangladesh cinema published in the West. The straightforward colonialist gaze of most of these “Western” critics of Bangladesh cinema can be located in their idiosyncratic assertions and unevidenced (sometimes, ignorant) claims—a trend started in the days of Pakistan and continuing to date. Their lack of seriousness and plethora of silly mistakes even in a small piece of writing, also show that they were merely dealing with a minor, “Third World” film.

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Peter Baker, the editor of Films and Filming, finds that the film, Day Shall Dawn (Jago Hua Savera), one of the first feature films made at the Dhaka studio “gives one a conception of the vast problem facing young countries in bringing to their people material and spiritual wealth.” This film won a gold medal at the 1959 Moscow Festival; however, Baker comments that he “certainly wouldn’t award it a gold medal.” He also doubts why Walter Lassally, one of the two cinematographers of the film, “is mentioned as a foreign ‘helper’ ,” as he believes that Lassally also “helped with the story line and the documentary detail.” Baker describes the film as a “saga of peasant life, a study of fisher-folk,” but still he “would have preferred it to stick to straight travelogue.”44 His “First-Worldist” look from an established higher position, combined with ignorance and neglect of the non-West, makes it difficult for him to judge the real merit of the style and content of Day Shall Dawn. Therefore Baker seems quite confused about how he should treat such a problematic text. Moreover, he seems to judge the film in a black-and-white manner (either as “travelogue” or “saga of peasant life”) and in this way misses the complexities and ambiguities inherent in such a non-Western film text. In the same vein, Mosk finds that The Ominous House (Surya Dighal Bari) is “somewhat too drawn out, a bit primitive technically and directorially.”45 It can be mentioned that this “primitive” work is the first Bangladeshi art film—from independent Bangladesh—that won critical success in the European film-festival circuit. It was featured in a number of international film festivals including London, Berlin and Karlovy Vary and won an award at the Mannheim film festival.46 A similar Eurocentric position can be recognized when Holl criticises The Endless Trail (Golapi Ekhon Traine) in Variety as “too melodramatic for Western standards . . . [T]his is apparently the first Bangladesh pic to reach an international fest, although a national cinema was begun in these parts 23 years ago.”47 It may be mentioned that during these “23 years,” at least a dozen or so Bangladeshi films were featured and gained awards in a number of prestigious international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, London, Vancouver, Frankfurt, Moscow, Tashkent and Delhi.48 But Holl has of course never heard of these films or about their inclusion in international festivals. When Fred Marshall contributed a 300-word country profile on Bangladesh cinema in the International Film Guide 1986, he made mistakes about the titles of films and the names of directors or actors. In one case, he transforms two actors into directors, while he also misinforms the readers about the first feature film produced in Dhaka.49 Marshall met Rafiqul Bari Chowdhury, a cinematographer-turned-director from the Dhaka film industry, by chance at the 1984 Indian film festival, and uses him as his main source. Marshall then finds that “the most successful film . . . of the past couple of years has been Rafiqul Bari Chowdhury’s Pension, screened at the 1984 Indian Film Festival.” He does not clarify in which way he thought it “the most successful.” He concludes his 1986 profile on Bangladesh cinema by saying that Kabir’s Cinema in Bangladesh has recently been published, and that one can use it to “collect reliable

National cinema and non-Western modernity 53 data.” Unfortunately, he overlooks the fact that this book was published seven years ago, in 1979.50 Maggie Lee, a reviewer from Variety, hails the Bangladeshi film Television as a “Bangladeshi-German folk tale about the clashes between religion and technology, ‘Television’ invokes the playful, philosophical allegories of Iranian cinema by way of 1999’s Bhutanese spiritual dramedy ‘The Cup’ ”51 (my emphases). For Lee the film, which is produced by one German and two Bangladeshi producers, is easily a “Bangladeshi-German” production, though this is essentially a work by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, a stalwart of contemporary art cinema in Bangladesh. Her colonial political-nationalist look at Asian nations and their films also becomes clear as she marks the signs of “Iranian” and “Bhuatanese” films on Television, as if those national cinemas are so homogenous that they can unquestioningly influence another monolithic national cinema such as Bangladesh cinema. Maggie Lee also describes the film as “folk tale,” as if it is based on some kind of folklore! However, the film is an acute, discursive look at globalizing Bangladesh as shown in/from a remote village; it is so contemporary that it cannot be equated with any folklore (The film was actually scripted by Director Farooki and noted writer Anisul Hoque during 2010–2011.) Lee makes similar errors when she identifies a major character of the film as “Hindi” who is actually a “Hindu,” a member of the religious minority in Bangladesh. Like Maggie Lee, Deborah Young, another reviewer of Variety—when reviewing another celebrated art film Wail of the Conch—finds that the film “is a handsomely lensed adaptation of Nasrin Jahan’s 1999 novel, but is urgently in need of a substantial re-edit to make the storytelling more logical.”52 Similarly to Lee, Young—demanding a “substantial re-edit” of the film—does not hide her colonialist attitude towards a non-Western cinema like Bangladesh cinema. Not only the reviewers of Variety and International Film Guide, but the wellknown proponent of Asian Cinema Studies in the US, John A. Lent, also exhibits a political-nationalist attitude coupled with several errors in his brief chapter on Bangladesh cinema in The Asian Film Industry. He misspells the name of the family (Nawab spelt as Nawak) who initiated silent filmmaking in Dhaka during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the title of the film (Roopban spelled as Rupha), which became the first box-office hit among vernacular features produced in the embryonic phase of the Dhaka film industry in the 1960s. Lent extensively uses Kabir’s book, quoting it more than 12 times in less than six pages. He makes his political-nationalist standpoint clear, stating that the cinema of Bangladesh “branched from that of Pakistan, which itself stemmed from that of India.”53 Through his First-Worldist/colonialist gaze, Lent easily finds that all these South Asian nations and their cinemas exist very much physically with some extendable “branches” and “stems.” Such essentialism and Eurocentrism are popular tendencies in the works of other Asian cinema scholars based in the West and published over the last four decades or so. That is why Shohini Chaudhuri’s Contemporary World Cinema (2005) and James Brandon’s edited volume The Performing Arts in Asia (1971)—though published 35 years apart—both take a typical colonialist, political-nationalist approach to Asian national cinemas.

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In Contemporary World Cinema, Shohini Chaudhuri devoted fewer than two pages to reflect on the entirety of Bangladesh cinema in a three-page sub-section called “Cinema of Pakistan and Bangladesh.”54 She depended on four pieces— three of them from Celluloid, a film club periodical published from Dhaka. Two of these essays are authored by Tanvir Mokammel, a renowned art cinema proponent in Bangladesh. Chaudhuri’s political-nationalist outlook is clear in her decision to present Bangladesh cinema in the same sub-section as Pakistani cinema. Her colonialist attitude leads her to comment that “Bangladeshi films have been called a ‘poor man’s copy of the Bollywood masala films’.”55 Similarly to John Lent, she does not seem to care for the complexity that lies in naming and understanding non-Western national cinemas such as Bangladesh cinema or Bollywood cinema so straightforwardly. Focusing on two art films only—the Clay Bird (2002; mentioned as 2003) and Quiet Flows the River Chitra by Tanvir Mokammel—her key source on Bangladesh cinema—Chaudhuri seems satisfied about representing this national cinema in Contemporary World Cinema. The Performing Arts in Asia contains the papers presented at the 1969 UNESCO Conference in Beirut, which discussed the state of theater, cinema and television in Asian countries. The editor (James Brandon) and all the contributors seem quite clear about the division of the world into East and the West, as they unproblematically use titles like “View from the West” and “Western and Asian influences.” They also seem assured of their essentialist standpoint when devoting chapters to Indian and Ceylonese theater or Japanese, Chinese and Pakistani cinema, showing (no doubt) that there many “nations,” each with their own kind of “national” art forms. Interestingly, Brandon’s preface suggests that there are some problems in the way in which nations are described—it is presented as a clarification: [T]he designations employed and the presentation of the material in this work do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Unesco Secretariat concerning the legal status of any country or territory, or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitations of the frontiers of any country or territory.56 I cannot help remembering that this book was published in 1971, when (the then) East Pakistan, a province under Pakistan, was going through a liberation war that transformed its status to a new “nation” called Bangladesh at the end of that year.

Understanding non-Western cinemas: neocolonial cultural-nationalist approach Alongside this kind of political-nationalist standpoint coupled with a colonialist view, there is another tendency of approaching national cinemas. I term this the neocolonial cultural-nationalist trend. This group of works also operates within

National cinema and non-Western modernity 55 the essentialist-Eurocentric discourse on national cinemas, like the politicalnationalist group. However, this trend is more concerned with how to understand and represent non-Western cinemas, including the approaches termed as Third Cinema and Third World cinema. This group of work on non-Western cinemas understands that the nation is not something that is taken for granted as a political entity; rather, it has been earned through long anti-colonial struggles. The nation is seen as a cultural construct that predates colonialism, having also survived the age of colonialism. The neocolonial cultural-nationalist approach relies on simplistic cultural differences between nations and national cinemas as well as on the dichotomy of the First and Third Worlds. The scholars using this approach—who are based in the West—acknowledge the disparities between the First and Third Worlds, and recognize that the relation between the “East” and the West is based on the domination of the former by the latter. They like to situate themselves on the side of the Third World and overtly express their solidarity with the anti-colonialist struggle against the First World. They also imply that the practices of Third World national cinemas need to be strongly theorized in Western academia by themselves—these sympathetic Western researchers of non-Western cinemas. These scholars then select some non-Western film texts, and call for the attention of “First World”-based “Western” readers to be focused on these “neglected” texts. They see their mission as being to theorize these “Third World” texts—in order to make a space for “marginal” field operations in their “mainstream” theoretical practices. What is significant is that they treat the East as a distant and remote plane of existence that does not interfere in the everyday world they belong to in the “West.” In turn, they avoid the larger context of international politics, culture and economics, not looking at how both Western and non-Western societies and cinemas operate within a single global matrix. They end up producing partial, static and comfortable portrayals of non-Western national cinemas—to be appropriated within the “First World”-based Eurocentric theoretical discourse. In this way, they do not understand non-Western cinemas and societies as spaces where the discourses of colonialism and nationalism intersect. This approach is unable to depict the contesting discourses within and beyond non-Western cinemas and communities. By regarding the nations as distinct cultural entities, their straightforward demarcation of world geopolitics and black-and-white appropriation of “Third World” texts within “First World” theory in practice reassures them of their place within the essentialist and Eurocentric discourse of national cinemas. They are “anti-colonialist,” so long as this does cause any problems for their position, which always sees the West as the center that really matters. Following Spivak, I term these scholars “neocolonial anti-colonialists.”57 For example, Roy Armes, in his Third World Filmmaking and the West, also emphasizes cultural-nationalism over political-nationalism. He confirms that his work is “written from a Western standpoint, with all the implicit assumptions that this carries” and he also relies on the division of the world into the West and the non-West (or the Third World, as used in the title) throughout. Thus Armes

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operates within the discourse of “neocolonial anti-colonialism,” and he locates the all-encompassing nature of Westernization in the “Third World”: “the impact of the West was almost universally experienced as a traumatically destructive force by those subjected to it.”58 Armes’ fascination with cultural-nationalism sees Fanon’s three phases of battle between traditional culture and colonizing power as logical and plausible. He narrates the three phases as, “a concern primarily with the culture of the colonizing power; a return to an idealized view of the traditional culture; and a third stage of uniting with the people’s struggle in an authentic way.”59 In other words he believes, following Fanon, that there were national cultures (or culturally distinctive nations) in the non-West, which were seriously damaged by the West. In this way Armes situates his work within the “dependency analysis” that argues that, actually, the Third World countries aid the First World, not the other way around as is commonly perceived. Though he seems quite sympathetic to Third World cinemas, as he follows the dependency model, he actually looks at these cinemas via Eurocentric terminology and comparison. Therefore, Armes’ work seems to be an example of what Gayatri Spivak calls the “arrogance of the radical European humanist conscience, which will consolidate itself by imagining the other.”60 Teshome Gabriel, another renowned “neocolonial anti-colonialist” like Armes, also utilizes Fanon’s three phases to theorize and, in turn, support the strategies adopted by “Third World” film-makers in their fight against colonialism. He terms these phases the “assimilation,” “remembrance” and “combative” stages, which he quite accurately detects in the modes of texts and the reception and production of Third World cinema. He develops a theoretical model showing the convergence of these three phases and these three modes of critical theory.61 Relying on this model, Gabriel furthers his arguments about why and how the national cinemas from the non-West should be recognized in the West as quite distinct cultural practices. In this way, the neocolonial cultural-nationalist tendency is to situate non-Western cinemas in the theoretical arena of the West as different and in most cases, exotic and fascinating. These practices can be seen as, in Bhabha’s terms, the “appropriation of the other as a good object of knowledge,” and, in turn, the “epistemological colonization of the non-West”62— processes which I wish to go against in the current study. Before I proceed to outline how I will avoid such a “Third-Worldist” approach in my own study, let us imagine for a moment how a study on Bangladesh cinema could be articulated following this kind of neocolonial culturalnationalalist model. On the cover of the work, a still of beggars or a “homeless family outside a film venue” in Bangladesh might be used, as James Leahy did when he wrote a short report in South on the First International Short Film Festival, in Dhaka in 1988.63 Inside the study, the films of Bangladesh might be divided into three separate trends, following Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino’s conceptualization.64 These would include a first cinema (those films which unquestionably follow the Hollywood concerns: films of the assimilation phase); a second cinema (those films which follow art cinema guidelines: films of the remembrance phase); and a third cinema (those films which oppose both the first

National cinema and non-Western modernity 57 and second cinema: films of the combative phase). The study will theorize Bangladesh films and their reception as a very different activity compared to the films and viewing practices of the West. Let us assume that we rely on Teshome Gabriel’s Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation as a key resource for this study on Bangladesh cinema. Then this study will dissect Bangladeshi film texts to locate the tendencies of the “folk (or oral) art form” against the “print (or literate) art form” of the West.65 It may also find that what is “excess” in the cinematic narrative of the West is quite natural for Bangladesh films. Following Gabriel, the work could even present a table showing the different ways Bangladeshi films use cinematic codes. And in this way, the work would demonstrate how the “imperfect” films of Bangladesh are actually films as “messages,” not films as “realities” that hide the marks of the film-making process. Dissecting specific narratives and styles of “combative” or third cinema films, the study would highlight how these films are determined to create, in the words of Gabriel, a “new national school of film-making . . . untouched by European conventions” for Bangladesh cinema. In this way the study might argue that Bangladesh cinema is “oriented toward a peaceful coexistence with folkculture” and therefore how different, distinct and exotic it is compared to the cinemas of the West.66 I do not intend to look at Bangladesh cinema through this kind of Third Worldist or neocolonial cultural-nationalist approach. Because, first, it extends the three worlds discourse to appropriate national cinemas from the non-West in such a way as to reproduce the geopolitical division of today’s postcolonial world order. Second it is a newer model, used to justify the cultural colonization of the Third World by the West, disguising power relations in the production of knowledge.

The way forward: cinema and national modernity in Bangladesh The above section clarifies that both these approaches to national cinemas— colonial political-nationalist and neocolonial cultural-nationalist—directly or indirectly subscribe to the division of First versus Third World. They also take the nation as a concrete, solid entity and extend their understanding of nonWestern national cinemas from a First- or Third-Worldist view. They thus fail to identify nations as constructs that are: malleable, contextual, and capable of persistence and reconfiguration amidst socioeconomic and political change. . . [The nations are] . . . historically contextual formations, shaped by the social and material conditions that surround them, and that it is the very malleability of nations and nationhood that accounts for why and how they persist.67 I take nations as being “malleable, contextual and capable of reconfiguration.” This takes us beyond the easy conception of First World/Third World or Self/

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Other divisions. I draw upon Yoshimoto as he notes that, “The studies of nonWestern national cinemas based on the axiomatics of Self/Other opposition cannot but reproduce the hegemonic ideology of Western neocolonialism.”68 In this way, in the words of Homi Bhabha: the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation. The Other is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment. . . . The Other loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its “desire,” to split its “sign” of identity, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse.69 Next, I study Bangladesh cinema as “the active agent of articulation”—“to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse” (borrowing from Bhabha above). Going against the omnipresent trend of empiricist and teleological histories full of essentialist and Eurocentric claims, I present here an engaged social history of Bangladesh cinema in which I combine a number of case studies. While these cases may appear disjointed or unrelated, at a deeper level, illustrating these events with relevant theory and method, I articulate them to form a history that makes visible the paradoxes inherent in Bangladesh cinema, a national cinema that developed within/by a non-Western modernity called Bangladesh. Therefore the major paradox I specifically address in this book is the relationship between cinema and non-Western modernity. Cinema is always seen to be in a relationship with the concept of modernity. Keya Ganguly argues that, “cinema is a profoundly modern discourse, both in temporal terms and vis-à-vis the changes it wreaks on the perceptual field as such.”70 In the words of Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “[t]he very construction of the filmic image, through editing, sound recording and mixing, and the process of projecting that image to an audience, had a relationship with the structuring of various kinds of modernist ‘public-ness’. . . .”71 The contradiction in this relationship surfaces when we juxtapose cinema alongside the notion of the modernity of a non-Western postcolonial nation-space like Bangladesh. Darrell William Davis points out such an unstable relationship of cinema and non-Western modernity in the context of 1930s Japanese cinema: Because of what film is—a sophisticated modern technology infused with Western modes of representation—a premodern, indigenous national identity was articulated and dispatched against the very modernity . . . embedded in that technology.72 A similar instability between cinema and East-Bengali/Bengali-Muslim or “Bangladeshi” modernity can be identified. As happened in most other nonWestern nations, the Western-educated middle class here received the understanding of nation and modernity also from the West. British and Pakistani

National cinema and non-Western modernity 59 colonialism played a crucial role in the construction of such a Bengali-Muslim middle class as well as in building bourgeois consciousness in East Bengal/Pakistan and in Bangladesh. In the words of Japanese scholar Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto: “the enlightenment and colonialism have transformed the world into the world of modernity, which constitutes an absolute horizon of containment for the nonWest.”73 I wish to argue that it is this “absolute horizon of containment” of Western modernity within which the Western-educated middle class in East Bengal/Pakistan and Bangladesh operated between the 1910s and 2010s, with a constant search to locate a “national” version of modernity for Bengali Muslims, the large majority in the region. Because of this contradictory relationship with the West and the notion of Western modernity, the idea of national modernity in a postcolonial non-Western nation-space like Bangladesh certainly poses a major dilemma. Indian-Bengali historian Partha Chatterjee wonderfully articulates this ambivalent situation: Ours is the modernity of the once-colonized. The same historical process that has taught us the value of modernity has also made us the victims of modernity. Our attitude to modernity, therefore, cannot but be deeply ambiguous.74 Such a dilemma in the idea of non-Western modernity becomes omnipresent in Bangladesh, as we find different types of modernity advocated here during last century or so. Professor Borhanuddin Khan Jahangir, a renowned scholar of Bangladeshi culture and modernity, identifies three conceptions of modernity functioning in Bangladesh. These are: first, the concept of following a Westernderived culture and civilization; second, the nationalist resistance derived from colonial historicity; and third, the religion-based sense of fundamentalist rejection. He finds that pro-West modernity mixes up the West with the world, whilst religion-based modernity positions itself against the West. The second strand of national modernity tries to create an independent space operating within the proWest conception of modernity.75 I wish to argue that the nationalist version of Bengali-Muslim modernity identified by Professor Jahangir is the major mode of modernity that anti-colonial, cultural-nationalist Bengali Muslims opted for in last hundred years. I see this national modernity of Bengali Muslims as a Janus-faced modernity on at least two counts. First, as Jahangir noted, I also note that middle-class Bengali Muslims constantly looked for a version of “national” modernity that was supposed to be different but was, at the same time, based on the western or “universal” concept of modernity. They wished to establish a distinct version of “national” modernity as well as to be a part of Western modernity that set the ideal and prime example of being modern for them. Stuart Hall’s vision of identity formation resembles this sense of being similar and different at the same time in the case of the national modernity of Bengali Muslims. Hall emphasized two vectors of similarity and difference in the formation of cultural identities. His view of identity recognizes that, “as well as the many points of similarity,

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there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute. . . ‘what we have become’.”76 Second, and more importantly, this “national” modernity of Bengali Muslims can be seen as the conflict and complementation of two nationalist discourses that I term cultural-national modernity and nation-state modernity. While the latter version mostly developed in post-1971 Bangladesh, the earlier version, based on a secular notion of Bengali identity, functioned throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The concept of modernity for Bengali Muslims has taken such a divided and contested status as different groups of nationalist Bengali Muslims advocated for different notions of national modernity in different periods during early twentieth to early twenty-first century. Why I identify the two discourses of national modernity of Bengali Muslims as key to my understanding of cinema and modernity in Bangladesh can be better understood by drawing upon a twofold division of anti-colonial nationalism as proposed by Partha Chatterjee. Chatterjee talks about “material and spiritual domains” that he thinks are “a fundamental feature of anticolonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa.” In his words: [A]nticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society . . . by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into. . . the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the “outside,” of the economy and of state-craft. . . . The spiritual . . . is an “inner” domain bearing the “essential” marks of cultural identity.77 I intend to compare the cultural-national modernity of Bengali Muslims with the “inner” domain of anti-colonial nationalism mentioned by Chatterjee. I argue and later demonstrate that this was (and is) the domain of nationalist Bengali Muslims, through which they wished to “preserve” the “essence” of a different Bengali identity as developed within the region (East Bengal) and prove its difference from Western modernity. Similarly I wish to use the term nation-state modernity in the way Chatterjee used the notion of the “outer domain,” through which the Bengali Muslims of East Bengal intended to build a “modern” nation following the West. The distinctiveness of East-Bengali cultural identity was (and is) not that important for the nation-state version of national modernity. Though Chatterjee located the “inner” domain, that is cultural-national modernity only within the colonial settings, I locate the cultural notion of national modernity contesting with nation-state modernity in postcolonial Bangladesh even in the twenty-first century. Such a contest between two versions of national modernity could recurrently happen in Bangladesh because of the mulitiplicity and hybridity of the BengaliMuslim identity. Under the umbrella of this hyphenated identity, ethnic-cultural identity (Bengali-ness) and religious-political identity (Muslim-ness) always conflict with each other. Therefore, within the decades of the early-to-late-twentieth century, the cultural identity of Bengali Muslims has been repeatedly questioned. Identities, such as “Bengaliness,” “Muslimness,” “Bengali-Muslimness” and

National cinema and non-Western modernity 61 “Bangladeshiness” have been constructed, questioned and redefined within a short period of time. The cinema, as a social institution, has participated in this process of constructing, as well as deconstructing, different versions of cultural identity and national-modernist discourse for Bengali Muslims of East Bengal/Pakistan and Bangladesh in the last hundred years or so. I attempt a demonstration of this process in the chapters that follow.

Notes 1 Oskar Negt and Alexandar Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 17–18. 2 J. E. Fox and C. Miller-Idriss, “Everyday Nationhood,” Ethnicities (2008): 536. 3 Ibid. 4 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Realism, Modernism, and Post-colonial Theory,” in (eds.) John Hill and Pamela C. Gibson Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 413. 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991)p. 14; Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 39. 6 Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–87 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 20. 7 Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order,” in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (eds.) Japan in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 353. 8 Partha Chatterjee, “Introduction,” in Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of Indian Nationstate (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 11. 9 Partha Chatterjee, “Our Modernity,” The Present History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997b), pp. 205–6. 10 Willem Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 183. 11 Shahriar Kabir, “Cine Journalism in Bangladesh,” Chalachitrapatra 4.1–2 (1979): 4. 12 Alamgir Kabir, Film in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1979) pp. 32, 119 and 121. 13 International Film Critics Association of Bangladesh, “State of Cine Criticism,” Celluloid 18.1–2 (1996): 63 14 Kabir (1979) pp. 18, 37–9, 44–5, 56–8, 63–5, 90 and 136–42. 15 Bruce A. Austin, Immediate Seating: A Look at Movie Audiences (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989), p. 101. 16 Jackie Stacey, “Textual Obsessions: Methodology, History and Researching Female Spectatorship,” Screen 34.3 (1993): 261–2. 17 Shaun Moores, “Texts, Readers and Contexts of Reading,” Media, Culture and Society 12 (1990): 10–7. 18 Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. xii. 19 Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography 1918–1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (New York: Aldin de Gruyter, 1993); Karl G. Heider, Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991); Sara Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 20 David Desser, “Review of Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen,” Film Quarterly 46.1 (1992): 41.

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21 Alison Butler, “New Film Histories and the Politics of Location,” Screen, 33.4 (1992): 414. 22 Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies 1939–90 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 6–11. 23 Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison, USA: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. x–xi. 24 Dana Polan, “Review of The Cinema’s Third Machine,” Film Quarterly 48.1 (1994): 42. 25 Andrew Britton, “The Philosophy of the Pigeonhole: Wisconsin Formalism and ‘The Classical Style’,” CineAction!, (Winter 1988–1989): 48. 26 Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 17–18. 27 Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere,” in Linda Williams (ed.) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 145. 28 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 7–8. 29 Thomas Elsaesser, “Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema,” in Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Rosen (eds.) Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 55. 30 Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Postcolonial World Order,” in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (eds.) Japan in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 341. 31 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 2. 32 Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, “What is Post(-)colonialism?,” in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.) Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 289. 33 Chris Berry, “Writing as a Foreigner: Review of Primitive Passions,” UTS Review 2.2 (1996): 180–90. 34 Anderson (1991), p. 19. 35 Philip Rosen (1992), “Making a Nation in Sembene’s Ceddo,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13(1–3): 147. 36 Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990a), pp. 291–322. 37 Homi Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990b), p. 5. 38 Bhabha (1990) “Introduction,” p. 4. 39 Wimal Dissanayake, “Introduction,” in Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. x–xi. 40 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.) Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 328. 41 Philip Rosen, “History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch, and Some Problems in the Study of National Cinemas,” Iris 2.2 (1984): 70. 42 Kabir (1978) pp. 54, 61–2, 83. 43 These research articles are written by only two scholars, namely this author and Lotte Hoek, a Dutch anthropologist who did a PhD on film production and exhibition in the mid-2000s Dhaka film industry at the University of Amsterdam. See Bibliography for list of research articles by myself and Lotte Hoek. 44 Peter Baker, “Review of Day Shall Dawn,” Films and Filming (February 1962): 34. 45 Mosk “Review of Suria Dighal Bari,” Variety (July 30, 1980). 46 Anupam Hayat, History of Bangladesh Cinema (Bangladesher Chalachitrer Itihash) (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Development Corporation, 1987), p. 159 and Mirja Tarequl

National cinema and non-Western modernity 63 Quader, Bangladesh Film Industry (Bangladesher Chalachitro Shilpo) (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993), pp. 543–4. 47 Holl, “Review of The Endless Trail,” Variety (September 5, 1979). 48 Some of the Bangladeshi films featured in international film festivals during 1956–79 are: One Acre of Land (1957) —which won an award in Venice Chittagong Hill Tracts (1957)—screened in Cannes and Berlin Day Shall Dawn (1959)—which won an award in Moscow and was nominated in the “Academy Awards” foreign film section Asiya (1960)—screened in Delhi Wealth in Pond (1961)—which won an award in Vancouver Tanha (1962)—screened in Beirut The Sun Bath (1962)—which won an award in Tehran Sutarang (1965)—which won an award in Frankfurt Sat Rang (1965)—which won an award in London Aina o Oboshishto (1967)—which won an award in Moscow Sirajuddoula (1967)—screened in Tashkent Stop Genocide (1972)—screened in Tashkent and which won an award in Delhi in 1975. See Hayat (1987) p. 157. 49 Fred Marshall mentions Shabana, a popular Bangladeshi actress and Nadeem, a popular Pakistani actor as joint directors of Basera, while no survey history on Bangladesh cinema notes such a venture. With no evidence or reasoning, he also claims that The Number Table (Dharapath, 1960) is the first Bengali feature produced in Dhaka, not The Face and the Mask (1956), a common claim of Bangladeshi film historians. 50 Fred Marshall, “Bangladesh,” International Film Guide 1986 (1986): 70. 51 Maggie Lee, “Review: ‘Television’ ,” Variety (November 18, 2012), available at: http://variety.com/2012/film/reviews/television-1117948777/, accessed January 30, 2014. 52 Deborah Young, “Review: ‘Wail of the Conch’,” Variety (January 3, 2006), available at: http://variety.com/2006/film/reviews/wail-of-the-conch-1200519477/, accessed January 30, 2014. 53 John Lent, Asian Film Industry (London: Christopher Helm, 1990), pp. ix and 260–4. 54 Chaudhuri, Shohini, Contemporary World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 152–3. 55 Ibid. p. 152. 56 James Brandon, “Preface,” The Performing Arts in Asia (Paris: UNESCO, 1971). 57 Yoshimoto, “Difficulty of Being Radical,” 353. 58 Roy Armes, Third World Filmmaking and the West (London: University of California Press, 1987) 8 and 28. 59 Armes, 25. 60 Gayatri Spivak, “Theory in the Margin,” in Jonathan Arak and Barbara Johnson (eds.) Consequences of Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) 155. 61 Teshome Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds.) The Questions of Third Cinema (London: BFI, 1989) 31–7. 62 Cited in Yoshimoto, “Difficulty of Being Radical,” 345. 63 James Leahy, “Escape from Fantasy,” South (March, 1989): 90. 64 Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in Michael Chanan (ed.) Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI/ Channel 4 Television, 1983) 65 Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI press, 1982) 45–6.

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66 Gabriel, Third Cinema, 50–2. 67 S. L. Croucher, “Perpetual Imagining: Nationhood in a Global Era,” International Studies Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2003, p. 14. 68 Yoshimoto (1993) p. 346. 69 Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in Questions of Third Cinema, Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989), p. 124. 70 Keya Ganguly, “Carnal Knowledge: Visuality and The Modern in Charulata,” Camera Obscura 37 (1996): 162. 71 Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1998) p. 414. 72 Darrell William Davis, Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 9. 73 Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “Melodrama, Postmodernism and the Japanese Cinema,” EastWest Film Journal 5.1 (1991): 51. 74 Partha Chatterjee (1997b) p. 210. 75 Borhanuddin Khan Jahangir, “Modernity and Bangladesh,” The Experience of Modernity and Post-modernity (Dhaka: Agami Prokashoni, 1997), p. 18. 76 Hall, Stuart “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in J. Evans Braziel and A. Mannur (eds.) Theorizing Diaspora (London: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 233–46. 77 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 6.

3

National cinema study and beginning of Bangladesh film history

As the cinema of Bangladesh is one of the least discussed Asian cinemas, debates about issues such as its originating moment are still in their infancy. The main aim in this chapter is thus to examine the possible starting points of Ban­ gladesh film history from various streams of Bengali Muslim identity and cul­ tural modernity as well as from different approaches to writing film histories, such as production history, exhibition history and institutional history. This can help us get an idea of how East Bengalis appropriated cinema in the early twen­ tieth century as well how the survey historians of Bangladesh cinema reconstructed this period using the conventional historiographic mode and the empirical­industrial method during the writing of its history. I made it clear in earlier chapters that I do not attempt to produce an empirical­industrial study of Bangladesh cinema: neither a linear­teleological nor a revisionist-industrial history. My endeavour is to situate my work as a viable alternative to this major, and by now popular and fashionable, trend of national cinema study using a revisionist-industrialist approach. Revisionist-industrial histories of national cinemas developed in the 1970s and 1980s, in opposition to traditional histories.1 Until then, the introductions of most national cinema histories were always done as a survey histories in the tra­ ditional mode. These are linear and teleological histories, structured within an organic model, that list the achievements of some “great men” of the national film industry. These histories were mostly written and appreciated between the 1920s and the 1960s. In some non-Western countries like Bangladesh, they were produced even as late as the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. A group of North American scholars like Bordwell, Balio and Gomery initi­ ated the use of revisionist-industrial historiography as a contemporary approach in film studies. This trend emphasizes the rigorous search for historical evidence on the systematic nature of a particular film industry. In the last two decades, this method of producing revisionist-industrialist histories on national cinemas has travelled a long way from the USA and has become a “standard” approach for national cinema study. If we flip through some of the major studies done on national cinemas during this period, we can easily identify the extensive (or partial) use of this approach.2 It might be said that this revisionist-industrialist method, and the body of works

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appropriating this method, have very quickly become a dominant discourse within cinema studies. In such a standard revisionist-industrialist history of a national cinema, one can find elaborations on usual practices and visible tendencies of the filmproduction industry in a given geographical territory. Film distribution and exhi­ bition are usually treated in isolation or sometimes as appendices to the discussion on film-production industry. Much less data might be presented on these sectors. This exercise of presenting numerical data on a national filmproduction industry—sometimes enhanced through tables and charts—generally starts from the first date of film production in that nation-state. This is more so in the case of Western colonial nations. For the non-Western, once-colonized, nations film history normally begins from the date when the place or community turned into a nation. However, this trend of national cinema study finds Bangladesh cinema problematic as, like much of Asia, silent film production began here during the 1900s and the estab­ lishment of film theaters began here in the 1910s, but the production of sound features started as late as the 1950s in then East Pakistan. Therefore I began the project of writing Bangladesh national cinema history with the realization that cinema existed in this land before there was “Bangladesh” at all. Unlike most other nation-states, cinema history in Bangladesh begins before the beginning of national history. The exhibition and shooting of actuality footage began in the geopolitical area now called Bangladesh at the end of the 1890s, as in most other places in the world. At that time, it was the eastern part of the (then) Bengal province of British India. It took a whole half-century for film to be assim­ ilated into the cultural environment of (then) East Bengal/Pakistan. As the popula­ tion of the region (largely rural-based Bengali Muslims) was developing new identity streams and a renewed sense of cultural modernity in this period, they took this time to indigenize cinema into their Bengali-Muslim milieu. In this chapter, in particular, my intention is to interrogate why and how a specific event in Bangladesh cinema history has been taken for granted and repeatedly used as the beginning of this national cinema by Bangladeshi film historians. This happened because film historians, en masse, believed in a certain notion of cultural identity for Bengali Muslims and in a particular kind of national modernity for the Bangladesh nation-state. However, if we look beyond the governing conditions and circumstances tailored by such cultural identity and national modernity, we can find a number of other alternatives that locate the beginning of Bangladesh national cinema. Therefore, I start this chapter by reviving and restating an old question: when did Bangladesh cinema begin? Historians of Bangladesh cinema, who are mainly concerned with theatrical feature film production, are in consensus in answering this question. They locate the beginning of Bangladesh cinema with the making of The Face and the Mask in 1956, and call this the “first” film (read theatrical feature film) produced in (then) East Pakistan/East Bengal. However, there are other less-celebrated “beginnings” of Bangladesh cinema, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century. I suggest that these events were not found to be

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 67 suitable starting points of Bangladesh cinema history because they cannot be appropriated within the major stream of cultural identity for Bengali Muslims, or the nationalist discourse of historiography as revered in contemporary Bangla­ desh. This historiography of Bangladesh cinema developed in two major strands, following the formation of the cultural-national modernity of Bengali Muslims throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century and the development of nation-state modernity during the 1970s to 2000s in Bangladesh. This chapter thus unveils how such ideological stances dictated the choice of an innocent-looking beginning of Bangladesh national cinema. Here, I first ques­ tion the taken-for-granted portrayal of the early period of cinema in Bangladesh by traditional historians. Then I unearth the notions of the national­cultural iden­ tity of Bangladesh that helped to create and maintain those articulations which defined the beginning of Bangladesh film history.

Cultural identity and nationhood of/in Bangladesh Cultural identity, using Stuart Hall’s words, refers to: The common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide [a community], as “one people,” with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissi­ tudes of [their] actual history.3 Willem Van Schendel succinctly summarizes such a process of identity con­ struction for Bengali-Muslims as well as “shifting divisions and vicissitudes”: [D]iverse and often opposing cultural strains produced a recognisable regional culture in the eastern Bengal delta. . . . Unlike the surrounding pop­ ulations, most inhabitants of the active delta came to define themselves as both Muslims and Bengalis. . . . [T]his process was never homogenous and there was continual transformation of what it meant to be a Muslim Bengali or a Bengali Muslim. There were considerable differences in the meaning of these identities, partly spatial and partly temporal.4 It is unsurprising then, that while searching for a viable cultural identity, Bengali Muslims in different historical conditions propagated different notions of iden­ tity for themselves. I identify three overlapping and conflicting discourses of cul­ tural identity that not only served as crucial markers for Bengali Muslims at different historical junctures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also can be located in present-day Bangladesh. I term these three, Muslim, BengaliMuslim and Bengali trends of cultural identity for Bengali Muslims—all ima­ gined as natural, all-encompassing identity frameworks by different groups of Bengali Muslims, with different agendas at hand. None of these are, of course, homogenous categories, and all three are somewhat criss­crossed. By Muslim discourse, I mean ways of announcing the Islamic identity as

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more important than the geo-ethnicity of Bengali Muslims. The proponents of this anti­Hindu trend of identity enforce the incompatibility of Bengali­ness and Muslim-ness and mostly promote pan-Islamic brotherhood. Upper­class, non­ Bengali Muslim leaders first attempted to define the identity of Bengali Muslims in this way in late­nineteenth century Bengal. They accepted the notion, estab­ lished by Hindu nationalists, that the Bengali cultural identity can accommodate Hindus only, not Muslims. As a result, the pro-Islam group of Bengali-Muslims also promoted (and still promote in contemporary Bangladesh) Muslim identity as the only cultural identity for Bengali Muslims. The Bengali-Muslim discourse of cultural identity wishes to merge both Bengali and Muslim identities together in one identity. However, the proponents of this trend consider the ethnic­cultural identity that is Bengali­ ness to be more important than the Muslim-ness of Bengali Muslims. Because of that, though they accept a certain notion of Muslim-ness as part of their cul­ cultural identity, they make distinctions between themselves and non-Bengali Muslims, denoting the ethnic-linguistic uniqueness of the Bengal delta. By increasing the marks of Muslim-ness within the Bengali-Muslim identity in particular ways, they make distinctions between their own and the BengaliHindu identity—the dominant identity in colonial Bengal, which is largely based on Bengali cultural modernity as consolidated in nineteenth­century (West) Bengal. The newly-emerged Bengali Muslim middle classes initiated such a move to create a merger between Bengali-ness and Muslim-ness in early-twentieth-century Bengal. Between the 1900s and the 1930s, alongside the Muslim identity propagated by elite, non-Bengali Muslims in colonial Bengal, the emerging Bengali-Muslim middle classes emphasized this BengaliMuslim cultural identity. In the 1940s, however, this discourse of ethnoreligious identity gave way to the discourse of pan-Indian Muslim identity and made possible the formation of Pakistan, a separate state for the Muslims of India. The geo-ethnic identity of Bengali Muslims (that is, deltaic Bengaliness) became negligible within this movement in order to get rid of the hege­ monic umbrella of Bengali-Hindu identity that suppressed Bengali Muslims in many ways during the nineteenth and early­twentieth centuries. The third trend of identity formation—culturalist discourse—represents a Bengali-nationalist trend of identity for Bengali Muslims. This version, the “Bengali” cultural identity of Bengali Muslims with a strong local root, can be visibly located in 1920s East Bengal for the first time. After the 1947 partition, it strengthened with modernist aspirations and cultural movements among Bengali Muslims in 1950s East Pakistan. The Bengali Muslim middle classes used this secular notion of Bengali identity as a powerful weapon in the 1960s Bengali nationalist movement. This identity played an important role in mobilizing the 1971 liberation war for Bangladesh against the (West) Pakistani, non-Bengali Muslim oligarchies and bourgeoisie. Van Schendel encapsulates the formation of such a “separate Bengali” identity as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s—“The new Bangladeshi elite imagined the society that was taking shape in the delta as distinctly Bengali. They thought

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 69 of Bangladesh as a true nation­state, a homeland to the Bengali community that had been denied justice in Pakistan.”5 This elite propagates a secular stance that religious identities (such as Muslim-ness and Hindu-ness) need to be kept separate from the political-cultural domain. They hail the supremacy of the Bengali language, as voiced by the lan­ guage movement of 1952. They also accept the uniqueness of the Bengali culture, partially following the Bengali Hindu bhadralok-reformers, who led the Bengali renaissance and modernized the Bengali language and literature in nineteenth­century Bengal. We now move to a quick review of the history of East Bengal/Bangladesh. However fractured, contradictory and imagined the collective identity of Bengali Muslims may be, their identity as “one people” served as a constituent of the Pakistan state in 1947 and also as the driving force for establishing the state called Bangladesh in 1971. The textbooks tell us that the British East India Company—a trading group— started the process of taking over the rulership of India when, in 1757, it won a mock battle against the army of Nawab Sirajuddoulah, the ruler of the conglom­ erate of three provinces: Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. By the late eighteenth century, these British merchants achieved political authority over the subcontinent through diplomatic and economic maneuvering and a few battles. Before this British inva­ sion, the Delhi-based Mughal emperors held supreme but distant political author­ ity, while the local feudal lords and kings of the many small states directly ruled and collected taxes from ordinary citizens. Most of these rulers were Muslims, so later Muslim historians argued that the British invasion uprooted the Muslims from their crowns, while the Hindus welcomed and assisted the British in a bid to destroy Muslim dominance over the subcontinent. By the 1890s, the British had developed a westernized education system and an efficient colonial machinery, both at the federal and local levels in India. An English-educated, largely BengaliHindu, middle class developed, which led a movement for literary and cultural modernity in nineteenth-century Calcutta. The Bengali Muslims were never meant to be a part of this cultural modernity. On the other hand, considering the English language and westernized education as anti-Islamic, they largely avoided the polit­ ical, educational and cultural spheres in the nineteenth century. By the 1890s, the large Muslim peasant community comprised the majority of the population of rural East Bengal, while the minority Hindus were rich land­ lords, well connected with the British rulers and the urban centers. Bangladeshi historian Sirajul Islam quoted the English administrator W. W. Hunter, who observed in 1871 that: “it was almost impossible for a well-born Mussalman in Bengal to become poor [in 1701], at present it is almost impossible for him to continue rich.” Islam notes that this became the key slogan of the emerging Bengali-Muslim middle class migrating to the towns and entering politics during the 1880s and 1890s.6 In 1905, the British rulers divided Bengal into East and West, created a new province called “East Bengal and Assam” and made Dhaka its capital. The emerging middle-class Bengali Muslims were encouraged, seeing this as a way to develop Dhaka as a cultural and educational hub for themselves.

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However, due to series of protests led by Bengali Hindu bhadraloks in 1911, the partition of Bengal was annulled: Calcutta again became the capital for an undi­ vided Bengal, while the capital of India was transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. During the 1930s and 1940s, the anti-British discourse of the Bengali-Muslim middle class contained a strong anti-Hindu sentiment. Bengali Muslims joined the Pakistan Movement, which was based on a Muslim nationalist view propagated by north Indian (and non-Bengali) Muslim feudal lords and leaders, including Mohammad Ali Jinnah. After a series of riots, protests, famines and meetings in 1946–1947, the subcontinent was divided into “India” and “Paki­ stan,” imagined as two separate national sanctuaries for Hindus and Muslims respectively. The Bengal province was divided again, with East Bengal becom­ ing a part of Pakistan and, later, being renamed East Pakistan. It is said that, apart from its Muslim allegiance and the PIA (Pakistan Inter­ national Airlines), there was no bond between the populations of West and East Pakistan. The ethnic and cultural differences of various groups of Pakistanis, especially between the Bengalis of East Pakistan and the non-Bengali West Pakistanis (that means Punjabis, Sindhis and other minority groups), became more and more evident through the 1952 language movement and the 1954 elec­ tions. In particular, the discourse of Bengali identity started a nationalist appre­ ciation of the Bengali language following the 1952 language movement: Now it was not just the language itself that grew into a symbol of resistance and cultural pride. Each Bengali letter could be used as a badge in the cul­ tural guerrilla war. . . . It has become a deeply emotive emblem of identity.7 In the 1960s, the idea of a nation for Bengali Muslims made a radical shift from the religious to the cultural domain: from Muslim-ness to Bengali-ness. This discourse of cultural­nationalism, based on the supremacy of the Bengali language and culture and coupled with a secular worldview, fostered the birth of Bangladesh as a nation-state. During the 1960s, this discourse helped to unite the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. It fostered popular protest against West Pakistani military rule, which was using the banner of “Muslim Pakistan” to accuse Bengali Muslims, and their language, of being un-Islamic. This protest ended in a bloody war between the Pakistani army and the Bengali guerrillas, with some Indian backing during March to December 1971, and it led to the independ­ ence of Bangladesh. This short, straightforward summary of the national history of Bangladesh demonstrates that this nation-state came into being more than seven decades after the arrival of cinema in this land. More importantly, it becomes clear that Bangladesh is very much an imagined and constructed nation. Therefore, as Bangladeshi historian Tazeen M. Murshid states: The history of the region demonstrates that the process of identity selection was not constant; the cultural markers adopted were not fixed. . . . Here,

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 71 nationhood has been defined and re-defined three times within a quarter of a century.8 The basis of the formation of Pakistan—the discourse of Muslim nationalism— lost its legitimacy in the wake of the counter-discourse of Bengali culturalnationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, which led to the formation of Bangladesh. However, a new discourse of political-nationalism seems quite evident and strong in Bangladesh during the 1980s to 2000s; it aspired to create a Bangla­ deshi identity for all Bangladeshis and move towards nation-state modernity. While the relationship between this modernity and cinema becomes my focus in later chapters, below I enlist the ways that have been utilized to locate a begin­ ning for Bangladesh film history, and I explore how these are related to nation and identity construction in Bangladesh.

Beginning Bangladesh film history As I indicated in the introduction to this chapter, the task of selecting the starting point of a national cinema history always denotes the particular nationalist dis­ courses within which that history is produced and appreciated. In other words, the beginning of a film history is normally dictated by the historian’s implicit subordination to the dominant ideologies inherent in the national public sphere in which the historian works. First the notion of historiography and then the ideas about the nation and cinema construct the film-historian’s view of the history of a national cinema. Here, using these three major principles or under­ standings implicit in the historiography of non-Western national cinema, I present and re-read the conventional wisdom on the beginning of cinema in Bangladesh. In determining the starting point of Bangladesh film history, Professor Abu Sayeed, the minister who included cinema in his portfolio in the culturalnationalist, Awami League-led Bangladesh government (1996–2001), provides a clue. While inaugurating a film festival in Dhaka on August 22, 1998, he said: “film production in this part of the subcontinent began with the release of The Face and the Mask in 1956.”9 The newspapers quote him as saying: “we have started this venture against many hurdles both in social and state-life.”10 A group of leading film directors of the 1990s held a rally on August 3, 1998 at the compound of the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation studio, the only full-service film production studio in Bangladesh. They demanded that the government should declare August 3 as “Cinema Day,” because in their words, “the first cinematic protest of the nation, The Face and the Mask,” was released on this date in 1956.11 At a seminar of the 1997 Dhaka International Short and Alternative Film Festival, the well-known art cinema film-maker Syed Salahuddin Zaki—in his keynote speech—compared the release of The Face and the Mask in 1956 with the moving images created and projected by the Lumière brothers in France in 1895.12

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These examples above tally with many others who like to claim The Face and the Mask as the beginning of Bangladesh cinema. This claim is also well­ supported in most survey histories of Bangladesh cinema, including those authored by Kabir, Hayat, Mutsuddi, Quader and Zaki.13 These histories (and several others not listed) describe this milestone event in detail, spending much time and energy on illustrating the hurdles faced by Abdul Jabbar Khan, the director-scriptwriter-producer of the film, in his effort to make this “first cine­ matic protest” (in the words of contemporary film-makers of Bangladesh). As the story goes, Jabbar Khan accepted the challenge of making a film in East Pakistan as laid down by Fazal Alidina Dossani, an influential film-capitalist in 1950s and 1960s East Pakistan, who had experience in the film business in Cal­ cutta before migrating to Dhaka. He built the Gulistan cinema in Dhaka, a major film theater in the capital of East Pakistan, as well as producing and dis­ tributing many Bengali and Urdu films during the 1950s and 1960s.14 During a meeting of cultural activists in Dhaka in 1953, Fazal Dossani, in the words of Kabir, “suggested that even East Bengal’s weather was unsuitable for filmmaking not to mention the absence of suitable technicians, equipment and artistes.”15 Each survey history depicts how Jabbar Khan went into the production and distribution of The Face and the Mask as an adventure story, complete with con­ flict and climax. Hayat devotes a full chapter to the subject, calling it “The Face and the Mask: The Birth of a History,” while Mutsuddi refers to the “story behind the film-making of Abdul Jabbar Khan.”16 Kabir and Quader elaborate how Khan, with no training or experience in film-making, bought a second-hand camera, collected the actors (especially the females) and used a home tape recorder for sound recording in the absence of better recording equipment. They also outline how Khan finally released and screened the film while all the film distributors of East Pakistan were panic-stricken, thinking that the audience would damage the theater seats upon seeing the devastating shortcomings of this maiden venture.17 After narrating this tale of the beginning of cinema in Bangla­ desh, Kabir entitles his next section, “Birth of an Industry.”18

Re-reading the “beginning” of Bangladesh cinema It is striking how unproblematically all the survey historians of Bangladesh cinema present the making of The Face and the Mask as a story of human evolu­ tion, highlighting the achievements of specific individuals. This history only involves the event (what happened: the production and release of the film), the main actor (who did this: Abdul Jabbar Khan), sometimes accompanied with simplified cause–effect explanations (Khan wanted to meet a challenge, in protest against the comments of Dossani, the non-Bengali film-distributorproducer). In this way these histories present a teleological and empiricist por­ trayal of the past, ignoring other possible forces at work. This simplistic common­sense notion of empiricist historiography is built upon an organic and linear narrative, based upon human evolution as birth–growth–death.

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 73 So the history of The Face and the Mask is presented as a story that includes an easily determined beginning, middle and end. As Edward Branigan argues, such stories are “structured as dramas of disclosure, with a stress on conflict and climax” while “the source of this evolution is, again, located in a point: a deci­ sive event, the genius of an individual, a revolutionary invention.”19 All the survey histories of Bangladesh cinema set out to provide an unproblematically seamless history that starts with The Face and the Mask. They find this event useful as the starting point of a descriptive, chronological and linear history of Bangladesh cinema characterized by simplified cause–effect structures and hero– villain dichotomies. As they view historiography simplistically, the national film histories also tend to consider concepts of cinema and nation at their simplest and most common-sense level, as if a basic and unproblematic agreement is already developed on the relationship between these. Essentially, the historians, critics and promoters of Bangladesh cinema are concerned only with theatrical feature film production. One of the historians says explicitly: “only with a story and sound, that means the dialogue can be heard by the viewers, a film can be a com­ plete film.”20 In other words, the dominant discourse around cinema is limited to sound feature films, which are made for showing in commercial cinemas. As The Face and the Mask is appropriate to this understanding of cinema (as a sound feature film), they place it with no hesitation as the “beginning” of cinema in Bangladesh. Similar to the way of understanding cinema, the historians of Bangladesh cinema aspire to fit The Face and the Mask unquestioningly within the discourse of national modernity in Bangladesh. The writers of Bangladesh national cinema histories, sharing an anti-colonialist, Bengali nationalist viewpoint, have worked hard to place The Face and the Mask within this well­accepted discourse of nationalist struggle. These historians value Khan and The Face and the Mask only as far as they can be incorporated within the nationalist­heroic rhetoric sup­ porting nation­state modernity in contemporary Bangladesh. This is why they highlight the tremendous efforts taken by Khan in producing and releasing The Face and the Mask as the first Bengali film by a Bengali Muslim in response to another strong figure of non-Bengali origin (Dossani). They conclude that Khan made The Face and the Mask in 1956 as part of the anti-colonial struggle of Bengali Muslims—following the path of nationalist struggle against the nonBengali Muslim rulers of West Pakistan. But this heroic view of the film as a symbol of anti-Pakistani Bengali nation­ alism and nation-state modernity is only part of the story: the film can even be appropriated within the official discourse of the pan-Pakistani nationalism of the 1950s. For example, the shooting of The Face and the Mask was inaugurated and formally blessed in 1954 by the governor-general of Pakistan (a West Paki­ stani military leader) at a dinner party in the most expensive hotel in Dhaka, when most of East Pakistan was inundated by flood water. The film was adver­ tised as the “first Bengali picture of Pakistan,” clearly denoting that it was initi­ ating a new stream within the Pakistani film industry, alongside Urdu films. It

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was not hailed as the first feature film produced in East Pakistan or East Bengal, even by the director-producers themselves. Later in the 1960s, both Khan and Dossani made Urdu films in the Dhaka studios; films that signify an opposition to Bengali nationalism. In the same period, Khan served as a leader of the allPakistan Film Producers’ Association and even attended international confer­ ences as a member of the official Pakistan delegation.21

Alternative beginnings of Bangladesh cinema history I demonstrated that the identification of The Face and the Mask as the “begin­ ning” of Bangladesh national cinema fulfils the desire for the construction of nation-state (i.e. Bangladeshi) modernity in contemporary Bangladesh. The glo­ rification of the making of this film serves the dominant narratives of nation and cinema in Bangladesh very well. Most historians mention a few earlier films, as they think these are of no central importance. Below, I challenge this “begin­ ning” and propose some alternative starting points for Bangladesh film history— some events that cannot be appropriated so easily within the dominant discourses of nation and modernity in Bangladesh. For me, these different but possible beginnings of Bangladesh cinema history also represent different options of constructing and viewing this cinema history, as well as the narrative of nation in Bangladesh. Therefore, I propose to pinpoint these alternative “beginnings” of cinema in Bangladesh from three approaches to writing cinema histories: cinema history as film-production history, cinema history as film-exhibition history and cinema history as the history of film as a social institution.

Beginnings of Bangladesh cinema from film-production history When we take cinema as a film text and cinema history as the history of film production only—as accepted by most historians of cinema in Bangladesh and elsewhere—but approach the meaning of nation differently, we can list a number of beginnings from the years between 1898 and 1955. This period in the devel­ opment of Bangladesh cinema remains largely unexplored to date, but it is a period full of great men and their achievements. Most of them are still unsung heroes, waiting to be picked up and colorfully illustrated by the film historians so that they can share the limelight along with Khan. From a long list of pioneering achievements in the film-production sector of Bangladesh cinema I present two case studies, glancing at the early decades of the twentieth century. Silent one-reelers produced by Hiralal Sen Hiralal Sen (1866–1917) a famous East-Bengali still photographer from the Bagjuri village of Manikganj, near Dhaka, started filming actuality footage in

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 75 Calcutta and Dhaka between 1898 and 1900. Among Bangladeshi film historians, only Hayat and Hoque have detailed Sen’s life and achievements.22 They noted that Hiralal Sen was the son of a Hindu landlord-pleader, Chandra Mohan Sen, and the grandson of Gokul Krishana Sen Munshi, a very well known pleader and a member of the elite in nineteenth-century Dhaka. Hiralal was edu­ cated in his village and in the cities of Dhaka and Calcutta. He started still photo­ graphy in his youth and between 1887 and 1898, he won seven awards from the all-India-level photography competitions, competing against both Indian and British photographers. He established his own photography studio, “H. L. Sen and Brothers,” in Calcutta in 1890. During 1900 and 1901, Sen shot various scenes from drama performances at the Classic Theater, Calcutta, with the help of Amarendra Nath Dutta, a famous dramatist at that time. The shots he took from the stage drama like Ali Baba, Sarala, Buddha, Bhramar and Sitaram were first shown at Classic Theater in February, 1901. Other than shooting drama per­ formances, Hiralal also shot some actuality footage of various events in Calcutta, Manikganj and Delhi. These include, the Darbar hall in Delhi (shot in 1903); a demonstration protesting the partition of Bengal in 1905; a procession of the Swadeshi movement—people and transport—at Chitpur Road, Calcutta; people bathing in the village pond at Bagjuri in Manikganj; and the coronation cere­ mony of King George V in Delhi in 1911.23 Indian cinema historians Rajadhyaksha and Willemen noted that Hiralal Sen’s Dancing Scenes from “The Flower of Persia,” shot in Calcutta in 1898, is the earliest example of a film shot by a Bengali and an Indian. They also note that Hiralal’s Royal Bioscope Company, established in 1899, was the first filmexhibition and production company in colonial Bengal.24 However, the leading survey historian of Bangladesh cinema—Hayat—differs, saying that Sen estab­ lished this company in Calcutta on April 4, 1898, along with his brother Matilal Sen, Deboki Lai Sen and his nephew, Bholanath Gupta. He claims that Sen shot the first film in (then) East Bengal at Manikganj sub-district, near Dhaka, during 1900–1901. He also made a few advertising films at the beginning of the twentieth century to promote products like Edward’s anti-malaria medicine of Batakrishna Pal and Co., Joba Kusum Oil of C.K. Sen and Co. and Salasapila of W. Major and Co. According to Hayat, Hiralal made 12 “feature films,” 10 “documentaries” and three advertising films between 1900 and 1912.25 Hoque argued that these “feature films” actually are the scenes of drama performances at the Classic Theater. In that case, the “documentaries” Hayat refers to are the pieces of actuality footage shot in locations outside the theater. Both Hayat and Hoque agree that the length of the films made by Hiralal Sen was between 50 and 250 feet (1–5 minutes duration).26 Kalish Mukherjee, a well-known Indian historian of Calcutta-based Bengali cinema, quotes from the widely-read periodical of that time, Bangabashi, (August 23, 1903), which highlighted the achievements of Hiralal Sen’s Royal Bioscope Company: Really the Royal Bioscope Company is praiseworthy. They have entertained the Indian population by showing the live and moving images of wonderful

76

Beginning of Bangladesh film history and famous events. Not only that they show British [read Western] pictures, they themselves have also taken moving images of local events spending a lot of money (my translation). 27

Hiralal Sen, then, can be credited with a number of “first” or early achievements in the history of Bangladesh cinema. Some survey histories of Bangladesh cinema, however, do not acknowledge his efforts. These include Kabir (1979), the first book-length history of Bangladesh cinema in English, Mutsuddi (1987) and Zaki (1997). None of these histories mention Hiralal Sen and his films at all, though both Mutsuddi and Zaki begin their histories with a mention of The Face and the Mask.28 A few historians describe Sen and his efforts as playing a valuable part in the pre­history of Indian and Bangladesh cinema; but they do not credit his films as the “beginning” or him as the “beginner” of that cinema; rather, they refer him within the debate about who should be identified as the first filmmaker-exhibitor of the whole Indian subcontinent. Willemen and Rajadhyak­ sha’s Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, Kalish Mukherjee’s 1961 History of Bengali Film Industry (published in Calcutta) and two important survey histo­ ries of Bangladesh cinema by Hayat and Quader recognize Hiralal Sen in such a contested manner. This situation can be accounted for within the dominant discourses of “cinema,” “nation” and “history” of Bangladesh cinema that I outlined in Chap­ ters 1 and 2. First, within the discourse of “cinema,” Hiralal Sen did not produce and exhibit theatrical feature films: he shot actuality footage, such as the arrival of a new British ruler in Calcutta, segments of stage plays etc. In most film his­ tories, including the histories of Bangladesh cinema, the production and exhibi­ tion of real­life recordings are not considered as a feat at par with theatrical features (or even documentaries). Hiralal Sen was the son of a Bengali-Hindu landlord, whose family migrated from their ancestral home at Manikganj (a sub-district, around 80 kilometers from Dhaka) to Calcutta in West Bengal well before the independence of Bang­ ladesh. Such a background easily ousted him from the public sphere of the Bengali Muslim middle class, which imagined and fought for the nations called Pakistan in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971. Sen’s film works can be valued neither within the Muslim-nationalist discourse of Pakistan nor within the Bengali cultural-nationalist modernity of 1970s–2000s Bangladesh. The early decades of the twentieth century are less relevant for Bengali nationalism—the founding force of Bangladesh—as this strand came into its peak through the anti-Pakistani struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Besides, cultural-nationalist Bengali Muslims feel comfortable voicing the achievements of Bengali Muslims, rather than those of Bengali Hindus like Sen, as the latter seems to be unsuitable for most nationalist narratives of Bangladesh. During the 1990s, because of this situation, Mofidul Hoque, a leading Bengali-nationalist intellectual, urged that Hiralal Sen and his works should be highlighted in the history of Bangladesh cinema:

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 77 The influential class in post-1947 East Bengal did not consider the migrated [-to-India] Hiralal Sen as the son of Manikganj [of East Bengal]. Refusal to appraise its own history was the ideal of Pakistani rulers. Today, in an inde­ pendent Bangladesh, it is essential to change the situation. We have to know our own great people. Because of that we need [to discuss] Hiralal Sen (my translation).29 Hoque has to remind people of the achievements of Hiralal Sen in this tone because in Bangladesh during the 1980s to the 2000s, the Bengali-nationalists were battling against the discourse of nation-state modernity symbolized through a version of political-nationalism. This nationalism, popularly called Bangla­ deshi nationalism, gained currency in a military­ruled, pro­Islamic and pro­state environment after the assassination, in 1975, of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the cultural­nationalist leader who led the struggle for Bangladesh during the late 1960s and the 1971 liberation war. The political-nationalists in Bangladesh con­ sider the period (i.e. the first years of the twentieth century) when Sen was involved in his heroic achievements as even more backward than the pre-history of “Bangladeshi” nationhood. In this way, Sen becomes unsuitable and problem­ atic for all three discourses of nationalism (Bengali-Muslim, Bengali-nationalist and Bangladeshi), which were severely contested during the last century or more in the Bengal delta—now called Bangladesh. Sen cannot be assimilated and rationalized within any of these identity strands and can neither be a part of the cultural­national modernity nor of the nation­state modernity. Third, from the viewpoint of understanding the method of writing a history, the survey historians of Bangladesh cinema rely mostly on material data. In the case of The Face and the Mask, they can readily access such data: the film print is still in use (a DVD has been recently released) and most of the cast and crew including Mr Khan were alive and active till the 1980s and 1990s. In the case of Sen, not only did he die in 1917, after facing a devastating loss in his film pro­ duction and exhibition business, but also his films are not to be found either in India or in Bangladesh. After 100 years, one cannot find any people who watched Sen’s films in the early twentieth century. There are some newspaper reports and biographies in Bengali available on Sen’s film initiatives from as early as 1898. However, most writers of Bangladeshi and Indian film histories cannot access these easily because of locational, logistic and linguistic barriers. Bangladesh cinema historians who have looked at these materials, I believe, do not find these documents substantial enough to build a captivating narrative that can topple the adventure story of Abdul Jabbar Khan on his making of The Face and the Mask as the beginning of Bangladesh cinema.

Film-making efforts of the Nawabs in Dhaka Some survey historians of Bangladesh cinema record that the young members of the Nawab family of Dhaka (a leading Muslim feudal landlord family with polit­ ical authority during the colonial era) started making films as early as 1927. The

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members of the Nawab family completed a silent short Sukumari (The Good Girl) in 1928. These members include Khaza Azmal, Khaza Nasrullah, Khaza Azad, Khaza Akil, Khaza Akmal and Khaza Zahir. Ambuj Gupta, a sports instructor at Jagannath College in Dhaka, played the directorial role in this short film. Khaza Nasrullah acted as the hero, while Abdus Sobhan, another young man, featured as a female protagonist as no woman could be found to act in a film at that time in East Bengal because of social and religious inhibitions.30 After Sukumari, the same film-making team started the feature project, The Last Kiss in October 1929. Again, Ambuj Gupta took up the role of the director and Khaza Azad and Khaza Azmal performed the cinematography. Hayat and Quader, two Bangladeshi film historians, narrate the production of this film in detail. In The Last Kiss, Khaza Azmal takes the role of the hero, while Khaza Nasrullah, the hero of Sukumari, plays the role of the villain. This time a girl was found to feature as the female protagonist. She was Lolita, a 14-year-old girl brought from the Badamtoli brothel of Dhaka, who played the role of Azmal’s wife. Other important protagonists include Shailen Roy—aka Tona Babu (chief robber), Khaza Adel (the Zamindar or landlord), Khaza Akmal (robber), Khaza Shahed (child of Adel, the Zamindar), Khaza Zahir (robber), Syed Shahebe Alam (police officer), Charubala Devi (wife of Adel, the Zamindar) and Harim­ oti (Dancer-cum-singer). Similarly to Lolita, Charubala, the supporting actress in the film, was also brought from another (Kumartuli) brothel of Dhaka. Harimoti, who led the song-and-dance number in the film, was also a commercial dancer and singer by profession. Other actors of The Last Kiss included Dhiren Mazum­ dar, Dhiren Ghosh, Dev Bala, Baby Tuntun and Benu Bannerjee. This silent feature was released for a month or so in the Mukul Theater in Dhaka in 1931. The renowned historian of India, Ramesh Chandra Mazumdar, then professor at the University of Dhaka, inaugurated the premier show of the film there. He handed gold medals to Khaza Shahed and Baby Tuntun, two child actors in the film. The Last Kiss was made in three languages—presenting intertitles in Bengali, English and Urdu. Both the Bengali and English intertitles were written by Ambuj Gupta, the director of the film, while the Urdu titles were written by Dr. W. H. Andalib Shadani.31 In the early 1980s, Hayat also interviewed some members of the Nawab family about the plot of The Last Kiss. They gave different descriptions of the narrative of the film. Khaza Shahed viewed the plot as a conflict between two landlord families; at the moment of their separation, two children from the fam­ ilies kiss each other, so the film is called The Last Kiss. Khaza Zahir said that when the hero (Azmal) was going to see Jatra (an indigenous form of rural opera of the Bengal delta) along with his wife (Lolita), the gang of the villain (Nasrullah), another landlord, kidnap Lolita. Azmal finds Lolita in Nasrullah’s bedroom and a fight erupts between them. At last both Azmal and Lolita die. However, both of the storytellers, Shahed and Zahir, confirmed that there was a scene in the film in which Shahed, the child of Adel and Charubala, was kid­ napped by the robber-leader Shailen Roy, aka Tonababu.32

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 79 We can see that, as in The Face and the Mask, local talents were used in The Last Kiss, and only the shooting was done in Dhaka; the post-production work was done in Calcutta (in the case of The Face, it was done in Lahore). Inciden­ tally, the narratives of both films circle around a robbery and how the police act against the robbers. The plots can be termed as localizations of the “law and order” drama commonly found in many popular films of Hollywood and Bombay. Despite the similarities in production mode (apart from the fact that The Last Kiss was silent) and in the plots of The Last Kiss and The Face, The Last Kiss was never identified as the beginning of Bangladesh film history. I believe that the reasons for this are similar to the problems film historians faced in applaud­ ing Hiralal Sen. Bangladesh cinema historians feel discouraged as the primary and physical data on The Last Kiss is too limited. The film print and negative are lost, and there are no living members of the core team responsible for making the film left. The only print of the film was sold to the Aurora Film Company of Calcutta in 1931 by Shahebe Alam, a member of the film crew, for broader and professional distribution of the film in the (then) Bengal province of British India. Second, the crew and cast of The Last Kiss were disbanded soon after the completion of the film. Lolita and Charubala, the female protagonists of the film returned to sex work—their usual profession. Similarly to Hiralal Sen, the dir­ ector of the film, Ambuj Gupta, a Bengali Hindu from East Bengal, migrated to Calcutta after the 1947 partition of Bengal and the foundation of Pakistan as a Muslim state. Hayat notes that Harimoti, the dancer/singer of the film, moved to Calcutta in the 1930s and Khaza Azmal, the hero and one of the two photo­ graphers of The Last Kiss, was killed in 1971.33 The third reason, and probably a more important one, is that the Nawab family could not be appropriated within the currently popular nationalist dis­ courses in Bangladesh, neither in its approach towards cultural­national mod­ ernity nor towards nation­state modernity. The Nawab family was one of few elite families in Dhaka who propagated Muslim nationalism in East Bengal during the 1900s to the 1940s and led the Pakistan Movement against the British and the Bengali Hindus in the 1930s and 1940s. For example, Khaza Nasrullah, the hero of Sukumari and villain of The Last Kiss, actively participated in the 1930s, political movement that aimed to establish a “Muslim” Pakistan. During this period he served as the vice-chairman of Dhaka municipality. He was appointed Deputy High Commissioner of Pakistan in its consulate in Calcutta, where he died in 1953. Two other members of the film crew, Shahebe Alam and Abdus Sobhan, also took up important political and bureaucratic positions during the Pakistan regime. Alam became the vice-chairman and commissioner of Dhaka municipality, while Sobhan served as the secretary of the Planning Min­ istry under the government of Pakistan.34 It seems clear that the members of the Nawab family were Muslim national­ ists and, in turn, they were close allies of the (Western) Pakistani ruling cliques of Pakistan during the 1940s to 1960s. Because of this kind of allegiance of the Nawab family with Pakistani-Muslim nationalism, Khaza Azmal was killed,

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probably by Bengali nationalists, in Savar near Dhaka on December 17, 1971, just a day after the liberation war ended and Bangladesh became independent. Historians like Hayat only mention the event but do not comment on who killed Khaza Azmal. However, the pro-West modernist “achievements” of Azmal in the 1930s and 1940s clearly prove that he was member of the ruling elite in East Bengal/Pakistan.35 He acted for Pakistan and its Muslim nationalism and, in turn, against the Bengali cultural-nationalism that gave birth to Bangladesh. In this way, Azmal and his film-making efforts cannot easily be accommodated in Bangladesh film histories, especially not as the “beginning” of this national cinema.

“Beginnings” of Bangladesh cinema from film-exhibition history The historians of Bangladesh cinema are mainly concerned to write a history of film production. From this viewpoint they rarely look for the events in film dis­ tribution and exhibition, let alone the consumption and reception of films in the early years of Bangladesh cinema. However, if we consider cinema history not only as film-production history, but rather as the history of film exhibition too, we instantly find some other options for identifying the history of Bangladesh national cinema. For example, below I present two case studies on the early period of film exhibition in East Bengal, any of which can be considered as the “beginning” of cinema in Bangladesh from a film-exhibition history approach. First film exhibition in East Bengal The first film show in South Asia was held by the famous Lumière brothers on July 7, 1896 at the Watson Hotel in Bombay. Then films were shown in Calcutta during 1896 and 1897 by the initiatives of John Stevens, Hudson and Father Laffaun, of Saint Xavier’s College. Soon after that, film was exhibited in Dhaka. According to Dhaka Prokash, the Dhaka-based Bengali weekly published during the late nineteenth century, the first film exhibition, by the Bredford Cinemato­ graph Company in East Bengal, was held at the Crown Theater in Dhaka on April 17, 1898. However, the film historian Gowrango Prasad Ghosh, wrote that John Stevens also exhibited films in Dhaka during the years 1896–1897 with a Calcuttabased touring theater company named “Star Theater,” though the documentary evidence of Stevens’ shows is not available. The Bredford Company came down from Calcutta to exhibit films for the first time in Dhaka in April 1898.36 Hayat noted that the venue of the 1898 screening in Dhaka, the Crown Theater (now defunct) at Patuatuli near Sadarghat—the largest river port of Dhaka and an important city hub at that time—was famous for staging wellknown Calcutta plays in Dhaka. The price of admission tickets to this first film show ranged from 0.50 Rupees (8 Annas) to 3 Rupees, at a time when the price of a kilo of rice was about 0.04 Rupees and the daily wage of a daily laborer was 0.50 Rupees.

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 81 The show was reported in Dhaka Prokash of April 24, 1898. The program included: the Diamond jubilee procession of Queen Victoria, the Greek-Turkish war of 1897, Princess Diana’s jump in the water from above 300 feet, the Coro­ nation ceremony of Russian Tsar, Activities of a mad barber, Storm in the sea, Game between a lion and its owner, Crowd in the street of France, French soldiers riding on horses, Rail passengers in France and Play on the ice of England. According to Hayat, this report in Dhaka Prokash highly praised the invention of cinema by saying: This wonderful magic is really surprising. . . . The inventor of this cinemato­ graph must be very wise. We also thank the user of this machine. We think it is worthwhile to spend money to see this wonder. We cannot but say that this is a thousand times better than watching the plays or circuses acted by living beings. It is also not that expensive (my translation).37 Interestingly, outlining Hiralal Sen’s exhibition ventures, Hayat claims that, two weeks before the Dhaka screening, the “first” film exhibition of East Bengal was held on April 4, 1898 in Bhola, a sub-district town in Southern East Bengal. Though the date is not confirmed, he notes that Sen’s Royal Bioscope Company arranged the film show in the bungalow of the sub-divisional officer (SDO—an influential bureaucratic position in the local government) of Bhola. Sen also arranged film shows at his native village of Bagjuri, in Manikganj (near Dhaka) at the same time. On April 15, 1900, Sen’s Royal Bioscope Company exhibited films at the Joydevpur palace of “the king of Bhawal,” Rajendra Narayan Chow­ dhury. Hayat, using a Dhaka Prokash report, lists another film show that was held on May 12, 1902 at the premises of Jagannath College, Dhaka. The admis­ sion charges were: first class, 1 Rupee; second class, 0.50 Rupees; third class, 0.25 Rupees; fourth class, 0 .20 Rupees; and ladies gallery, 0.50 Rupees.38 First cinema theater in East Bengal The first cinema theater in East Bengal was established during the First World War. This cinema, named Picture House, was modified from a jute storehouse at Armanitola in Dhaka. It began showing films with hurricane lights in 1913–1914 under the ownership of Uddavji Tegore, a Marwari (a non-Bengali minority community famous for mercantile activities in colonial Bengal). This was the first cinema of (then) East Bengal. There were two daily screenings, with an extra weekend screening on Sundays. A film featuring Greta Garbo was shown in the inaugural screening at this theater. Before the establishment of this cinema, films were being shown in East Bengal, either in the playhouses ear­ marked for commercial theater performances or in fairgrounds, along with other attractions like magic and the circus. Later, this film theater was renamed the

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New Picture House in 1940 under the ownership of R. K. Guha and Motilal Basu and then again as the Shabistan in 1956, under the ownership of Mohammad Mostofa. Dhaka had three more cinema halls, established between 1924 and 1929. These were the Cinema Palace, later named the Rupmahal (1924), the Lion Cinema (1927) and the Mukul (1929). Two cinema theaters, namely the Cinema Palace and the Rangam, were also set up in the 1920s in Chittagong, the second largest city of East Bengal.39 During the next decade or so, a number of cinema theaters were established in the major cities of East Bengal. If we write Bangladesh film history as a film-exhibition history, we might use the first film exhibition or the first cinema in East Bengal as the “beginning” of this national cinema. However, no Bangladeshi film historian uses early film screenings or the establishment of film theaters in the early twentieth century as the starting point because of their ideological positions with regard to discourses like nation and history as well as cinema. The early exhibition of foreign films (or actuality footage) seems irrelevant for both the cultural-national modernity of Bengali Muslims and the nation-state modernity of the Bangladesh state. Moreover, these events can create more confusion in the empirical, organic and teleological history based on film-production aspects that were built up for Bangladesh national cinema. Such less-mentioned film-exhibition events also raise serious questions that were left unanswered by the leading writers on Bangladesh cinema. For example, cinema was an entertainment for the elite only in Dhaka during 1898–1902; this fact is clear from the high admission rate, as outlined above in the first case study. How and why film became a popular mode of leisure entertainment in East Bengal by the 1920s (as reflected in the increasing number of cinemas in Dhaka and Chittagong during this period) was never articulated in any of their film histories. Similarly, these historians never looked at why and how the cinema of the early­to­mid­twentieth century displaced commercial theater per­ formances of the late nineteenth century—as exemplified in the trend of trans­ forming playhouses into cinemas in the 1920s and 1930s.

Cinema as social institution: new “beginnings” for Bangladesh film history? In this section I ask—considering cinema as a social institution—how one could begin a history of Bangladesh national cinema. From this approach, which I explore throughout this study, Bangladesh cinema is a complex combination of texts, institutions, spectators and also the intertextual and contextual relation­ ships of all of these. Though it has not turned into a popular approach in film studies, Thomas Elsaesser encapsulated this way of seeing cinema as a social institution in his study of national cinemas back in the early 1990s: To decide what is national about a national cinema, one always needs to know what films people saw, where and how they saw them, and what public opinion [the critics who either thought they represented it or who tried to create it] did with them.40

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 83 As I propose to rethink Bangladesh cinema as a social institution, I combine ana­ lyses of texts with and alongside an examination of the social contexts in which these are produced and circulated. I believe that the cinema is not merely an industry, a mass media or an art form. As Ann Friedberg observed, it is “one of many ways in which vision has been enlisted in both modern and postmodern life”; we need to go beyond its industrial periphery and discuss “the social and economic constraints that accompany actual, and virtual, looking.”41 From this viewpoint it strikes one that very little has been written on the indi­ genization of cinema as a social institution in East Bengal during the early decades of the twentieth century. Though the first film exhibition happened in Dhaka in 1898 and the first cinema theater was established in 1913–1914; and American, European and Indian films were being shown in theaters here during 1920s and 1940s, no mentionable research has been done on the consumption and reception of these films in (then) pro-Islamic and agrarian East Bengal. Among Bangladeshi film historians, only Hayat mentioned some foreign films that were exhibited during the 1920s to the 1950s in East Bengal. He noted that American and British films such as The Kid (Charles Chaplin, 1921), Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936) The Good Earth (Sidney Frank­ lin, 1937), King Solomon’s Mine (Robert Stevenson, 1937) and A Farewell to Arms (King Vidor, 1957) were shown in Dhaka cinemas during this period. He also presents a list of Indian Bengali and Hindi films shown in East Bengal in the same period. These include Bilwamangal (Jyotish Bannerjee, 1919), Jaydev (Jyotish Bannerjee, 1926), Doorgeshnandini (Priyonath Ganguly, 1927), Bombai Ka Billi (aka Wildcat of Bombay, Ardeshir Irani, 1927) Chandidas (Debaki Bose, 1932) Seeta (Sisirkumar Bhaduri, 1933) Kapalkundala (Premankur Atorthi, 1933), Dakoo Mansoor (Nitin Bose, 1934) and Sonar Sangsar (Debaki Bose, 1936).42 Kaiyum Chowdhury, a leading Bangladeshi painter, also remembers well­ known English and Hollywood films that he and his friends watched together in Dhaka cinemas in the 1940s and 1950s. He lists films such as Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953), Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) and Lust for Life (Vincent Minnelli, 1956) which were released in Dhaka cinemas during that period.43 However, none of the film histories in Bangladesh reviewed the modes of operations through which these films of foreign origin entered and were indi­ genized in East Bengal society. None of the historians look at this imported cinema culture as part and parcel of Bangladesh film history. For them, this period (1920s–1950s) seemed to be the negligible pre-history of cinema in Bang­ ladesh. Being armed with their textualist, empiricist and Third World nationalist viewpoint, they were, rather, interested in locating the “great men” among Bengali Muslims who started feature film production in East Pakistan as a protest against the non-Bengali colonizers in the 1950s. Therefore, the consump­ tion, reception and appropriation of foreign-origin films in the early to mid twen­ tieth century are missing in Bangladesh cinema history, which could even be

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reasonably pinpointed as the “beginning” of cinema in Bangladesh. Similarly, in the absence of an understanding of cinema as social institution, these historians do not identify and illustrate the negotiations of the rural Bengali Muslims with the first batch of Bengali popular films produced in early-to-mid-1960s Dhaka. In this way, Bangladeshi film historians often bypass Roopban (1965), one of the most popular films produced in the Dhaka film industry to date. This was the first feature film, based on a popular East-Bengali folktale, that supposedly trans­ formed the Dhaka film industry into a Bengali film production center with a viable (sized) audience. The production and reception of Roopban not only founded the Dhaka film industry on a strong economic base; it also widened the social acceptance of cinema in the agrarian-Islamic society of the 1960s Bengal delta. Taking cinema as a social institution, this 1965 film could also be termed as a “beginning” for Bangladesh cinema. For the first time, this film brought cinema to the indigenous world of rural Bengali Muslims, who had previously perceived it only as a Western medium that addressed urban-based, middle-class Bengali Muslims. In support of this view, I now present a case study on Roopban and its role in indigenizing cinema in (then) East Pakistan.

Roopban and cinema in the rural public sphere in 1960s East Pakistan In order to understand why Roopban (Roopban, 1965) was hailed as the rescuer of Bengali cinema in East Pakistan, we need to closely look at the development of the Dhaka film industry in the early 1960s. During the first three years of the Dhaka film industry (1959–1961), only ten feature films were made. One of these was by a visiting independent film-maker from West Pakistan—the London-trained A. J. Kardar, who made the famous art film—Jago Hua Savera (Day Shall Dawn, 1959). The rest of the films were also mostly art cinema films such as Asiya (Asiya, 1960) and Kokhono Asheni (Never Came, 1961). Apart from one film, Harano Din (The Lost Day, 1961) by Mustafiz, the popular audi­ ence rejected these early attempts at art cinema film-making in 1959–1961 and thus these films proved unsuccessful in terms of commerce and spectatorship. In other words, the first batch of homegrown art films of the 1960s failed to attract audiences, who were engaged in watching entertainment films in Hindi and Urdu imported respectively from Bombay and Lahore. Kabir notes that the embryonic Dhaka film industry was heading for disaster because of the failure of its Bengali art films during these years. This changed when Ehtesham made Chanda (1962), the first Urdu language film produced in Dhaka. As Chanda did very well in the box offices of both East and West Pakistan, a trend of making Urdu films started in the Dhaka film industry. Con­ sequently, the Dhaka-based Bengali film industry, still in its infancy, had to engage in a competitive fight against not only imported films, but also homegrown Urdu films in order to gain a viable share of the audience. Even veteran Bengali-nationalist film-maker Zahir Raihan had to make entertainment films, such as Sangam (The Intercourse) and Bahana (The Excuse), in Urdu in

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 85 1964–1965. However, by 1965, Urdu films from Dhaka started to become unsuc­ cessful in bringing audiences to watch any kind of homegrown film, either in Bengali or Urdu. Supposedly, the industry was again near to a “close down” when, in November 1965, the release of Roopban “saved” it.44 Kabir describes Roopban as the “forerunner of a commercially succcessful trend” that enabled the Dhaka studio to survive as a production center for Bengali films. The pro­ duction of Bengali films started to increase dramatically: from five in 1965 to 14 in 1966 and then to 25 in 1968.45 In the post­Roopban era, Quader finds that 28 Bengali films were released in 1968 and 16 in 1967, while the Urdu productions decreased, from 11 in 1966 to only three in 1970. On the other hand, in the preRoopban phase, during 1962 to 1965, 19 Urdu films were produced alongside 18 Bengali features in Dhaka.46 Though these facts and figures are important from an “industry” point of view, taking cinema as social institution, we can locate a more important phe­ nomenon. That is, the reception of Roopban among the villagers in 1960s East Bengal can be seen as cinema’s earliest negotiation with active social and cul­ tural practices of this area. These practices range from religious to leisure activ­ ities including a rural-based, folk performing art like Jatra. Being textually connected with this form of folk art, Roopban proved that “cinema” was not an entertainment for urban or semi­urban populations of that period alone. This was the first time that villagers in East Bengal—who were the overwhelming majority at that time—flocked to the towns to see a film. Here I ask, as well as answer, the question of why and how Roopban could become such a massive hit that it rescued the Bengali cinema of the Dhaka film industry from disappearing and, more importantly, made villagers of the Bengal delta interact with a “modern” and “technological” medium like cinema. The answer lies in the intertextuality and narrative mode of Roopban, which made this film very acceptable to rural viewers, and started the assimilation of cinema into the semi-rural, Bengali-Muslim cultural arena of East Bengal. First, this film was transformed from a rural operetta (Jatra) called Roopban. For many years, Jatra existed in the villages of East Bengal as a traditional mode of entertainment. This form of performance in the Bengal delta was normally staged between midnight and dawn on a raised wooden platform in the village center, usually in the harvesting season. An all-male cast was used to portray both sexes, while the event was financed by a rich landlord (Zamindar) or through subscriptions from the audiences (sometimes in kind, such as a kilo of rice to be “paid” by each family). Plots of the plays were based on well-known legends and popular myths surviving over generations. These outline a fight between good and evil, and of course, the good hero and heroine always win against all evils.47 As the villagers were accustomed to watching such jatra plays (including Roopban), when Roopban was made into a film, they considered it to be an extension of the play, happening on a screen instead of a stage. Salahuddin, the director of Roopban, used a “traditional stage style of entrance-dialogue-exit” when he “transliterated” the jatra play into a film.48 In this way, the rural

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viewers’ transition from the jatra stage in the village center to a cinema in a nearby town, could happen smoothly. Tanvir Mokammel, an influential film commentator and film-maker in Bangladesh identifies an “intense nostalgia” among the villagers of the Bengal delta towards jatra as an entertainment medium. They became happy seeing their well-known characters shift from a jatra play to a larger­than­life cinema screen.49 In this way, Roopban helped to break down social and religious taboos that kept the rural masses (mostly Bengali Muslim) away from the cinemas until 1965. Prior to this, cinema was considered to be “sinful.” While Hindus in the Indian subcontinent worship icons representing gods and goddesses, Muslims pray to Allah, the God (the only one, who can never be turned into an idol). So, for the rural Muslims of the Bengal delta in the 1960s, photographs or filmed images were similar to icons and therefore an “Islamic” conception grew, that watching or preserving a photo or image was also sinful. As Kabir writes in 1971: The moment the word got round that Roopban would be shown in a town cinema, there was an unprecedented rush. Villagers, who always considered the cinema a corrupting temptation of the Devil, flocked in the thousands with their families to the towns. Failing to get tickets they camped outside the cinema halls. When asked if they did not consider such a craze for cinema as something sinful they replied, quite sincerely: “we have come to see Roopban [the operetta], not cinema!”50 In other words, the Bengali Muslim villagers argued that watching a film can be a sin, but watching a filmed jatra cannot be a sin, and they had already watched many jatra plays including this one. One cannot but remember the similarity of the event to the reception of Raja Harishchandra (The King Harishchandra), the first Indian feature film made in 1913 by D. G. Phalke, who was inspired by the film Life of Christ.51 The King Harishchandra was also the filmed version of a devotional tale of Hindu mythology that was shown around India. The other reason for an easier absorption of Roopban into the cultural sphere of rural East Bengal was the narrative pattern and the songs of the film. The film tells the story of the outstanding sacrifice of a young woman named Roopban. On the orders of a king, who is under the influence of a soothsayer, this 12-yearold girl has to marry a newborn prince and take him to the jungle for 12 years, where she nurses him. He becomes a handsome man and falls in love with another woman. In the end, of course, Roopban wins and is reinstated with full honour. Certainly this kind of glorification of a self-sacrificing womanhood seemed acceptable to the conservative Bengali-Muslim villagers of East Bengal in the late 1960s. In Kabir’s words, “the ideal Muslim womanhood as portrayed by title­roler ‘Roopban’ had sanctified the medium itself.”52 This tale of female suffering and sacrifice was told through a chronological narrative that knitted a large number of popular folk songs together, one after another. This musical way of storytelling is originally used in the jatra play, and is directly copied in the

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 87 film. The songs and the way they were knitted into the tale itself directly trans­ ported the viewers into their well-known jatra play—Roopban. Both Kabir and Mutsuddi noted how Roopban enlarged the cinema audience of the Bengal delta by a significant proportion. Kabir finds that “it won new audiences for the cinema from the rural areas—new spectators who for the first time in history developed the habit of coming to towns to watch movies.”53 Mut­ suddi finds that at a time when only four or five release prints of other Bengali films were made in early-1960s East Bengal, 17 prints were made for Roopban. Many makeshift cinemas were built in rural areas, just to show Roopban.54 It is not surprising, then, that Roopban as a folk-musical film had a huge impact on the Dhaka film industry for the rest of the 1960s and well into the 1970s and 1980s. For example, the massive popularity of Roopban in 1965–1966 encouraged at least seven more directors to make films on popular jatra plays or other kinds of folklores immediately. Eight of these films were produced in 1966 (out of a total 25) including an Urdu version of Roopban itself. Two of these films used Roopban in the title, giving an impression of sequels to Roopban. These were Rahim Badshah O Roopban (King Rahim and Roopban) and Abar Bonobashe Roopban (Roopban again in the Forest) directed by Safdar Ali Bhuian and Ibne Mizan respectively. In the same year, Mizan made another folkfilm—Jorina Shundori (Jorina, the Beautiful)—while Zahir Raihan, the mostpraised veteran director of the 1960s Dhaka film industry, also made a folk-film—Behula.55 This film, based on the success of a sacrificing womanhood adopted from a Hindu mythology—in a way, a slightly varied version of the Roopban narrative—also proved to be a money-spinner.56 Another veteran, Khan Ataur Rahman, made four folk-musical films between 1966 and 1968: Raja Sannyasi (King becomes Prophet), Nawab Sirajuddoulah, Sat Bhai Champa (Champa, Sister of Seven Brothers) and Arun Barun Kironmala, all of which (with the exception of Raja Sannyasi) became very popular among audiences. In 1967, other veterans like Kazi Zahir and Azizur Rahman also joined the trend by directing films like Nayantara and Saiful Mulk Badiuzzamal.57

Conclusion Using different methods of writing film histories (film-production history, filmexhibtion history and film-as-social-institution) I have presented various case studies on the early period of Bangladesh cinema, mostly drawing upon the data collated by major historians of this cinema. These “cases” are only examples; with more careful enquiry, one could find more examples of beginnings of Bang­ ladesh film history from the histories published and circulated so far. This exer­ cise of locating possible alternative beginnings for a history of cinema in Bangladesh indicates that because the film historians in Bangladesh are operat­ ing from within certain notions of building the nation—its history as well as its film history—as part of a larger nation-building discourse, they do not evaluate other possibilities for beginning the history of cinema in Bangladesh. The earlier decades of this cinema, until feature film production began in East Bengal, are

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then seen only as a pre-historic phase. They thus reveal a substream of the social history of early Bangladesh cinema. They largely ignore the mainstream devel­ opment—that is, this cinema’s role as a discursive entity and, in turn, a social institution that intersects with the life­ and system­worlds of the community it addresses. In this way, these histories do not identify the terms and processes of the public acceptance of cinema in the early decades of the twentieth century within the social milieu of the Bengal delta, whose belief systems were firmly rooted in agriculture and Islam. For example, we can never know the answer to why, in 1898, the Dhaka Prokash described the earliest moving images as a “wonder” and also as “magic,” though we locate this in the pages of the empiri­ cist history of Bangladesh cinema presented by Hayat.58 Only if we move from the empirical-industrialist approach to locate early cinema in film history, and consider it as a social institution that is interacting, overlapping, changing and competing with other institutions in a society, can we see the more complex, diverse and in-depth portrayal of a national cinema. For example, Khan, Sen and the Nawabs—and their film-making efforts alongside the early exhibitions, early cinema theaters and the reception of popular films such as Roopban in the early years—signify the attempt to absorb the cinema medium into the Bengali-Muslim cultural arena. Using all these “cases,” I have demonstrated that cinema has gone through an indigenization process, from the 1910s to the 1950s, in East Bengal/ Pakistan and these events and ventures are important parts of that process. Here, I suggest that articulating an engaged framework for the study of the early years of a non-Western national cinema like Bangladesh cinema needs a reorientation towards writing a history, the function of cinema as, or in, the public sphere and the concept of national identity in a postcolonial nation­space. By chang­ ing the bases of understanding of discourses of “history,” “cinema” and “nation,” we can build different notions of the same event and we can see what seems to be invis­ ible in conventional film histories. Therefore, I do not propose a single, alternative and more suitable starting point for the history of cinema in Bangladesh. Rather, I discuss a few possible “beginnings,” including how cinema was appropriated into the social and cultural matrix of East Bengal/Pakistan during the 1900s to 1960s.

Notes 1 See the detailed discussion on traditional and revisionist histories in Chapter 1. 2 Some of the revisionist-industrial studies (or studies with such tendencies) on national cinemas written in last two decades or so are: John Lent, The Asian Film Industry (London: Christopher Helm, 1990); John Downing (ed.) Film and Politics in the Third World (New York: Praeger, 1987); Roy Armes, Third World Filmmaking and the West (London: University of California Press, 1987); Michael Chanan (ed.) Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema (London: BFI/Channel 4 Tele­ vision, 1983); Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Dmitry Shlapentokh and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography 1918–1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality, (New York: Aldin de Gruyter, 1993); Karl G. Heider, Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991).

Beginning of Bangladesh film history 89 3 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” in Robert Stam and Toby Miller (eds.) Film and Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 705. 4 Willem Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 37–8. 5 Van Schendel (2009) p. 184. 6 Sirajul Islam (ed.) The History of Bangladesh 1704–1971, Vol. 1 Political History (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1993), pp. 575–6. 7 Van Schendel (2009) p. 112. 8 Tazeen M. Murshid, “State, Nation, Identity: The Quest for Legitimacy in Bangla­ desh,” South Asia 20.2 (1997): 7. 9 “British-Bangla Film Festival Opens in City,” The Daily Star (Dhaka) 2.11 (August 23, 1998): 4 (www.dailystarnews.com/199808/23/n8082306.htm), accessed August 24, 1998; “Call to Portray Life, Realities of Country in Films,” The Independent (Dhaka) 367 (August 23, 1998): 8 (www.independent-bangladesh.com/news/ aug/23/230898mt.htm), accessed August 24, 1998. 10 “Call to Portray Life.” 11 “The Demand for ‘Cinema Day’,” Anyadin 3.15 (August 16–31, 1998): 48. 12 Syed Salahuddin Zaki, “Bangladesh Cinema: A Brief Review,” Celluloid 20.1 (December 1997): 20–3. 13 Alamgir Kabir, Film in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1979), pp. 22–4; Anupum Hayat, History of Bangladesh Cinema (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Develop­ ment Corporation, 1987), pp. 43–55; Chinmoy Mutsuddi, Social Commitment in Bangaldesh Cinema (Dhaka: Bangladesh Arts Academy, 1987), pp. 19–22; Mirja Tarequl Quader (1993) Bangaldesh Film Industry (Dhaka: Bangla Academy), pp. 96–7, 103–19 and Zaki (1977) 20–23. 14 Email to researcher dated August 1, 2003 from the grandson of Fazal Dossani, Omar Dossani, currently based in USA. 15 Alamgir Kabir (1979) p. 22. 16 Hayat (1987) p. 43; Mutsuddi (1987) p. 20. 17 Kabir (1979) pp. 22–4; Quader (1993) pp. 96–7 and 103–19. 18 Kabir (1979) p. 24. 19 Edward Branigan, “Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History,” Film Reader 4 (1979): 17–8. 20 Khondokar Kamruzzaman Feroz (1983), “Historical Perspective of Bangladesh Cinema,” Celluloid 3.3 (1983): 24. 21 Quader (1993) pp. 105, 109 and 119; Hayat (1987) pp. 45, 49 and 53. 22 Mofidul Hoque, “The Tribute of the Centenary of Cinema: Hiralal Sen,” Celluloid 20.1 (1997): 13–8; Hayat (1987) pp. 3–4. 23 Ibid. 24 Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian cinema (London: British Film Institute and Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 17 and 195. 25 Hayat (1987) pp. 1–4; Anupam Hayat, “Silent era of Dhaka cinema,” Dhrupadi 5 (August 1985): 14. 26 Hoque (1997) 17–8; Hayat (1987) p. 4. 27 Kalish Mukherjee, The History of Bengali Film Industry (Calcutta: Rupamancha, 1961), p. 27. 28 Zaki (1997) 20; Mutsuddi (1987) p. 19. 29 Hoque (1997) 19. 30 Mutsuddi (1987) p. 19; Hayat (1987) p. 19; Jahangir Alam Khan, “The Development of the Bangladesh Film Industry,” Chinta 19 (June 1995): 39–40; Mahmudul Hossain, “Mainstream Cinema: a Brief Introduction,” View from Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangla­ desh Federation of Film Societies, 1991) not numbered. 31 Hayat (1987) pp. 10–15; Quader (1993) pp. 73–6.

90 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Beginning of Bangladesh film history Hayat (1987) p. 12. Quader (1993) p. 76 and 85; Hayat (1987) pp. 12–15. Ibid. pp. 11 and 16. Azmal was the first person in Dhaka to buy a motor car and to travel in an aeroplane. See Ibid. p. 14. Quader (1993) pp. 43–4; Kabir (1979) pp. 1–2. Hayat (1987) p. 1. Ibid. pp. 1–3. Ibid. pp. 6–7. Thomas Elsaesser, “Early German Cinema,” Screen 33.2 (1992): 210 Ann Friedberg, “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,” in Linda Williams (ed.) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 8–9. Hayat (1987) pp. 6–8. Kaiyum Chowdhury, “Gregory Peck: Our Favorite Hero,” Daily Prothom Alo 5.234 (4 July 2003): 18. Golam Mostafa “Thoughts about Cinema,” Chalachchitra 1.2 (1975): 25. Kabir (1979) p. 29; Alamgir Kabir “Bangladesh Film Industry,” Celluloid 2.2 (1981): 5. Quader (1993) p. 135. Alamgir Kabir “A Study of the Pakistani Cinema,” in James Brandon (ed.) The Performing Arts in Asia (Paris: Unesco, 1971), p. 148. Kabir (1979) p. 28. Tanvir Mokammel, The Aesthetics of Cinema (Dhaka: Agami Publishers, 1998), p. 169. Kabir (1971) p. 149. Quader (1993) p. 47. Alamgir Kabir, “Bangladesh Cinema: A Critical Note,” in Film Culture in South Asia, (Dhaka: Sequence Publishing 1985), p. 31. Kabir (1979) p. 29. Mustsuddi (1987) p. 32. Quader (1983) p. 187. Kabir (1979) p. 36. Quader (1983) pp. 136–7 and 187. Hayat (1987) pp. 2–3.

4

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity in colonial Bengal

In the preceding chapter, I analyzed some early attempts in the Bengal delta to indigenize the Western import of cinema in the early-to-mid twentieth century. By proposing various starting points for the history of the Bangladesh film industry, I reviewed how cinema emerged as a social institution in East Bengal/Pakistan society as well as its negotiations with the dominant modes of historiography and nationhood as practiced by Bangladeshi scholars operating from within the framework of national modernity. Bangladeshi film historians unanimously highlighted The Face and the Mask as the “beginning” of Bangladesh cinema. I aruge that film historians overlooked or undermined the earlier film production efforts locally as well as the exhibition of foreign films, as these efforts normally do not meet the demands of imagining a certain kind of national modernity. I re-read these under-appreciated early efforts and pointed out that these could also be seen as the “beginning” of Bangladesh cinema, provided that they are considered from the different paradigms of cultural identity and national modernity that evolved in the Bengal delta during the twentieth century. This chapter focuses on the construction of a Bengali-Muslim identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal, and asks why feature films signifying such a hyphenated cultural identity were not made until the late 1940s, in spite of the existence of a vibrant Bengali-language film production industry in Calcutta during the 1920s to 1940s. As a reply to this question, I outline how the Bengali cinema of late colonial period Calcutta was used to build a BengaliHindu public sphere led by bhadraloks, that is, the upper-caste Bengali Hindu middle classes, in the same way they utilized print media in nineteenth-century Bengal. Joya Chatterji identifies bhadraloks as: Essentially products of the system of property relations created by the Permanent Settlement. . . . [T]his was a class that did not work its land but lived off the rental income it generated. . . . The title “Babu”—a badge of bhadralok status—carried with it connotations of Hindu, frequently upper caste exclusiveness, of landed wealth, of being master [as opposed to servant], and latterly of possessing the goods of education, culture and anglicisation.1

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These bhadralok babus articulated Bengali identity as their preferred version of cultural-nationalism and equated it with Hindu identity through a modernist public sphere. For these middle-class Hindus, Bengali Muslims were “Muslims” only, and not “Bengalis.” Historian Mohammad Shah noted that, it was “the tendency of the Hindu politicians and intelligentsia to confuse the term ‘Bengali’ with the Hindu society of Bengal, and ‘national progress’ with the progress of the Hindus only.”2 So the bhadraloks excluded Bengali Muslims from the Bengali-Hindu public sphere, and this eventually hindered the process of constructing a Bengali-Muslim cultural identity in colonial Bengal. In this way, this chapter lays a spatial dimension alongside Chapter 3. Here, I shift my focus from East Bengal to Calcutta, the center of colonial Bengal in a similar time frame. I aim to demonstrate the tension between the hegemonic presence of a Bengali-Hindu modernity and the emergence of the BengaliMuslim identity in colonial Bengal. It can be noted that no cinema historian in Bangladesh or India3 has anlayzed the role of the Bengali cinema of Calcutta in relation to the development of a film culture in East Bengal or Bangladesh. They seem to find no relationship between the Calcutta and Dhaka film industries, the only two Bengali-language film industries in the world. It is surprising that they locate neither commonality nor tension between these two Bengali cinemas and comfortably begin the history of Bangladesh cinema with The Face and the Mask (1956), the first feature film produced in Dhaka, which I questioned in Chapter 3. Going against the wind, I focus here on the role of the Bengali cinema of Calcutta in constructing a Bengali-Hindu identity and in obstructing the imagining of a Bengali-Muslim identity during the 1920s to 1940s, a period that is seen as the “pre-history” of Bangladesh cinema by these scholars. Understanding how identity construction in colonial Bengal impacted the Bengali film industry is quite an under-explored area of inquiry and here I take a first look into it. I should admit that as the construction and conflict of identities in colonial Bengal is a large and well-contested historical field, here I cannot but produce a direct, brief and, to some extent, partial analysis. Therefore, what follows in this chapter is presented in three sections. First, after outlining various cultural identities and the nature of the public sphere in colonial Bengal, I delineate how Islam and British colonialism reshaped social classes and especially developed an English-educated Bengali Hindu middle class, i.e. bhadraloks in nineteenth-century Bengal. The second part of this chapter presents the roles of the Bengali renaissance, print media and the Bengali cinema of the Calcutta film-production industry during the 1920s to 1940s in creating and maintaining the Bengali-Hindu public sphere created by these bhadraloks. Through case studies, I analyze how these Western-educated Bengali Hindus used the texts and institutions of Bengali cinema in this period to form a cultural-national modernity for themselves, as they did with print media and reform novels in the nineteenth century. In the last part I outline how the emerging middle class of Bengali Muslims attempted to construct a separate “Bengali-Muslim” identity through the Bengali cinema of Calcutta against the hegemony and exclusionist nature of the Hindu bhadralok public sphere of that time.

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Identities and public sphere in colonial Bengal Identity construction always happens within certain cultural contexts. Following Raymond Williams, I take culture to mean “a whole way of life of a social group,” a signifying system, “through which necessarily. . . a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored.”4 In the case of the South Asian nations, where a nation is a combination of various linguistic, ethnic and religious cultures, I find that this notion of culture may be applied more appropriately. Here, in the words of Wimal Dissanayake: Understanding a culture, therefore, entails the understanding of the ways in which different groups construct, maintain, and respond to meaning systems. [. . .] Cultural identity needs to be perceived as the way in which these meaning systems and their symbolic forms invest a given group with readily identifiable distinctiveness.5 In this way, one can locate Bengali identity as an emerging linguistic or ethnic identity in the Indian subcontinent under British colonialism, which gave an “identifiable distinctiveness” to the population of Bengal. This did of course conflict with other linguistic and ethnic identities, such as Marathi, Punjabi and Tamil as well as religious identities like Muslim and Hindu. Middle-class Bengali modernists among both Hindus and Muslims made use of the Bengali identity as the cultural identity for themselves, though in different historical periods with different agendas at hand. However neither Bengali nor other linguistic or ethnic identities were and are as singular, concrete and clear-cut, as the users or promoters of these markers wish them to be. As I demonstrate in this chapter and in Chapter 5, neither Bengali Hindus nor Bengali Muslims could, or did, fully bypass the coupling of their religious affiliation with the Bengali identity they were advocating for. The Bengali identity never could achieve the status of a singular, secular cultural marker throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather, as happened in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, the linguistic-ethnic sign amalgamated with religious indicators and created notions of hybrid, ambivalent cultural identities. In Bengal, both Bengali-Hindu and Bengali-Muslim identities were constructed, as such hybrid identity frameworks. For the latter, Willem van Schendel points out: [A] crucial hyphenation of Bengali and Muslim did occur in the region and it became the leitmotiv of the delta’s modern history. A perpetual creative reworking of what it meant to be a Bengali Muslim or a Muslim Bengali energised cultural expression, political mobilisation and social organization. The inherent instability of this identity proved highly productive of a sense of regional belonging: nowhere but in what is now Bangladesh did Bengaliness and Islam become domesticated as they merged.6 In other words, the struggle to accommodate both ethnic-linguistic and religious parts of the identity of Bengali Muslims within a single identity framework has

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become a continuous battle. Almost all of the social and political happenings of East Bengal/Pakistan, and later of Bangladesh, in the twentieth century are related to this inner conflict of the hyphenated identity of Bengali Muslims in different ways and means. In this chapter, in order to understand the late entry of Bengali Muslims in using the medium of film for modernist purposes, I point out to their process of identity construction within the social conditions of colonial Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this period, Bengali Muslims, having a small middle class among themselves, were caught between the Muslim modernist movement led by elite non-Bengali Muslims and the Bengali literary movement of middle-class Bengali Hindus. Therefore their identity formation took two directions that overlapped each other at different junctions of history. In the late nineteenth century, they attempted to create their cultural modernity depending on religious discourse—that is, of pan-Indian Muslim nationalism. From the early twentieth century onwards, this trend moved towards an ethnic-linguistic discourse—that is, of Bengali cultural modernity. Whilst I analyze the second phase of the formation of a Bengali-Muslim cultural identity in Chapter 5, below I situate the Bengali Muslims within the traction of Muslim modernity and the Bengali-Hindu public sphere in late-nineteenthcentury Calcutta. In both the chapters, as I take a quick journey through the terrain of the much-contested history of colonial Bengal, I provide only a general and sketchy picture of major changes and interactions as recorded by some historians. I also wish to clarify that I am quite aware of the problems inherent in the idea of the public sphere. When I refer to the concept in relation to Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims in nineteenth-century Bengal, I do not mean that there really were liberal and all-encompassing public spheres in which every Bengali Hindu or Bengali Muslim could take part. Rather, I argue that it was mostly the English-educated middle-class Bengali-Hindu men of nineteenthcentury Calcutta who created such a public sphere. Following them, their Muslim counterparts in early-to-late twentieth-century East Bengal/Pakistan and Bangladesh imagined another such public sphere for Bengali Muslims (which I outline in next chapter). In Habermas’ term, the public sphere I am looking at in colonial Bengal is “the public sphere in the world of letters,” which was not, as he puts it, “of course, autochthonously bourgeois.” He also admitted that “wherever the public established itself institutionally as a stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself with the public but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as its educator.”7 Similarly, the upper-caste Bengali-Hindu middleclass “reading public” of the early nineteenth to mid twentieth century imagined a Bengali public sphere as being able to accommodate all the Bengali Hindus and Muslims of Bengal; practically, however, they themselves served as the mouthpiece or educator of this public. Scholars like Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, Eizabeth Brooks-Higginbotham and Geoff Eley contend that, despite the rhetoric of open access and participation, the bourgeois public sphere was constituted by a number of significant exclusions

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 95 based on criteria like gender, class and race.8 In late-colonial Bengal, as I demonstrate below, religious allegiance also served as a criterion for exclusion. Bengali Muslims were excluded from the Bengali public sphere mainly because they were not Hindus. Similarly it can be said that Hindu women and low-caste Hindu men were also kept outside this public sphere.9 In Europe, similar exclusions operated as important parameters in the historical transformation of bourgeois society and in setting up its democratic ideals as a means of political domination. Therefore, drawing upon Gramsci, Eley suggests that the liberal-bourgeois public sphere is “the shift from a repressive mode of domination to a hegemonic one.”10 Agreeing with this view I demonstrate below how the Bengali public sphere developed by the Bengali-Hindu middle classes, that is bhadraloks in nineteenth century Bengal served towards establishing the hegemony of the Bengali-Hindu cultural modernity.

Islam, British Colonialism and Hindu Bhadraloks in nineteenth-century Bengal According to the census of 1901, Bengal had a population of around 40 million and this population followed four main religions: Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism.11 The Muslims were the majority community among these four, comprising over 51 percent of the total population.12 In 1911 it rose to 52 percent, when the Hindu population decreased to 45 percent.13 However until the late nineteenth century, it was thought that Bengal was the domain of the Hindus. A Bangladeshi historian of colonial Bengal, Rafiuddin Ahmed, notes that it was the first census in 1871 which proved for the first time that Muslims made up almost half of the population of Bengal—48 percent, to be precise. He termed the presence of an “unexpectedly large number of Muslims” in Bengal as a “discovery.”14 Most Bengali Muslims lived in the eastern part of Bengal, or the Bengal delta, the area covering roughly the whole of East Pakistan/Bangladesh. The 1871 census raised debates about the origins and cultural identity of the large number of Muslims in Bengal. Two conflicting discourses developed in this regard. European scholars and officials like H. Beverley, Dr. James Wise, W. W. Hunter, Dr. Francis Buchanon and Sir Herbert Risley believed that largescale conversion of low-caste Hindus to Islam had formed a Muslim majority in Bengal. Elite Muslims of Bengal did not like this theory about their origin. So, in The Origin of the Muhammadans of Bengal (1895), Fuzli Rubbee, a spokesperson of the Muslim elite, attempted to prove that Muslims in Bengal were largely descendants of noble and aristocratic Muslim families who migrated to Bengal from outside the region.15 Most historians of Bengal appreciate the view of the European scholars whilst they also locate a small group of migrants among Muslims of colonial Bengal. They go back to 1204 in order to look for the origin of such a dichotomy and the beginning of Muslim conversion in Bengal. Historians Addy and Azad note that though the preaching of Islam began in South India, Sindh and North-West India during the eighth to thirteenth centuries, Islam officially arrived in Bengal in

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1204 through the invasion of the Turk-Afghan Muslims. They argue that Islam came to Bengal as an anti-Brahminical movement and almost half of the local population in Bengal converted to Islam. Brahmanism, as a strict form of Hinduism, was promoted here during the Gupta Empire of the fifth century by uppercaste fundamentalist Hindus—that is, Brahmans. Though these Hindu conquerors attempted the conversion of the local masses to Hinduism, they considered the locals to be inferior and low caste. Moreover, as Addy and Azad argue, because of better communications, the western part of Bengal (presently West Bengal in India) underwent a more effective and wide conversion to Hinduism.16 Ramkrishna Mukherjee also argues that because of the inaccessability and remoteness of the region, East-Bengalis were relatively free from the control of pre-Muslim Hindu rulers propagating Brahmanism and, as a result, less Hinduization happened here. So, the large majority of people could easily embrace Islam in the wake of the Muslim conquest.17 If Islam brought major changes to the social composition of Bengal, then another major transformation started in 1757, when the British East India Company won mock-battles against the army of Nawab Sirajuddoulah, the Muslim ruler of the provinces of Eastern India, including Bengal. A Leading Marxist commentator in Bangladesh, Sirajul Islam Chowdhury, outlines the impact of British colonialism: The English came as representative of a dominant social-cultural-political force. Murshidabad [the previous capital of Bengal] went down, Calcutta rose. Persian went; English [language] came. The Permanent Settlement arrived; the peasants lost rights on the land for good. . . . English administration threw a huge net all over the country; Railway, Post and Telegraph arrived one by one (my translation).18 However, these social changes brought forward by British colonialism delivered different political and economic outcomes for Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. Historians have identified a pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim attitude among the British. The Indian historian Mukherjee, and Dutch sociologist Westergaard, noted that the British administrators considered Muslims to be the direct representatives of previous rulers, and therefore deliberately lowered their numbers and positions in the fields of administration and civic organization.19 Nazmul Karim has pointed out that, as the Muslim aristocracy was an artificial elite that survived on state patronage, when such sponsorship was withdrawn this elite began to decline.20 David Kopf notes that British colonialism created ways for Bengali Hindus to accumulate wealth, mostly as brokers or intermediaries, while it almost ruined the Muslim ruling class in eastern India. This process was quickened by the Permanent Settlement Act, “one of the most momentous of all British policy decisions.”21 This act provided the Calcutta-based, newly rich Bengali Hindus with a chief source of wealth: the system of landed aristocracy in rural Bengal, including the whole of the Bengal delta. This wealthier and educated group eventually

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 97 produced the infamous Bengali renaissance in the early-to-late nineteenth century. On the other hand, the act helped the British colonizers to consolidate their control over the masses through the landlords, who themselves became interested in keeping the colonial machinery intact and vibrant. In 1828, the Governor General of India, William Bentinck, without any hesitation, described this as the “great advantage” of the Permanent Settlement.22 Alongside the act, the introduction of English-language education fostered the growth of a new group of Bengali Hindu middle classes appreciative of Western democratic ideals. In 1835, the British government accepted a new education policy, suggested by Macaulay, that formulated ways to spread Western learning via the English language in India. Sirajul Islam Chowdhury commented that: English education was brought, through which another empire suggested by Macaulay was built—of law and literature, of aesthetics and ethics. A class supportive to English developed, that got richer through landlordism, business, administrative jobs and other professions.23 The class that Professor Chowdhury refers to is the Bengali Hindu high-castes, who turned into the Western-educated middle classes in the nineteenth century and, later, were termed bhadraloks. By 1844, the colonial administration started to give preference to candidates with knowledge of English. For the next few decades, Bengali Muslim candidates were noticeable by their absence. As a result, as Bangladeshi sociologist Nazmul Karim points out, Bengali Muslims filled only 16 percent of the positions in the Bengali judiciary and revenue departments in 1856. By 1901, this came down to 6 percent. Karim also cites from the Moslem Chronicle editorial published in the 1890s, that quoted one of the British administrators saying, “we see that while the population of Muhammadans in some districts in Bengal is almost two-fold of Hindus, their proportion in public service stands at the ratio of 1 Muhammadan to 100 Hindus.”24 As noted above, the policies of the colonial administration in nineteenthcentury Bengal helped to create the urban Hindu middle class and keep up their dominance over Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. For example, the Bengal Local Self-Government Act of 1892, while enlarging the Bengal Council, decreed that seven out of 21 members of the Council would be nominated by the Corporation of Calcutta, District Boards, the Chamber of Commerce and the Senate of the University of Calcutta. In this way, the colonial government ensured that the Bengal Council—the top constitutional body in Bengal—would have a larger-than-proportional representation of upper-caste urban Hindus. Though these upper-caste Hindus comprised less than 6 percent25 of Bengal population, they were given 33 percent of seats in the Bengal Council. For this reason, historian Rahim notes that urban Bengali Hindus protested when the British, after four decades, decreased their representation in Bengal Legislative Council in 1935. This time, the British offered Hindu middle classes less than 20 percent of total seats as well as offered 48 percent of seats to Muslims under the Government of India Act 1935.26

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In this way, British colonialism fostered the growth of an English-educated, Bengali-Hindu middle class in nineteenth-century Bengal. The infamous term bhadralok was used to denote this class. A literal translation of bhadralok would be “respectable folks” or “decent folks.” They were mostly drawn from the three high castes of Bengali Hindus, namely, the Brahmans (Priests), Vaidyas (Doctors) and Kayasthas (Writers).27 For a number of centuries, these castes together always formed an educated class and served as minor officials in the administrations of the British and their Muslim predecessors. Bhaskar Sarkar points out the complexity inherent in the term Bhadralok: The term [literally, gentleman] has taken on a complex valence through the sedimentation and interaction of multiple layers: class investments, regional affiliations, cultural pride. Simply put, it refers to the educated, enlightened, cultivated bourgeois class in Bengal, connoting an idealized subjectivity marked by genteel sophistication.28 Addy and Azad identified three factors that characterized the unique and central position of bhadraloks in nineteenth-century Bengal. First, their secured position as rent-receivers within the insecurity of an agrarian economy; second, they were Hindu elite in a predominantly Muslim population and third, they were an educated and English-speaking group “in a society overwhelmingly illiterate, parochial and poor.”29 Kopf notes the dualistic nature of this group; he finds that bhadralok Hindus were simultaneously “writing eloquent essays in urban Calcutta against social evils” and “as a land-owning class oppressing the peasantry in the backwaters of rural Bengal (presently Bangladesh).”30

The Hindu Bhadralok public sphere in Colonial Bengal: from print to film Historians of South Asia have summed up the steps taken by bhadraloks to modernize the Hindu religion as well as the Bengali language and literature in nineteenth-century Calcutta under the much-discussed term “Bengali renaissance.” Kopf cites the introduction of English-language education, the birth of a modern Bengali prose, the genesis of historic consciousness and the rise of secular humanism as important signs of the Bengali renaissance.31 The year 1800, when the Fort William College was established in Calcutta, is repeatedly seen as the beginning of the renaissance. The English scholar William Carey and his Hindu colleagues developed a modern form of Bengali prose in this college. The establishment of the Hindu College, the first institution of higher learning based on a Western model in Calcutta in 1816, and the abolition of Sati (the tradition of burning widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, termed as self-sacrifice by widows) in 1830 are two of the important achievements of the renaissance. The Bengali renaissance can be cited both as the achievement and construction process of the bhadraloks. Noted Bengal Studies scholar Broomfield notes that the Hindu bhadralok community drawn from the three upper castes, was

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 99 distinguished by “their cultural values and their sense of propriety.”32 Dipesh Chakrabarty, a member of the renowned Subaltern Studies group, describing bhadraloks as “Hindu reformers and writers, mostly men, who pioneered political and literary (male) modernity in Bengal,”—adds how they were connected to the European Enlightenment, defining them as “a group of people who had been consciously influenced by the universalistic themes of the European enlightenment: the ideas of rights, citizenship, fraternity, civil society, politics, nationalism, and so on.”33 By the efforts of this group, Calcutta became the Bengali cultural hub in the nineteenth century and Bengali cultural identity was normalized as appropriate for Bengali Hindus only. They went on to establish many reformist associations and learned societies as well as organizing meetings and lectures on matters that seemed urgent to them. Importantly, in order to make their reform agenda heard, Hindu bhadraloks leading these voluntary bodies became engaged in publishing a huge number of newspapers, leaflets and monographs.34 All these voluntary bodies and print media publications together formed a Hindu bhadralok public sphere in colonial Bengal. Though a direct comparison is impossible, the bhadraloks in colonial Bengal were at least partially similar to the group that Habermas identified in eighteenthcentury Europe; he described it as a “reading public composed of bourgeois private persons . . . crystallizing around newspapers and journals.” Habermas located dual orientations in such actors—they influenced the political system as well as enlarging the public sphere, while confirming their own identities.35 Such dual orientations can be located in the actions of bhadralok leaders of the reformist association, such as Brahmo Samaj and learned societies such as Tattvabodhini Sabha, as well as among the editors and publishers of newspapers and the authors of early Bengali novels. They claimed democratic rights from British colonizers as per Western democracy, and identified themselves as a liberal, proreform and respectable group of Bengali Hindus. The representatives of the Bengali-Hindu bhadralok class established the Calcutta Book Society in 1817. They started a number of Bengali newspapers and periodicals in Calcutta during the 1820s to 1850s. Most of these were edited and published by key leaders and reformist writers among Hindu bhadraloks, such as Raja Rammohan, Bhabanicharan, Neelratan Haldar, Iswar Gupta, Rajendralal Mitra and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar.36 Two of the earliest Bengali periodicals were the monthly Digdarshan and the weekly Samachar Darpan, both first published in Calcutta in 1818 and 1819 respectively.37 Hindu bhadraloks of East Bengal also took the initiative to begin newspaper publication in East Bengal. The first such effort was the publication of Rangapur Bartabaha in 1847 by the landlord of Kundi, near Rangpur district.38 In this way, these leaders of the Bengali-Hindu middle classes used print media to equate Bengali identity with their own vision of modernity and create a bhadralok public sphere in nineteenth-century Bengal. In the words of Partha Chatterjee, It is through the production and circulation of printed texts . . . that the discourses of modernity are disseminated in Bengal from the early nineteenth

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In this manner, the Bengali-Hindu identity, under the rubric of Indian and Bengali nationalism, grew stronger in the late nineteenth century through the use of print media and in the early twentieth century through the Bengali cinema of the Calcutta film industry, as I outline below. Thompson and Bordwell note that, by the mid 1920s, Calcutta and Bombay, two major film production centers in India, were producing 100 feature films annually—that was more than England, France or the USSR.40 Following Hollywood’s studio system, two major companies, Madan Theaters in the 1910s and 1920s and New Theaters in the 1930s and 1940s, played a leading role in film production and distribution in Calcutta. After the coming of sound in Indian cinema in 1931, Calcutta maintained its status as one of the two major production centers for sound films alongside Bombay until the 1950s, mainly producing films in Bengali and Hindi. Bengali Muslims, though comprising an important audience for these films, had almost no involvement in the production and distribution of Calcutta films of this period. In the late 1910s, Madan Theaters owned all of the cinemas in Calcutta except one, which was called the Russa Theater. Madan Theaters, owned by J. F. Madan, a Persee businessman, had 51 theaters in 1920. This figure rose to 85 in 1927 and to 126 in 1931. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy noted that in 1927, this company controlled one-third of the total number of cinemas in India.41 Madan Theaters utilized their control over the exhibition sector in favor of their own productions. Madan’s production wing is credited with the production of Bilwamangal (1919), the first silent feature by an all-Bengali cast and directed by a Bengali Hindu—Jyotish Bannerjee.42 Film historians note another “first” silent feature produced by an all-Bengali team (which also includes the Production Company, as Bilwamangal was produced by non-Bengali Madans) in Calcutta. This was Dhiren Ganguly’s Bilet Pherat (England Returned, 1921). Bilet Pherat was released in the Russa Theater, the only theater in Calcutta that was not owned by Madan Theaters. It was produced under the banner of the Indo-British Film Company, one of the earliest film production companies owned by only Bengalis—that is, Hindu bhadraloks. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy note that along with Dhiren Ganguly, three other Bengali Hindus based in Calcutta: businessman P. B. Dutt, former employee of Madan Theaters, N.C. Laharrie and cinematographer J. C. Sircar formed this all-Bengali Hindu film enterprise in 1920. In Bilet Pherat (The England Returned), Ganguly, a graduate of the University of Calcutta and Shantiniketan, the institution for the study of arts founded by Rabindranath Tagore, satirized the pro-West attitudes of Indians returning from England as well as the conservative Indians who wished to stop the in-flow of new ideas.43 In other words, Ganguly, a Hindu bhadralok himself, criticized fellow bhadraloks for imitating or rejecting Western modernity in his film. Thus, The England Returned, in the words of Indian film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “reflected the colonial world-view as seen through the eyes of the city’s bhadralok.”44

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Bengali cinema of Calcutta during the 1920s to 1940s: a Bhadralok public sphere These two films—Bilwamangal and The England Returned heralded the start of the first Bengali cinema in the world. These also started what I term the cinematic public sphere of and for Hindu Bhadraloks. In the 1920s–1940s Calcutta film industry, bhadraloks like Ganguly utilized two major film genres, the “social” and the “mythological,” which were developed during the silent period of the Calcutta film industry and retained on their popularity in the sound era. In a bid to be a part of the bhadralok public sphere, both these filmic genres, as well as the studios and the cast and crew involved in the Calcutta film industry, attempted to equate Hindu identity with Bengali cultural modernity in all films. After all, this was the ideal already set up by Bengali Hindu bhadralok writers, publishers and reformists of the late nineteenth century. Below, I present case studies on the texts and institutions of the Bengali cinema of Calcutta during the 1920s to 1940s. I demonstrate that Hindu bhadraloks leading the Calcutta film industry used this Bengali cinema to build and maintain the sense of a Bengali-Hindu public sphere in colonial Bengal. Bengali “social” films of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s as translation of nineteenth-century reform novels The “social” film, a romantic melodrama set in contemporary times, was introduced in the mid 1920s in the Calcutta film industry, and it gained importance over the other genre—“mythological films”—in the sound era.45 Most of these films drew on the reform novels written by Hindu bhadraloks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rajadhyaksha points out that such translation from novel to film was inevitable: Through the late nineteenth century the reform novel had established itself . . . in Bengali . . . narrativizing a series of mutations of “tradition” into a reformist discourse of middle-class neo-traditionalism. By the 1880s it had established itself in the popular literary mainstream . . . establishing a range of literary stereotypes virtually waiting to be transformed into a theatrical and cinematic language.46 Alongside publishing newspapers, the Bengali Hindu middle classes came forward to author and publish Bengali reform novels in the mid nineteenth century. The first Bengali novel, Alaler Gharer Dulal, by Teckchand Thakur, appeared in 1858 just after the first novel published in Marathi (1857)—the first novel ever composed in an Indian language. While other major Indian languages were in line to produce their first novels in the 1870s and 1890s, in 1865, the veteran Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee published Durgeshnandini, the first historical novel in any Indian language.47 Chatterjee, a Hindu bhadralok, by writing a number of Hindu-nationalist-heroic novels from 1865 onwards,

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almost single-handedly upgraded the Bengali (and Indian) novel to the status of an artistic and anti-colonial mode of expression. Shivarama Padikkal correctly points out that early Indian novels such as these bhadralok novels started imagining the nation of and for the middle classes: The novel in India begins as the story of the English-educated class’s striving for social identity, for a new nation, for a new sense of community. . . . [I]n India the novel voices the conflicts, hopes and ambitions of the middle class. . . . [I]t provided literary expression for political aspirations that were not yet feasible in the political realm. . . . It was, however, the response to colonialism of the educated middle class. The problems of other classes. . . have all become silent in history.48 If we consider the Muslims of Bengal in these “other classes” of Padikkal, the Hindu bhadralok novelists were of course either silent on, or antagonistic to, their plights. Madan Theaters, despite its non-Bengali ownership, was quick to start transforming such Hindu-nationalist, anti-Muslim novels of Bankimchandra Chatterjee for cinema screens in colonial Bengal. In the 1920s, they released four of these films: Bishbrikkha (1923), directed by Jyotish Bannerjee and Krishnakanter Will (1926), Durgeshnandini (1927) and Kapalkundala (1929), all directed by Priyanath Ganguly. During the 1930s, the first decade of the sound era of the Calcutta film industry, Kapalkundala (1933) was again made into cinema alongside three other novels by Bankimchandra: Indira, Rajani and Radharani.49 Alongside the novels of Bankimchandra, screen versions of a series of reform novels by Sharatchandra Chatterjee, a Hindu bhadralok and supposedly the most popular among the Bengali novelists, were frequently produced during the 1920s to 1940s. In the 1920s, the Tajmahal Film Company, a small and short-lived studio in Calcutta, started producing silent film versions of Sharatchandra’s novels, such as Adhare Alo (1922), Chandranath (1924) and Devdas (1928)—all directed by Naresh Mitra.50 The novels of Sharatchandra—mostly published in the early twentieth century—were at par with the bhadralok agenda of social reform. For example, these novels focused on the sufferings of Bengali Hindu women and advocated social reforms such as widow remarriage. By the 1930s, the characters of these novels, such as Devdas, became household names in middle-class Bengali families. Devdas, a reform novel written in 1917, which protested the institution of arranged marriage, became subject to a number of film versions in Calcutta and other cities of the subcontinent. The novel can be said to bear the quintessential style of Sharatchandra. Thompson and Bordwell described Devdas, the 1935 film of New Theaters, which was released both in Bengali and Hindi, as “one of the most famous socials . . .which used naturalistic dialogue to show the suffering of lovers torn apart by an arranged marriage.”51 P. C. Barua, son of a Hindu landlord and one of the most respected film directors in pre-independence India, directed both versions of this film. Barua himself played the role of Devdas in

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 103 the Bengali version, while Saigal played the role in the Hindi version. In the words of Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, “ever since then the Indian press has used the word ‘immortal’ for Barua, Saigal and Devdas. . . . And virtually a generation wept over Devdas.”52 Novels by both Bankimchandra and Sharatchandra, which served as the source of the narrative for a number of important social films of the Calcutta film industry in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, were also well utilized by Hindu bhadraloks to normalize Hindu identity as Bengali cultural identity. Bankimchandra’s nationalhistorical novels expressed passionate disgust and enmity against the Muslims of Bengal. He always maintained that Muslims were not Indians, but javan (yavan) or outsiders. Similarly Sharatchandra’s novels also worked towards the standardization of the Hindu identity as a Bengali identity. Such an unequivocal statement can be found in his popular novel Srikanta (1917), in which he describes a football match played between “Bengalis” (read Hindus) and “Muslims.”53 Repeatedly, Hindu identity was put forward as equivalent to Bengali or Indian nationhood by bhadralok writers and film-makers. Dipesh Chakrabarty, when outlining the nationalist imagination of Bengali Hindus, points out their tendency of seeing Bengal as home, a sacred-aesthetic realm where, “The Muslim Bengali had a place created through the idea of kinship. But the home was Hindu. . . . Its sense of the sacred was constructed . . . through an idiom that was recognizably Hindu.”54 Such a process of equating Bengal with a Hindu abode made the Bengali cinema of 1930s–1940s an essential part of the bhadralok public sphere, which, in turn, ensured the popularity of these films among bhadralok or pro-bhadralok audiences. Indian-Bengali film historian Someswar Bhowmik noted how literatureturned-films found audiences then, Bengali films faced no problem of finding an audience in these two decades, because Bengali cinema, almost from the time of birth, depended on popular literature. In order to watch the screen versions of literature, the educated and decent Bengalis belonging to the middle and upper classes used to crowd in the cinemas. Ordinary viewers also went to see the easy translations of literature (my translation) .55 New theaters and B. N. Sircar—towards bhadralok public sphere Similarly to my short take on “social” films in the Calcutta industry above, here I forward a brief account of the organization and vision of the leading film studio in Calcutta in the decades of the 1930s to the 1950s, New Theaters, and its founder—B. N. Sircar. While contemporary Indian film histories56 detail the role of both New Theaters and B. N. Sircar with much rigour, I sneak a quick look here to demonstrate how Hindu bhadraloks organized the institutional structure of the Calcutta film industry at this time in order to make Bengali cinema a part of the Bengali-Hindu public sphere. B. N. Sircar, an engineering graduate of the University of London and son of Sir N. N. Sircar, Advocate General of Bengal, established New Theaters in 1931

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and put together talented directors like Dhiren Ganguly, Pramathesh Barua and Debaki Bose to work for the company.57 Indian film historian Bagishwar Jha describes Sircar as the son of “one of the most respected families in Bengal.” His grandfather wrote language primers for Bengali children and his father was co-opted by the British administration as Law Member in the Viceroy’s council for 1934–1939.58 It seems that Sircar, occupying a leading position among Hindu bhadraloks, was influential enough to bring together other bhadraloks to make social films reflecting bhadralok ideals, that is Bengali Hindu cultural identity. So in the glorious three-decade lifespan of this studio, a good number of “social” films signifying lives of Bengali Hindus were produced. These films included adaptations of novels of Bankimchandra, Sharatchandra and other BengaliHindu novelists. New Theaters started film production with Dena Paona (1931), which was based on Sharatchandra’s novel; this film is considered to be the first Bengali sound feature film. New Theaters made sound film versions of a number of other reform novels by Sharatchandra, such as Palli Samaj (1932), Devdas (1935), Bijoya (1935), Grihadaha (1936), Badididi (1939), Kashinath (1943), Biraj Bou (1946) and Ramer Sumati (1947). Hindi versions of three of these, Devdas, Badididi and Kashinath, were also released from New Theaters alongside the Bengali versions, while a Tamil version of Devdas was made in 1936. Like the nineteenth-century Bengali Hindu reformers who led the so-called Bengali renaissance, in Jha’s words, B. N. Sircar had “[the] conviction that the wealth of Bengali literature must be transcribed on to film, for the millions.” Because, “he was committed to raising a viable alternative to the Madans, the Parsee pioneers of film in the eastern part of the land. And the thrust would have to come from the Bengalis: artistes, technicians, storytellers. . . .”59 However, as with the bhadralok intellectuals, by “Bengali,” Sircar and others leading New Theaters meant only Bengali Hindus, or more specifically, Hindu bhadraloks. During its heydey of around three decades, New Theaters made no feature films on or about Bengali Muslims. Bhaskar Sarkar finds such an obsession in Bengali cinema during the 1950s too: “the sociocultural obsession with being bhadra . . . runs through Bengali film narratives of the fifties in general.”60

Filmic efforts of Bengali Muslims in the Hindu Bhadralok public sphere of colonial Bengal The exclusionist nature of the bhadralok public sphere as a Bengali-Hindu arena made the Bengali Muslims of colonial Bengal almost invisible. Addy and Azad commented that “for too many Hindu bhadralok the Muslims did not really exist except as objects of occasional high-minded concern.”61 Then American historian Broomfield correctly described the Bengali Muslims of colonial Bengal as “the forgotten majority.”62 Dipesh Chakrabarty articulates this process of excluding Muslims from the Bengali identity with despair: I am . . . sadly aware of the historical gap between Hindu and Muslim Bengalis. . . . I have not been able to transcend that historical limitation, for this

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 105 forgetting of the Muslim was deeply embedded in the education and upbringing I received in independent India. Indian-Bengali anticolonial nationalism implicitly normalized the “Hindu.” 63 The primary reason for the invisibility of Bengali Muslims is the absence of a large enough, English-educated middle class among them. Ramkrishna Mukherjee quotes the 1871 census report of Bengal that noted, “the Mussalmans . . . form a very large majority of the cultivators of the ground and of the day labourers.” Mukherjee also outlines the Hindu majority characteristics of the middle class in colonial Bengal: The “middle class” that developed in Bengal by the end of the nineteenth century was thus composed almost entirely of the Hindus, which upset the previous harmony in Bengal’s social structure and which was felt more keenly in East Bengal because of its Muslim majority. [. . .] A conflict situation. . . surfaced on the social scene with pernicious effects on the course of nationbuilding and state-formation in Bengal.64 The Hindu bhadraloks leading the Bengali renaissance in nineteenth-century Bengal were mostly rent-receivers (in many cases from rural Muslims), they were not heading industry and commerce like the European bourgeoisie. This economic structure dependent upon colonial administration keep them far apart from the liberal European bourgeoisie who led the Enlightenment. Rather, they represented a Janus-like duality in their nature. Historians described them as: A class based on land in a pre-capitalist society subordinated to colonial power . . . [and] clothed . . . in the imagery of a Hinduism retrieved from decadent priestcraft. . . .They were themselves the product of the most retrograde social forces—rural rents and metropolitan collaboration. [. . .] Renaissance politics stabilized the conflicting position of the bhadralok between the masses and the British into a Janus-like posture which looked to the colonial masters for enlightened reform, while turning the dark face of repression to the countryside.65 It should be remembered that the rural peasantry, the target of the oppression by the Hindu bhadraloks, mainly comprised Bengali Muslims. Dipesh Chakrabarty also argues that though Bengali Hindu writers of the late nineteenth century imagined “the political community of the nation as a fraternity, a brotherhood of men,” this fraternity was very different from that of European bourgeois society. While the European concept of fraternity highlighted self-interest, contract and private property, bhadralok Bengali Hindus looked for a fraternity based on “natural” brotherhood. Therefore Chakrabarty points out that:

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It seems clear that the Bengali Muslims, whom Hindu bhadraloks frequently called yavan or outsiders/foreigners, could never be considered as “natural” brothers and they were not accommodated within the Bengali-Hindu public sphere. Such a process of excluding Muslims from the Bengali public sphere continued well into the twentieth century and Bengali films produced in Calcutta in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, privileged by Hindu bhadraloks, served the same objective. The bhadralok Hindus leading the Calcutta film industry were not interested in making a connection with Bengali Muslims, let alone accommodating their cultural identity within Bengali cinema. For the manufacturers of Bengali cinema, that is the owners and employees of the Calcutta-based film studios, Bengali Muslims were simply a captive audience of the Bengali films they made. In this period, Calcutta as a major film production industry, reached most of the Indian subcontinent and had a monopoly over the Bengali-speaking region, which also included the Muslim-majority areas of the Bengal delta. Hindu Bhadraloks, the leaders of the Bengali-language film industry in Calcutta, quite rigorously excluded Bengali Muslims from participating in this industry. Alamgir Kabir, the veteran film historian of Bangladesh, recorded the context of such antagonism potently: Moslem directors, actors and actresses were well-entrenched in Bombay. . . . But in Calcutta . . . the Hindu domination was hundred per cent. . . . [T]he cinema became a battle ground where Moslems were hopelessly outnumbered. . . . In the cinema, large capital is a primary requirement and Bengali Hindus owned most of it. . . . Centuries of non-participation in the performing arts . . . resulted in making Moslem actors and actresses nearly non-existent. Thus an aspirant film-maker who happened to have a name of Arabic origin was deprived of the necessary finance, studio facilities (even on payment) and the service of the artistes and technicians.67 This antagonism on the part of bhadralok Hindus against Muslims was omnipresent in all spheres of life in colonial Bengal. The division between bhadralok Hindus and the Muslims, who were considered by the earlier as non-bhadralok en masse, was particularly visible. Nazmul Karim points out that a person needed to be: Aryanised Hindus for being included in the Bengali “Bhadralok” class. . . . No low-caste Animistic Hindu, Tribal or Mussalman . . . can ever be

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 107 regarded “Bengali,” however naturally he may speak the language or whatever his social status or learning.68 Because of this dominance of Bengali Hindus, the development of the BengaliMuslim middle class became nothing less than a crucial struggle. Therefore, though the Muslim population in colonial Bengal outnumbered the Hindu, in the case of urban settlement, Western education and employment in bureaucracy, the Bengali Hindus always led the way, leaving the Bengali Muslims far behind even as late as the 1930s and 1940s. Mukherjee notes that in the urban Bengal of 1931, the number of Bengali Hindus was three times higher than that of Bengali Muslims. He notes that the literate Bengali-Hindus (16 percent) were more than double the number of literate Bengali-Muslims (7 percent). Almost a similar range of difference can be noted between Hindus (59 percent) and Muslims (37 percent) in appointments to the civil and judicial bureaucracy as late as 1940.69 Bengali cinema, though primarily serving the Bengali-Hindu public sphere, also provided the small group of Bengali Muslim urbanites with a means of entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s. On the other hand, in this period the Bengali cinema of Calcutta never worked towards constructing or expressing a Bengali-Muslim cultural identity. However, non-Bengali Muslims of northern and western India seemed a viable audience to the Hindu bhadralok leadership of New Theaters, for whom they tailored Muslim-mythological films in Urdu. Indian-Bengali film historian B. Jha provides a list of such Urdu films produced by New Theaters. These are: Mohabbat Ka Ansoo (Tears of Love, 1931), Zinda Laash (Living Corpse, 1932), Subah Ki Tara (Morning Star, 1932), Joshe Mohabbat (The Excitement of Love, 1932), Yahudi Ka Ladki (Daughter of A Jew, 1933), Dulari Bibi (1933), Dakoo Mansoor (Mansoor the Gangster, 1934), KarwanE-Haiyat (The Caravan of Life, 1935) and Joshe Inteqam (Blood Feud, 1935).70 However, the Bengali Muslims, their close neighbors, received no such attention from New Theaters or other Calcutta studios—neither as existing audiences nor as potential producers of Bengali cinema. Leading film historian of Bangladesh, Alamgir Kabir, clarifies the tendency: To Calcutta, riverine and agriculture-based East Bengal was only the supplier of export goods. Though it was the land where majority of the Bengalis lived, films produced in Calcutta rarely reflected the aspirations of the ordinary people of this land or the local culture (my translation).71 Joya Chatterji points out more succinctly how critical the Hindu bhadraloks were in preventing the acceptance of Muslims as a majority in colonial Bengal: “When push came to shove, bhadralok Hindus preferred to carve up Bengal, rather than accept the indignity of being ruled by Muslims.”72 Therefore the middle-class Bengali Hindus never welcomed Bengali Muslim themes or even actors and directors in the Calcutta film-production industry—an essential part of the bhadralok public sphere, as I demonstrated above. An example of such anti-Muslim treatment can be located in the transformation of a Muslim character in Rabindranath Tagore’s novel to a Hindu one in the film

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version of Dristidan (1947) directed by Nitin Bose, a well-respected Bengali Hindu director of the Calcutta industry at that time.73 In such hostile circumstances, a few members of emerging Bengali Muslim middle classes attempted to make inroads into the Hindu hegemony of the Calcutta film industry. Renowned poet oet Kazi Nazrul Islam—who had written across the religious boundaries and had wide acceptance from both Hindus and Muslims in Bengal—was one of the few Bengali Muslims who contributed to Calcutta studio films in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1931, Nazrul joined Madan Theaters as a music trainer, to train Bengali actors for sound films. For Pioneer Films, one of the smaller companies, he jointly directed the mythological film Dhruba (1934) with Satyandranath Dey. However, Dhruba did not dramatize Bengali Muslims; rather, this film was based on a Hindu legend and Nazrul himself played the role of a Hindu religious character.74 Later, Nazrul became the only Bengali Muslim among the screenwriters and music directors at New Theaters. He wrote the screenplay for Vidyapati (1938), which was directed by Debaki bose and released both in Bengali and Hindi. He also provided the story and lyrics for Sapudey (1939), another film that had Bengali and Hindi versions.75 However, none of these films represented the Bengali Muslims in any way. Vidyapati told the story of a Vaishnavite singerpoet like Chandidas. Sapudey, based on Nazrul’s own story, showed the life of a teenage girl who clandestinely lives in an all-male group of snake-charmers.76 Film historian Anupam Hayat noted that in 1941, Nazrul and some other wellknown Bengali Muslims of the time, including political leader Fazlul Huq, writer Mohammad Modabber and singer-musician Abbasuddin, formed a film company—Bengal Tiger Pictures—in Calcutta.77 They planned a feature film, Madina,78 based on Nazrul’s novel Mrityukhudha. However, this was never made. If Abbasuddin and others at Bengal Tiger Pictures hade made the film version of Nazrul’s Mrityukhudha, it would probably exist as the only filmed portrayal of Bengali Muslim life produced by the Calcutta film industry. Apart from Nazrul, film historians detect only two other Bengali Muslims in the Calcutta film industry of the 1930s and 1940s; they are: singer-musician Abbasuddin Ahmed and writer-director Obaidul Huq. Abbasuddin acted in Bishnumaya (1932), produced by Madan Theaters and Mahanisha (1936), produced by New Theaters. He later reported that he was never paid by Madan Theaters. More importantly, in a bid to build his acting career in Bengali cinema at that time, most people in the Calcutta film industry advised him to change his Muslim name to a Hindu one; a proposal that he never accepted.79 As he did not agree to this transformation of identity, eventually Abbasuddin—a founder of the regional folk-music culture of East Bengal—did not succeed in developing an illustrious career in the Hindu bhadralok public sphere.

Obaidul Huq and Misery is Their Lot While Abbasuddin was able to reject a change of identity as crucial to being successful in the film industry of 1930s Calcutta, the only Bengali Muslim credited

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 109 with a directing a feature film in the Calcutta industry, Obaidul Huq, had to travel the same road in the 1940s. He had to identify himself with a Hindu pseudonym, Himadri Chowdhury, in order to get his film Dhukhey Jader Jiban Gora (Misery is Their Lot, 1946) released in the cinemas. This happened though Huq was not a newcomer in the Calcutta film industry. Before making Misery is Their Lot, Huq established a film distribution company, Standard Films, in Calcutta in 1944 and distributed one Bengali and one Hindi film for this company.80 Hayat mentions that another of Huq’s companies, Chayanot Pictures, produced his film Misery is Their Lot in 1946 and Calcutta Pictures, a Hindu-owned film distribution company, distributed it. Two other Bengali Muslims were involved in the film: actor Fateh Lohani (who also had to identify himself using a Hindu name—Kironkumar) and director of music, Abdul Ahad. Though Misery is Their Lot presented a Bengali Muslim actor (Lohani) in a principal role—that is of villain—for the first time, all the other members of the cast and crew were Bengali Hindus. Jahar Ganguly and Renuka Roy, two well-known BengaliHindu stars of Bengali cinema at that time, played the roles of hero and heroine. More importantly this film, in the vein of other social films of the Calcutta film industry at that time, also told the story of the reform and romance of the Bengali Hindu middle classes, though Huq situated the tale against the backdrop of the 1943 famine in Bengal.81 Still, Obaidul Huq was, and is, unanimously appreciated as a champion of Bengali Muslim cinema by film commentators in Bangladesh. Kabir Chowdhury, an influential cultural commentator of Bangladesh, highlights the pioneering role of Huq as a Bengali Muslim film-maker: A Bangalee Muslim with no formal training in cinematography he decided to make a feature film because he felt that it needed to be made and that he had it in him to make it. He sold land, borrowed money. . . . Finally overcoming near insurmountable difficulties, Huq made his film.82 Alamgir Kabir, veteran film-historian-critic of Bangladesh, also hails Huq, and points out that his middle-class background made Huq’s mission possible: I feel that Dukhey Jader Jibon Gora [Misery is Their Lot] was not only a bold attempt but also a tremendously risky venture. Had it not been for family affluence of the director, the “adventure” could have proved ruinous. But, then, taking dangerous risks has always been the way with the pioneers.83 Hayat also highlighted the middle-class background of Huq. He was the son of Bazlul Huq, a well-known lawyer of the time and a member of the Bengal Legislative Council. Huq received his MA from the University of Dhaka and then went to Calcutta to study law. He joined the Indian civil service in 1938 and resigned in 1945, before making Misery is Their Lot.84 Certainly, Huq’s middleclass background, which is very similar to the Hindu bhadraloks (except that

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Huq is a Bengali Muslim), enabled him to collect the money needed to make the film. Alamgir Kabir mentions the production cost of the film as 200,000 Rupees (US$50,000 approximately) while Kabir Chowdhury says it was 300,000 Rupees (US$75,000 approximately). However, both agree that Huq was able to recover only part of the money he invested in the film.85 Kabir points out that after the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, Huq wanted to correct his screen identity by putting his and others’ Muslim names in the film’s titles in a bid to re-distribute it in East Bengal. However, “his Calcutta-based distributor . . . successfully managed to exploit the film in here [East Bengal] without paying a penny to the director. . . .”86 Leading historians of Bangladesh cinema, like Alamgir Kabir, Anupam Hayat and Kabir Chowdhury, highlighted Huq’s Misery is Their Lot and earlier efforts of Bengali Muslims in the Calcutta film industry as pioneering achievements. However, they did not recognize the fact that though important, these works were created and assimilated within a Hindu bhadralok public sphere. Misery is Their Lot showed the relationship between a Hindu landlord and peasants in rural Bengal at the onset of the 1943 famine, as well as a love-triangle developing within the household of the landlord. I would like to point out that, following the track of most other social films produced in the Calcutta industry at that time, the plot of this film, created by a Bengali Muslim in Calcutta, did not address lives of Bengali Muslims—as it was done within the Hindu bhadralok public sphere. The transformation of the screen identities from Muslim to Hindu vividly represents the anxiety of bhadraloks and their determination to keep the Bengali cinema of Calcutta within the Hindu bhadralok public sphere. This makes it evident that the film-making efforts of Bengali Muslims like Obaidul Huq were, at this time, assimilated with rapidity and ruthlessness into this public sphere.

Conclusion In this chapter I demonstrated how the Bengali cinema of the 1920s to 1940s Calcutta film industry—one of the two leading film-production centers in colonial India—was aligned to Bengali-Hindu cultural modernity. This notion of modernity was developed through what has been termed the Bengali renaissance, which was ushered in by bhadralok intellectuals; that is, Hindu middle-class writers and reformers in nineteenth-century Calcutta. I began this investigation by analyzing the background and emergence of this Bengali renaissance in nineteenth-century Bengal. I then considered the consolidation of a Hindu bhadralok public sphere through the use of Bengali-language print media and the film-production industry in Calcutta. My central argument dwells on how the Bengali cinema of Calcutta, during the early-to-mid twentieth century, served such a Hindu bhadralok public sphere and how it rejected the cultural-modernist aspirations of the emerging Bengali Muslim middle classes to use cinema as a medium of self-expression. With cues from historians and film scholars, I have established that this happened because

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 111 the upper-caste Bengali-Hindu middle class equated Hindu identity with Bengali identity in and through a bhadralok public sphere in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal. This process of viewing Muslims as outsiders and thus excluding them from the Bengali-Hindu public sphere went on till 1947, when Bengal was divided into Hindu-majority West Bengal and Muslim-majority East Bengal, to become part of India and Pakistan respectively. I demonstrate in next chapter that after the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, when the Bengali Muslim middle classes had no more need to struggle within the Bengali-Hindu public sphere, they began feature film production aimed at building a separate, regional Bengali identity in 1950s East Bengal. The Bengali Muslim middle classes, hailing from their rural upbringing in the Bengal delta, played a nuclear role in this new identity formation. This process led them, in 1950s and 1960s Dhaka, towards articulating a national modernity for Bengali Muslims that was based on the region’s own culture. However, the Bengali-Hindu public sphere—based on notions of the cultural modernity of the Bengali renaissance—always served as a backdrop and a rival, if not a model.

Notes 1 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5. 2 Mohammad Shah, In Search of an Identity: Bengali Muslims 1880–1940 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1996), p. 19. 3 See, for example: Sharmishtha Guptu, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (London: Routledge, 2011); Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham and London: Durke University Press, 2009); Kironmoy Raha, Bengali Cinema (Calcutta: Nandan, 1991). 4 Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Collins, 1981), p. 13. 5 Wimal Dissanayake, “Cultural Identity and Asian Cinema: An Introduction,” in Wimal Dissanayake (ed.) Cinema and Cultural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India, and China (Lenham, MD and London: University Press of America, 1988) p. 3. 6 Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 38. 7 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry in to a Category of Bourgeois Society, Trans. Thomas Berger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989/First published in German in 1962), pp. 29 and 37. 8 Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “ Postsocialist” Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 73. 9 See Charulata (Satyajit Ray, 1961) for a vivid depiction of the exclusion of middleclass women from the Bengali public sphere in late-nineteenth century Calcutta. Charu struggles to spend time alone at home by reading magazines and novels or just looking at the people in the street when Bhupati, her husband, seems very busy publishing newspapers and participating in all-male meetings to discuss the implications of British policy in Bengal. 10 Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Craig Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (CamCambridge: MIT Press, 1992); cited in Nancy Fraser (1997) p. 76. 11 Aminur Rahim, Politics and National Formation in Bangladesh (Dhaka, University Press Ltd, 1997), pp. 107–8.

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12 Rana Razzaque Ahsan, “An Introduction to the Trends of Bengali Muslim Thought, 1905–1947,” Journal of Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 43.1 (1998): 37. 13 Rangalal Sen, Political Elites in Bangladesh (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1987), p. 27. 14 Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871–1906: A Quest for Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 1. 15 Rana Razzaque Ahsan (1998) 55; Kazi Abdul Wadud, “The Story of Muslims of Bengal,”(first published in 1941), in The Identity of Bengalis (ed.) Mustafa Nurul Islam (Dhaka: Bornayon, 2001), p. 104. 16 Premen Addy and Ibne Azad, “Politics and Society in Bengal,” in Robin Blackburn (ed.) Explosion in a Subcontinent: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Ceylon (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 80–1. 17 Ramkrishna Mukherjee, “Nationbuilding in Bangladesh,” in Rajni Kothari (ed.) State and Nation Building (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1976), pp. 287–88. 18 Sirajul Islam Chowdhury, Social Grammar of the Nineteenth Century Bengali Prose (Dhaka: University of Dhaka, 1983), pp. 10–11. 19 Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1976) p. 290; Kirsten Westergaard, State and Rural Society in Bangladesh: A Study in Relationship (London, Curzon Press, 1985), p. 24. 20 Nazmul Karim, The Dynamics of Bangladesh Society (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1980), p. 117. 21 David Kopf, “Pakistani Identity and the Historiography of Muslim Bengal,” in Richard L. Park (ed.) Patterns of Change in Modern Bengal (Michigan, Michigan State University, 1979) 115. 22 Addy and Azad (1975) p. 86. 23 Sirajul Islam Chowdhury (1983), p. 11. 24 Nazmul Karim (1980) pp. 207 and 200. 25 In the period from 1870s to 1890s, 5 percent of the population lived in urban Bengal. This increased to 6.7 percent in 1921. See Rana Razzaque Ahsan (1998) p. 54 and Rangalal Sen (1987) p. 31. Most of these were middle-class Bengali Hindus. The Hindu middle class did not amount to more than 6 percent of the whole population. 26 Aminur Rahim (1997) pp. 130 and 175. 27 Nazmul Karim (1980) p. 236. 28 Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 323. 29 Addy and Azad (1975) p. 93. 30 Kopf (1979) p. 115. 31 Ibid. p. 113. 32 J. H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth Century Bengal, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968), pp. 5–6. 33 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 20–1. 34 Two feature films by Satyajit Ray, Charulata (1960) and Ghare-Baire (1984), based on Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Nastanir and novel Ghare-Baire respectively, show Bhadraloks working towards a Bengali-Hindu public sphere in nineteenthcentury Bengal. For a discussion of Charulata, see Wimal Dissanayake “Cultural Identity and Asian Cinema: An Introduction,” in Wimal Dissanayake (ed.) Cinema and Cultural Identity: Reflections on Films from Japan, India, and China (Lenham, MD and London: University Press of America, 1988), pp. 6–7. 35 Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 366 and 370. 36 Shamsul Huq, “Hundred Years of Bengali Culture: Publishing,” in Karunamoy Goswami (ed.) Hundred Years of Bengali Culture (Narayanganj: Sudhijon Pathagar, 1994) 365–7. 37 Serajul I. Bhuiyan and Shelton A. Gunaratne, “Bangladesh,” in Shelton A. Gunaratne (ed.) Handbook of Media in Asia (London: Sage, 2000), p. 41.

Bengali cinema and cultural modernity 113 38 Bangladesh Press Institute Research Division, “History of Newspaper in Bangladesh,” Niriksha 74 (March–April 1995): 20; Seema Moslem, “The Periodicals of Bangladesh: A Survey,” Niriksha (July–August 1992): 17. 39 Partha Chatterjee, “The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal,” in Partha Chatterjee (ed.) Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (London and Minneapolis: Uni. of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 25. 40 Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), p. 285. 41 Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, first published 1963, second edition 1980), pp. 25, 65 and 38. 42 Momin Rahman, “Hundred Years of Bengali Culture: Cinema,” in Karunamoy Goswami (ed.) Hundred Years of Bengali Culture 1301–1400 [Bengali Year], (Narayanganj: Sudhijon Pathagar, 1994), p. 551. 43 Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, 24–5. 44 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Indian Cinema: Origins to Independence,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema ed., Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 402. 45 Thompson and Bordwell, 286. 46 Rajadhyaksha, “Indian Cinema: Origins to Independence,” 403. 47 See a list of early Indian novels and their types in Shivarama Padikkal, “Inventing Modernity: The Emergence of the Novel in India,” in Interogetting Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, eds., T. Niranjana et al. (Calcutta: Seagull, 1993) 240–41. 48 Shivarama Padikkal, 237–8. 49 Momin Rahman, “Cinema,” 551, 553 and 556. 50 Anupam Hayat, Some Film Activists of Bangladesh of the Yesteryears (Dhaka: National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts, 1999), p. 34. 51 Thompson and Bordwell, 286. 52 Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, 79–80. 53 Shah, 56 and 19. 54 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition,” South Asia 18 (1995) p. 129, cited in Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009, p. 323. 55 Someswar Bhowmik, Indian Cinema: An Economic Report, (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1996) 117–18. 56 See, for example, Sharmistha Guptu, Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation, London: Routledge, 2011 and Madhuja Mukherjee, New Theatres: the Emblem of Art, the Picture of Success, Pune: National Film Archive of India, 2009. 57 Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980) p. 74. 58 Bagishwar Jha, B. N. Sircar: A Monograph, (Pune: National Film Archive of India, 1990), pp. 10–11. 59 Ibid. pp. 13, 15–16 and 59–101. 60 Sarkar (2009) p. 158. 61 Addy and Azad (1975) p. 114. 62 J. H. Broomfield, “The Forgotten Majority: The Bengal Muslims and September 1918,” in D. A. Low (ed.) Soundings in Modern South Asian History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968), pp. 196–224. 63 Dipesh Chakrabarty (1995) p. 21. 64 R. Mukherjee (1976) pp. 291–2. 65 Addy and Azad (1975) p. 107. 66 Dipesh Chakrabarty (1995) pp. 217–18 and 15. 67 Alamgir Kabir, Film in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1979), pp. 8 and 15. 68 Nazmul Karim (1980) p. 236.

114 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

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R. Mukherjee (1976) p. 296. Jha (1990) pp. 15 and 60–70. B. Jha and M. Mukherjee (2009) provide the translations. Alamgir Kabir, “Thoughts about Our Cinema,” Shundaram 2.4 (May–July 1988): 81. Chatterji (1995) p. 266. Momin Rahman (1994) pp. 563–4. Anupam Hayat, History of Bangladesh Cinema (Dhaka: Film Development Corporation, 1987), p. 22. Jha (1990) pp. 78 and 84. Momin Rahman (1994) p. 562. It is notable that Indian snake-charmers follow a gipsy lifestyle and do not adhere to a strict religion such as Hinduism or Islam. For his brave leadership against the Hindus and the British, Fazlul Huq was called “Sher-E-Bangla” or “Bengal Tiger.” This probably prompted the naming of the film company. The title of the film came from Madina, that is the Arabian city where the prophet Hazrat Mohammad (SM) is buried. Anupam Hayat (1987) pp. 23–4. Anupam Hayat (1999) p. 72. Anupam Hayat, “The Print of the First Bengali Muslim Produced Film is Lost,” Daily Muktakantha (November 8, 1997): 14. Kabir Chowdhury, “The First Bangalee Muslim Filmmaker,” Celluloid 21.3 (July 1999): 4. Alamgir Kabir (1979) p. 18. Hayat (1999) p. 71. Kabir (1979) p. 18; Kabir Chowdhury (1999) 6. I calculated the conversion between US$ and Indian Rupees using the approximate exchange rate of that period, as provided by Barnouw and Krishnaswamy (1980) p. xvi. Kabir (1979) p. 18.

5 The Dhaka film industry and Bengali- Muslim modernity in postcolonial East Pakistan

This chapter outlines how middle-class Bengali Muslims developed the second Bengali-­language­ film­ industry­ as­ a­ vernacular­ film­ industry­ in­ Dhaka­ in­ the­ 1950s­ and­ 1960s.­ My­ question­ is­ why­ and­ how­ this­ vernacular­ middle­ class­ attempted­to­utilize­cinema­in­forming­their­collective­cultural­identity­towards­a­ cultural-­national­ modernity­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims­ of­ postcolonial­ East­ Pakistan.­ This­ cultural­ modernity­ of­ the­ vernacular­ middle­ class­ of­ the­ Bengal­ delta­ developed­in­the­mid­twentieth­century­because­this­was­the­first­time­in­history­ that­this­group­had­the­chance­to­express­themselves­culturally,­without­the­hegemonic­ pressures­ of­ any­ other­ dominant­ group­ (I­ have­ already­ demonstrated­ in­ Chapter­ 4­ that,­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims,­ this­ was­ quite­ opposite­ in­ the­ 1920s­ to­ 1940s­ Calcutta­ film­ industry).­ I­ have­ shown­ in­ Chapter­ 4­ that,­ during­ the­ nineteenth­ and­ early­ twentieth­ centuries,­ Bengali Muslims were­ suppressed­ by­ Bengali Hindu bhadraloks. Thus,­they­were­unable­to­use­media­to­define­their­ cultural­ identity­ until­ the­ mid­ twentieth­ century,­ when­ they­ developed­ a ­vernacular-educated­ urban­ middle­ class­ among­ themselves.­ Unlike­ the­ Arab-­ looking,­ Urdu-­speaking­ elite­ Muslims,­ these­ emergent­ middle-­class­ Bengali­ Muslims­were­close­to­rural­East­Bengal.­They­felt­an­affinity­with­this­region­as­ well­ as­ with­ their­ cultural­ roots—that­ is,­ Bengali-­ness,­ principally­ and­ visibly­ expressed­through­vernacular­(Bengali)­language. ­ On­the­other­hand,­because­of­its­elitist­approach­and­anti-­Bengali­stance,­the­ pan-­Islamic­ Muslim­ public­ sphere­ of­ nineteenth-­century­ Bengal did not accept and­ accommodate­ these­ rural-­based,­ Bengali-­speaking­ Muslims.­ So,­ opposing­ the­ hegemony­ of­ the­ Hindu­ bhadralok­ public­ sphere­ and­ subsuming­ the­ pan-­ Islamic­ Muslim­ public­ sphere,­ the­ middle-­class­ Bengali­ Muslims­ attempted­ to­ build­a­Bengali-­Muslim­public­sphere­in­the­early-­to-mid-­twentieth­century­that­ could­ articulate­ a­ Bengali-­Muslim­ cultural­ identity.­ In­ this­ process­ of­ identity­ construction,­they­started­publishing­Bengali­periodicals­and­novels­in­colonial­ Bengal­between­the­1900s­and­1940s.­These­efforts­at­creating­a­Bengali-­Muslim­ public­ sphere­ became­ stronger­ and­ more­ effective­ in­ post-­1947­ East­ Bengal­ under­Pakistan,­because­of­the­end­of­Bengali-­Hindu­hegemony­in­East­Bengal,­ which­ was­ brought­ about­ by­ the­ partition­ of­ colonial­ India­ into­ independent­ India­ and­ Pakistan.­ In­ order­ to­ propagate­ their­ cultural­ identity,­ the­ Bengali-­ Muslim­ middle­ class­ came­ forward,­ not­ only­ to­ produce­ more­ periodicals­ and­

116

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novels­in­Bengali,­but­also­to­initiate­hitherto­unused­media­and­cultural­forms­ such­as­theater,­radio­and­painting.­As­part­of­the­same­project,­they­established­ a­ Bengali­ film-­production­ industry­ in­ the­ 1950s­ in­ Dhaka,­ the­ capital­ of­ East­ Bengal/Pakistan. ­ My­core­argument­here­is­that­this­Bengali­film­industry­also­served­as­a­way­ of­ imagining­ and­ establishing­ a­ vernacular­ cultural­ modernity­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims,­ the­ majority­ population­ in­ East­ Bengal/Pakistan.­ The­ development­ process­ of­ this­ cultural­ modernity­ in­ 1950s­ and­ 1960s­ East­ Pakistan­ is­ aptly­ articulated­by­Willem­Van­Schendel: Taking­ advantage­ of­ new­ educational­ and­ job­ opportunities­ and­ educated­ entirely­in­Bengali,­this­provincial­elite­developed­a­cultural­style­of­its­own.­ It­ differed­ consciously­ from­ the­ ways­ of­ the­ Kolkata-­based­ urban­ professionals­as­well­as­from­the­cultural­universe­of­the­landholding­gentry,­not­ to­speak­of­the­ways­of­the­new­West­Pakistani­leaders.­What­set­this­emerging­elite­apart­was­that­they­were­not­bilingual­and­that­their­frame­of­reference­ was­ the­ Bengal­ delta,­ not­ the­ entire­ subcontinent­ or­ all­ of­ Pakistan.­ Their­new­cultural­style­was­shaped­by­the­very­provincial­Muslim­sensibilities­that­the­older­elite­groups­had­always­looked­down­upon.­It­was­popular­ rather­than­aristocratic,­open-­minded­rather­than­orthodox­and­delta-­focused­ rather­ than­ national.­ Most­ importantly,­ it­ was­ expressed­ in­ the­ Bengali­ language.1 Such “delta-focused” cultural expressions in cinema and other art and media forms,­ adjoined­ “provincial­ Muslim­ sensibilities”­ and­ were­ “expressed­ in­ the­ Bengali­language”­as­Van­Schendel­points­out­above.­Through­these,­I­locate­the­ development­ of­ a­ new,­ regional­ modernity­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims,­ which­ I­ call­ a­ Bengali-­Muslim­cultural­modernity­here. ­ In­order­to­get­to­the­core­of­this­chapter—that­is,­how­vernacular­cinema­in­ East­Pakistan­developed­a­Bengali-­Muslim­modernity,­I­first­draw­a­backdrop­in­ which­ I­ look­ at­ the­ formation­ of­ Bengali-­Muslim­ cultural­ identity—in­ particular—in­its­opposition­to­Bengali-­Hindu­cultural­identity­and­pan-­Indian­Muslim­ identity.­ This­ section­ probes­ the­ struggles­ of­ the­ rural-­born­ Bengali­ Muslim­ middle­ class­ toward­ the­ formation­ of­ a­ distinct­ Bengali-­Muslim­ identity­ in­ the­ early-­to-mid-­twentieth­century.­Here,­I­first­outline­how­rural­Bengali­Muslims­ in­late-­nineteenth­century­East­Bengal­were­caught­between­Muslim­nationalism­ and­ Bengali-­Hindu­ modernity,­ and­ how—in­ the­ early­ twentieth­ century—they­ developed­ a­ vernacular­ middle­ class­ among­ themselves.­ I­ then­ analyze­ the­ efforts­of­this­middle­class­to­identify­the­Bengali­language­as­their­cultural­root­ and their use of cultural forms such as Bengali periodicals and novels in propagating­a­Bengali-­Muslim­identity­between­the­1900s­and­1940s. ­ Next,­I­identify­how­the­development­of­a­Bengali­cinema­in­East­Pakistan­contributed­to­the­formation­of­a­cultural-­national­modernity­of­Bengali­Muslims­in­the­ 1950s­and­1960s.­I­take­this­“tour”­using­two­modes—first­a­contextual­and­then­a­ textual­mode.­The­first­part­of­the­tour­details­the­context­of­the­development­of­a­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan­ ­ 117 vernacular­film­industry­for­Bengali­Muslims­and­how­the­establishment­of­such­a­ film­industry­contributed­to­the­development­of­a­cultural-­modernist­public­sphere. After­ detailing­ the­ debates­ and­ desires­ around­ how­ such­ institutionalization­ happened,­I­look­into­the­textual­worlds­of­two­of­the­earliest­films­produced­in­this­ industry.­ These­ films­ are,­ Mukh o Mukhosh (The Face and the Mask,­ 1956)­ and­ Asiya­ (Asiya,­ 1960).­ Focusing­ on­ the­ texts­ and­ looking­ at­ their­ inter-­ and­ extratextual­ connections­ I­ propose­ that­ the­ early­ films­ of­ the­ East­ Pakistani­ film­ industry­ were­ committed­ to­ the­ task­ of­ visualizing­ a­ rural,­ idyllic­ East­ Bengal­ contributing­ towards­ a­ cultural­ modernity­ focused­ on­ the­ Bengal­ delta.­ Drawing­ upon­Dipesh­Chakrabarty,­I­compare­these­portrayals­of­the­beauty­of­the­countryside­with­what­he­found­in­the­autobiographies­of­East-­Bengali­Hindu­refugees­in­ Calcutta,­ which­ he­ called­ a­ “particular­ kind­ of­ language,­ one­ that­ combines­ the­ sacred­ with­ the­ secular­ idea­ of­ beauty­ to­ produce,­ ultimately,­ a discourse about value.”2­I­demonstrate­that­by­depicting­the­river,­boats,­flowers­and­other­elements­ of­the­beautiful­nature­of­East­Bengal,­these­early­films­of­the­Dhaka­industry­were­ actually­turning­towards­“the­secular­idea­of­beauty”­as­identified­by­Chakrabarty.

The backdrop: identity construction of Bengali Muslims in late- nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century Bengal The­construction­of­a­Bengali-­Muslim­cultural­identity­has­been­through­various­ contestations in the last two centuries or so. The term “culture” for Bengali Muslims­proves­to­be,­what­E.­P.­Thompson­calls­“a­whole­way­of­struggle.”3 Middle-class Bengali Muslims always­faced­a­basic­contradiction­while­defining­ their­cultural­identity­in­the­nineteenth­and­twentieth­centuries­because­two­conflicting­identities­were­bundled­together­in­their­hybrid­identity­framework. As­ the Bangladeshi historian Mohammad Shah­notes,­“Bengali­Muslim­identity­was­ .­.­.­ caught­ between­ the­ pulls­ of­ collective­ Muslim­ identity­ with­ its­ extra-­ territorial­characteristics,­and­the­geographical­or­territorial­Bengali­identity.”4 ­ These­“pulls”­divided­Muslims­in­colonial­Bengal­into­upper­and­lower­strata,­ a­ small­ group­ of­ aristocrats­ and­ a­ large­ mass­ of­ peasants,­ depending­ on­ their­ ancestral­linkage­with­Islam.­The­tiny­group­of­Muslim­immigrants­from­Central­ Asia,­Afghanistan,­Persia,­Arabia­and­northern­India­enjoyed­the­status­of­aristocrats or Ashraf­ (noble­ born).­ The­ ordinary­ Muslims­ were­ indigenous­ Bengalis.­ These­especially­low-­caste­Hindus­who­converted­to­Islam­during­the­thirteenth­ to nineteenth centuries were called Atrap­ (low­ born).­ These­ two­ groups­ were­ further­ fragmented.­ Ahmad­ Rafique­ noted­ that­ other­ than­ Ashraf–Atrap,­ there­ were­ segmentations­ on­ the­ question­ of­ religious­ sects,­ language,­ income­ and­ profession­ among­ Muslims­ in­ Bengal.­ He,­ therefore,­ harshly­ criticizes­ British­ administrator­ William­ Hunter’s­ infamous­ monograph,­ The Indian Mussalmans (1871),­which­attempted­to­prove­the­homogeneity­of­Muslims­in­Bengal.5 ­ For­ example,­ Rafiuddin­ Ahmed­ has­ located­ sub-­divisions­ between­ Urdu-­ speaking­ urban­ Ashrafs­ and­ Bengali-­speaking­ rural­ Ashrafs.­ He­ finds­ that­ the­ rural Ashrafs were those­ Muslims­ in­ rural­ Bengal­ who­ “could­ lay­ claim­ to­ foreign­ ancestry­ and­ possibly­ had­ some­ property­ and­ wealth­ to­ back­ up­ their­

118­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan claims.”­ The­ division­ was­ quite­ vicious­ among­ the­ various­ communities­ of­ Muslims.­Ahmed­quotes­S.­G.­Wilson­as­saying­that,­“Moslems­of­certain­caste­ will­ draw­ water­ from­ a­ well­ with­ Hindus­ of­ the­ same­ caste,­ but­ not­ permit­ Moslems of a lower caste to use the well.”6 ­ The­most­visible­division­was,­of­course,­between­the­Ashrafs and the Hindu bhadraloks.­David­Kopf­located­jealousy­and­hatred­for­Bengali­Hindus­among­ the elite Muslims in Bengal and notes that Muslims ignored “the positive features­ of­ the­ Bengali­ renaissance­ [and]­ the­ positive­ features­ of­ liberal­ Indian­ nationalism.”7 The Ashraf­Muslims­in­late-­nineteenth-century­Bengal­put­emphases­ on­ pan-­Indian­ Muslim­ nationalism­ and­ on­ learning­ English­ and­ Arabic­ as­ strategies­to­oppose­the­Bengali-­Hindu­cultural­modernity­propagated­by­Hindu­ bhadraloks,­and­to­get­better­professional­jobs.­Historian­Muin-­Ud-Din­Ahmed­ Khan­writes: After­ .­.­.­ 1857–58­ .­.­.­ the­ enlightened­ Muslim­ middle­ class­ .­.­.­ realized­ the­ pressing­ need­ .­.­.­ to­ equip­ them­ with­ modern­ education.­.­.­.­ In­ this­ new­ outlook­ is­ to­ be­ found­ the­ birth­ of­ modernism­ among­ the­ Muslims­ of­ Bengal.8 This­ “modernism”­ among­ elite­ Muslims­ inspired­ them­ to­ build­ up­ a­ Muslim­ public­ sphere­ in­ late-nineteenth­ century­ Calcutta,­ against­ the­ hegemony­ of­ the­ Bengali-­Hindu­ public­ sphere.­ Well-­known­ representatives­ of­ elite­ Muslims­ of­ Bengal,­like­Abdul­Latif­(1828–1893)­and­Syed­Amir­Ali­(1847–1929),­led­voluntary­associations­towards­this­goal.­Latif­set­up­the­Mohammedan­Literary­and­ Scientific­ Society­ (MLSS)­ in­ 1863,­ which­ sponsored­ monthly­ meetings­ and­ annual­conferences­in­Calcutta.­These­gatherings­discussed­contemporary­scientific­inventions­in­Persian,­Urdu­and­English.­David­Kopf­believes­that­Bengali­ was­deliberately­not­used­because­of­its­alleged­affiliation­with­Sanskrit,­the­language of Hindu religious texts.9­ Amir­ Ali­ founded­ the­ National­ Muhammadan­ Association­in­1877­(changed­to­the­Central­National­Muhammadan­Association­ (CNMA)­in­1883)­in­Calcutta,­which­was­described­as­“the­first­political­organization­ for­ Indian­ Muslims.”10­ Rafiuddin­ Ahmed­ observes­ that­ the­ Muslim­ associations­organized­by­Ashrafs­like­Latif­and­Ali­were­“little­more­than­exclusive­social­clubs­designed­to­draw­the­government’s­attention­to­the­social­and­ educational needs of the privileged [Muslims].”11­In­a­way,­these­Muslim­associations­ aimed­ to­ form,­ using­ Nancy­ Fraser’s­ words,­ “the­ informally­ mobilized­ body­of­non-­governmental­discursive­opinion­that­can­serve­as­a­counterweight­ to the state.”12 ­ However,­ such­ a­ public­ sphere­ of­ Ashraf Muslims was of an exclusionist nature,­ similar­ to­ that­ of­ the­ eighteenth-­century­ European­ bourgeoisie­ and­ the­ nineteenth-­century­ Hindu­ bhadraloks.­ As­ the­ Urdu-­speaking­ Ashrafs were always­economically,­linguistically­and­culturally­detached­from­the­rural-­based­ Bengali-­speaking­ Ashrafs­ and­ the­ bulk­ of­ Atrap­ Muslims,­ this­ elite­ Muslim­ public­sphere,­epitomized­by­the­Muslim­associations,­was­far­from­the­everyday­ lives­of­the­majority­of­Muslims.­In­the­words­of­Ahmed:

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan 119 The ashraf attitude to their less fortunate co-religionists was one of unabashed­ contempt.­ For­ them­ the­ poor­ peasants­ of­ rural­ Bengal­ were­ merely­ so­ many­ statistics­ computed­ to­ point­ out­ their­ own­ plight.­ More­ important,­ they­ were­ unsympathetic­ to­ the­ aspirations­ of­ the­ Muslim­ masses.13 The­ Urdu-­speaking­ Ashraf­ Muslims­ looked­ at­ Bengali­ as­ a­ “Hindu”­ language,­ and­never­accepted­Bengali­as­a­proper­language­for­Muslims.­Political­historian­ Anisuzzaman­ notes­ that­ Ashraf­ Muslims­ like­ Abdul­ Latif­ and­ Amir­ Ali­ themselves were not well-versed in Bengali.14­Kopf­points­out­that: [Amir­Ali]­preferred­to­identify­neither­with­the­Bengal­renaissance­which­ he­ saw­ as­ intrinsically­ Hindu,­ nor­ with­ the­ flowering­ of­ Bengali­ language­ and­literature.­.­.­.­[In­his­books]­so­intense­was­Amir­Ali’s­concern­with­the­ temporally­remote­happenings­of­physically­remote­Arabia,­that­if­one­did­ not­already­know­his­Bengali­origins,­one­could­easily­imagine­the­author­to­ have­been­born­an­Arab.15 Ashraf­Muslims­thus­used­pan-­Islamism­and­non-­Bengali­languages­as­a­way­of­ including­ Bengali­ Muslims­ under­ the­ umbrella­ of­ pan-­Indian­ Muslim­ identity.­ This­ attempt­ proved­ futile,­ as­ Muslim­ nationalism­ never­ accommodated­ the­ aspirations­of­the­rural-­based­Atraps. Since Bengali was almost never used in the Muslim­ associations­ organized­ by­ the­ urban­ Ashrafs,­ the­ rural­ Ashrafs and the Atrap­Muslims­were­automatically­excluded­from­these­public­sphere­activities­ as­they­spoke­only­Bengali.16 ­ In­ the­ circumstances,­ a­ desire­ to­ define­ Bengali-­Muslim­ cultural­ identity­ by­ going­ beyond­ religious­ identity­ and­ encompassing­ ethno-­linguistic­ identity­ became­noticeable­among­Bengali­Muslims­by­the­early­twentieth­century.­Such­ identity­ formation­ among­ Bengali­ Muslims­ was­ signaled­ through­ the­ dramatic­ increase­in­Muslim­religious­commentaries­in­Bengali­in­early­twentieth-­century­ Bengal.­ The­ writers­ and­ readers­ of­ the­ works­ were­ the­ rural­ Ashrafs and the forefathers of­ the­ emergent,­ vernacular-­educated­ Muslim­ middle­ class.­ Both­ these­groups­never­accepted­Muslim­nationalism­as­the­basis­of­the­identity­of­ Bengali­ Muslims,­ though­ they­ operated­ under­ the­ leadership­ of­ Urdu-­speaking­ Ashrafs­while­opposing­the­hegemony­of­the­Hindu­bhadralok­public­sphere. ­ Rafiuddin­Ahmed­pinpointed­“a­considerable­degree­of­horizontal­solidarity”­ among­the­Muslim­masses­of­Bengal­in­the­late­nineteenth­century,­which­gradually­led­to­“a­vertical­solidarity­encompassing­the­ashraf,­the­mullahs­(read­the­ clergy)­ and­ the­ masses.”­ He­ asserts­ that­ the­ subjective­ identity­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims­was­objectified­as­a­political­symbol­by­the­elite­in­collaboration­with­ the mullahs,­especially­in­the­early­twentieth­century,­when­institutional­politics­ widened­because­of­the­new­laws­passed­by­the­British.17 The political and economic­developments­in­early-­twentieth-century­Bengal­(which­I­outline­later­in­ this­section)­encouraged­the­creation­of­a­Bengali­Muslim­middle­class­in­rural­ East­Bengal,­which­in­turn­gave­rise­to­a­Bengali-­Muslim­cultural­identity.

120­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan ­ On­ the­ political­ front,­ because­ of­ the­ anti-­British­ stance­ of­ some­ Hindus­ in­ the­1857­rebellion,­popularly­called­the­“sepoy­mutiny,”­and­their­growing­participation­in­the­Indian­nationalist­movement­from­the­1890s­onwards,­the­colonial­ rulers­ shifted­ their­ patronage­ to­ the­ Muslim­ community.­ Two­ incidents­ marked­ this­ shift­ in­ the­ British­ attitude;­ first,­ the­ proposed­ 1905­ partition­ of­ Bengal­ into­ two­ provinces—a­ Hindu-­majority­ West­ Bengal­ and­ a­ Muslim-­ majority­East­Bengal­and­Assam;­and­second,­in­1906,­the­establishment­of­the­ Muslim­ League,­ the­ first­ all-­India­ Muslim­ political­ organization.­ With­ active­ support­ from­ the­ British,­ the­ Urdu-­speaking­ Ashraf­ Muslims—especially­ the­ landed­aristocracy­of­northern­India­and­Bengal—formed­the­All-­India­Muslim­ League­in­Dhaka­in­1906.­This­organization­aimed­to­be,­in­the­words­of­Premen­ Addy­and­Ibne­Azad,­“pro-­landlord­and­pro-­British­and­anti-­Bourgeois­and­anti-­ Hindu.”­Addy­and­Azad­cite­H.­H.­Risley,­then­Home­Secretary­to­the­Government­of­India,­who­bluntly­pointed­out­the­outcome­of­the­division­of­Bengal­in­ 1905: A­separate­administration,­a­separate­High­Court,­and­a­separate­University­ at­ Dacca­ would­ give­ extra­ opportunities­ to­ the­ Muslim­ middle­ class­ to­ emerge­ from­ their­ backward­ state­ and­ weaken­ the­ economic­ base­ of­ the­ Hindu middle classes. The Hindu Zamindari patrons to the Congress would find­ the­ Muslim­ peasantry­ ranged­ against­ them,­ .­.­.­ It­ would­ divide­ the­ nationalists­ranks­once­and­for­all.18 On­the­economic­front,­historians­Shah,­Rafique,­Mukherjee­and­Westergaard19 note that a new group of rich cultivators developed among the rural Muslims because­of­the­increase­in­the­price­of­jute­coming­from­East­Bengal.­Mukherjee­ viewes these rich cultivators as jotedars­ (cultivator-­landholders),­ meaning­ that­ they­were­peasants­with­substantial­holdings.­They­would­have­the­surplus­holdings­ cultivated­ by­ sharecroppers,­ and­ would­ acquire­ more­ land­ with­ the­ profit­ from­ these­ holdings­ in­ order­ to­ have­ more­ land­ cultivated­ in­ the­ same­ way.­ Westergaard­describes­jotedars­as­a­peasant-­moneylender-landlord­category.­An­ appreciable­ number­ of­ jotedars­ developed­ among­ the­ Bengali­ Muslims,­ who­ grew­numerically­in­the­course­of­time.­Jotedars could afford to send their sons to­nearby­towns­and­cities­like­Calcutta­and­Dhaka­to­take­up­education­and­then­ work­ as­ middle-­class­ professionals­ such­ as­ teachers,­ lawyers,­ doctors,­ government­officials­or­clerks,­whilst­also­keeping­rural­landholdings. ­ So,­ from­ the­ late­ nineteenth­ century­ onwards,­ the­ number­ of­ both­ students­ and­ institutions­ of­ British-­propagated,­ Western-­style­ education­ increased­ in­ Muslim-­majority­ East­ Bengal.­ Dhurjati­ Prasad­ Dey­ notes­ that­ there­ was­ a­ 13­ percent­increase­in­the­number­of­Muslim­students­in­Bengali­educational­institutions­between­1882­and­1883, and 1913.20­Rangalal­Sen­notes­a­four-­to­sevenfold­ increase­ in­ the­ number­ of­ high­ schools­ in­ Dhaka­ and­ Faridpur­ districts­ during­the­years­between­1896­and­1922.21 ­ In­this­way­a­rural-­linked­vernacular­Muslim­middle­class­developed­in­East­ Bengal­in­the­early­twentieth­century.­Since­this­emergent­middle­class­among­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan­ ­ 121 Bengali­ Muslims­ found­ both­ the­ Bengali-­Hindu­ and­ the­ non-Bengali Muslim public­spheres­closed­to­them,­they­strove­for­a­version­of­cultural­modernity­of­ their­own,­which­was­connected­to­aspects­of­their­everyday­lives,­such­as­land,­ language­ and­ religious­ practices.­ Therefore,­ during­ the­ early­ decades­ of­ the­ twentieth­ century­ they­ came­ forward­ to­ define­ a­ distinct­ identity­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims,­making­use­of­media­and­cultural­forms­as­well­as­political­forums. ­ In­ the­ early­ twentieth­ century,­ this­ emergent middle class was conscious of the­ambiguity­inherent­in­its­hybrid,­Bengali-Muslim­identity.­Its­members­faced­ difficulty­in­coming­up­with­a­viable­cultural­identity­that­was­nearer­to­its­own­ cultural­roots­but,­at­the­same­time,­different­to­the­Muslim­identity.­As­Hindu­ Bhadraloks­ through­ the­ Bengali­ renaissance­ in­ nineteenth-­century­ Calcutta­ seized­ the­ entitlement­ of­ being­ Bengali­ and­ kept­ it­ out­ of­ reach­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims,­ the­ construction­ of­ a­ separate­ Bengali­ identity­ became­ a­ challenge.­ The­ rural-­born,­ Bengali-­speaking­ Muslim­ middle­ class­ took­ this­ challenge­ of­ creating­ a­ certain­ identity­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims­ by­ enmeshing­ a­ regional-­ linguistic­identity­with­a­religious­identity.­In­order­to­achieve­this,­they­emphasized­ their­ geo-­ethnic­ origin­ (as­ people­ of­ the­ Bengal­ delta,­ not­ migrants­ from­ West­Asia­or­North­India)­and­Bengali­language­more­than­their­Muslim­identity.­Thus­a­pro-­Bengali­transformation­started­to­define­the­Bengali­Muslim­cultural­identity. ­ In­ this­ way,­ the­ middle­ class­ that­ rose­ from­ the­ rural-­based­ Atraps­ became­ key­ players­ in­ the­ construction­ of­ a­ new­ identity­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims­ in­ early­ twentieth-­century­ Bengal.­ They­ started­ to­ promote­ a­ discourse­ of­ Bengali-­ Muslim­identity­that­envisaged­a­possible­merger­between­Bengali­and­Muslim­ identities.­Mustafa­Nurul­Islam,­a­leading­cultural­commentator­of­Bangladesh,­ comments­ that­ an­ identity­ called­ “Bengali­ Muslim”­ was­ first­ heard­ in­ the­ opening­ decade­ of­ the­ twentieth­ century.­ In­ his­ words,­ “this­ was­ a­ sense­ of­ homeland,­ a­ sense­ of­ mother-­tongue,­ a­ sense­ of­ nation.”­ He­ quotes­ from­ Procharak and Nava Nur,­ two­ of­ the­ early­ periodicals­ published­ by­ Bengali­ Muslims. Procharak­wrote­in­1900: The­ land­ we­ are­ living­ in­ for­ thousands­ of­ years,­ the­ land­ whose­ seasons,­ fate,­famine,­wealth,­sorrow­and­happiness­we­are­sharing,­nobody­can­say­ that­ it­ is­ not­ my­ homeland,­ I­ have­ no­ homeland­ other­ than­ this­ (my­ translation). The Nava Nur said in 1904: What­can­be­the­mother­tongue­of­Bengali­Muslims­other­than­Bengali?­As­ the­Ganges­cannot­be­turned­back­to­its­source­in­the­Himalayas,­it­is­also­ impossible­to­stop­the­dissemination­of­Bengali­in­Bengali­Muslim­society­ (my­translation).22 Thus,­they­wished­to­clarify­their­relationship­with­their­mother­tongue,­Bengali. Rafiuddin­ Ahmed­ has­ explained­ that,­ “the­ Muslim­ masses­ in­ Bengal­ (in­ the­

122­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan n­ ineteenth­century­or­at­any­time),­descendants­of­immigrants­and­local­converts­ alike,­were­part­of­the­Bengali­‘speech­community’.”23 This pro-Bengali turn of Bengali­ Muslims­ in­ the­ early­ twentieth­ century­ was­ also­ noted­ in­ that­ same­ period;­ in­ 1920,­ in­ The Navayug periodical,­ the­ poet­ Kazi­ Nazrul­ appreciated­ Bengali­Muslims­for­“admitting­Bengali­as­their­mother­tongue­and­for­making­ more than expected improvement within a short while.”24 ­ Similarly,­ Wakil­ Ahmed­ connects­ this­ turn­ to­ the­ mother­ tongue­ to­ the­ national­independence­of­Bengali­Muslims: The­heartbeat­of­the­national­identity­of­Bengali­Muslims­is­inherent­in­their­ love­for­mother­tongue.­Love­for­language­turned­to­patriotism,­patriotism­ gave­ birth­ to­ nationalism,­ and­ nationalism­ transformed­ to­ independence— people­of­Bengal­progressed­through­this­trend­(my­translation).25 However,­the­journey­of­Bengali­Muslims­in­forming­their­identity­and­nationhood­ was­not­so­linear­and­direct­as­claimed­above.­For­example,­the­pro-­Bengali­identity­ of­Bengali­Muslims­went­though­contradictory­twists­in­the­1940s,­when­it­took­a­ pro-­Muslim­ turn­ before­ and­ after­ the­ establishment­ of­ Pakistan.­ Historian­ Rana­ Razzaque­Ahsan­notes­that­in­the­1930s­and­1940s,­middle-­class­Bengali­Muslim­ youths,­ mainly­ from­ rural­ and­ poorer­ backgrounds,­ were­ desperately­ looking­ for­ professional­jobs.­They­faced­unequal­competition­from­their­Hindu­counterparts,­a­ process that made the emerging Muslim middle classes hostile to Hindus.26 Shah notes­ that­ as­ the­ Bengali­ Muslims­ gradually­ made­ headway­ in­ education,­ they­ demanded­ their­ due­ share­ in­ bureaucracy­ and­ in­ the­ economy,­ which­ the­ Hindu­ middle­ classes­ were­ reluctant­ to­ give­ away.­ Therefore,­ as­ he­ argues,­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims­the­Muslim­identity­gained­more­importance­than­the­Bengali­identity;­it­ prevailed over class differences among Muslims themselves in 1940s Bengal.27 The Muslim middle classes and jotedars started to shift their support from the Bengal-­based,­local­political­Krishak­Praja­Party­to­the­Muslim­League,­which­ was­demanding­a­separate­Muslim­homeland­called­“Pakistan.”­The­possibility­ of­not­competing­with­their­Hindu­counterparts­on­economic­fronts­such­as­business­ and­ employment­ boosted­ the­ aspiration­ for­ Pakistan­ among­ the­ Muslim­ middle­classes.­This­class,­by­supporting­the­call­of­the­Muslim­League­for­an­ independent­ Pakistan,­ began­ to­ formulate­ a­ quicker­ way­ to­ advance­ their­ economic­ interests.­ From­ their­ dominant­ position­ jotedars, the rural allies of the urban­ middle­ classes,­ also­ began­ to­ influence­ the­ Muslim­ peasantry­ in­ East­ Bengal­to­mobilize­support­for­Pakistan.28 ­ The­ 1940­ Pakistan­ resolution­ of­ the­ Muslim­ League­ therefore­ mobilized­ various factions of Bengali­ Muslims,­ such­ as­ Ashrafs­ (aristocrats),­ middle­ classes,­ jotedars and peasants. The Bengali-­Muslim­ identity­ promoted­ by­ the­ middle class and jotedars­ in­ early-­twentieth-century­ East­ Bengal­ took­ a­ pro-­ Islam­ turn­ that­ was­ symbolized­ by­ the­ demand­ for­ Pakistan.­ Hindus­ were­ also­ mobilized­ along­ religious­ lines,­ and­ communal­ riots­ between­ Hindus­ and­ Muslims­ became­ frequent­ in­ mid-­1940s­ Bengal.­ The­ Bengali­ identity­ seemed­ inadequate­to­forge­a­bond­between­Hindus­and­Muslims­in­Bengal,­especially­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan­ ­ 123 after the violence of the 1946 riot. Bengal was divided through the British decree and­ East­ Bengal­ became­ the­ eastern­ part­ of­ Pakistan­ (later­ renamed­ East­ Pakistan)­on­August­15,­1947.

The emergence of the Dhaka film industry and Bengali- Muslim cultural modernity in 1950s and 1960s East Pakistan East­Pakistan­in­the­1950s­became­a­site­of­new­collisions,­but­also­a­place­of­ numerous­ new­ possibilities­ for­ identity­ construction­ as­ well­ as­ for­ forging­ the­ cultural­modernity­of­Bengali­Muslims.­I­cannot­but­remember­how­identities,­in­ the­words­of­Stuart­Hall,­“undergo­constant­transformation.­Far­from­being­eternally­fixed­in­some­essentialized­past,­they­are­subject­to­the­continuous­‘play’­ of­history,­culture­and­power.”29 ­ Subjected­to­this­continuous­“play”­of­history,­culture­and­power,­the­1940s’­ pro-­Muslim­discourse­turned­into­a­pro-­Bengali­sentiment­in­East­Pakistan­in­the­ early­1950s.­These­new­efforts­towards­Bengali-­ These­new­efforts­towards­Bengali-­Muslim­modernity­in­postcolonial­East­Pakistan­(which­I­assess­later­in­the­chapter)­gained­strength­from­the­ discourse­ of­ the­ delta-­focused,­ pro-­Bengali­ identity­ construction­ of­ the­ early­ twentieth­century.­This­transformation­of­the­1950s­signaled the end of the reign of­ Muslim­ identity­ as­ well­ as­ of­ “Bengali”­ identity­ as­ normalized­ by­ Hindu­ bhadraloks. However such­a­new­and­distinct,­region-­based­notion­of­Bengali-­ Muslim­ identity­ can­ also­ be­ located­ even­ during­ the­ peak­ of­ the­ Pakistan­ Movement.­In­a­1944­speech­by­Abul­Mansur­Ahmed,­the­President­of­the­East­ Pakistan­Renaissance­Society­pointed out the relevance and strength of the delta­focused­culture­of­Bengali­Muslims: Religion­and­culture­are­not­the­same.­Religion­can­cross­the­geographical­ boundaries,­but­culture­cannot­do­so.­Culture­rather­grows­in­a­geographical­ boundary.­.­.­.­That­is­how­the­inhabitants­of­East­Pakistan­are­different­not­ only­from­the­inhabitants­of­the­rest­of­the­Indian­nation,­but­also­from­their­ co-­religionists­in­West­Pakistan,­as­a­nation.30 Such­ a­ culturalist­ notion­ of­ Bengali-­Muslim­ identity­ served­ as­ the­ basis­ for­ the­middle-­class­Bengali­Muslims­of­East­Pakistan­to­begin­using­cinema­and­ other­ modern­ forms­ of­ cultural­ expression­ in­ the­ 1950s­ in­ a­ bid­ to­ build­ up­ Bengali-­Muslim­cultural­modernity.­Being­busy­in­creating­a­distinct identity­ and­modernity­for­Bengali­Muslims,­the­middle­classes­indigenized­the forms and­ technology­ of­ cinema­ quickly­ and­ initiated­ the­ Dhaka­ film­ industry­ in­ East­ Pak­istan.­ This­ eventually­ became­ the­ second­ Bengali­ cinema­ in­ the­ world. ­ How­and­why­did­the­establishment­and­development­of­another­Bengali­film­ production­industry­happen­in­East­Pakistan­in­the­1950s?­What­were­the­prime­ factors­ and­ who­ were­ the­ actors­ in­ this­ process?­ Why­ is­ the­ creation­ of­ this­ industry­ to­ be­ counted­ as­ a­ serious­ step­ towards­ constructing­ cultural-­national­

124­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan modernity­for­Bengali­Muslims?­The­two­modules­I­present­below­are­attempts­ to­ answer­ these­ questions.­ While­ the­ first­ approaches­ institutional­ initiatives­ around­ setting­ up­ the­ Dhaka­ film­ industry,­ the­ second­ module­ focuses­ on­ two­ influential­ film­ texts­ from­ 1956–1960,­ the­ first­ five-­year­ span­ of­ this­ industry.­ Through­ a­ reading­ of­ these­ films,­ I­ demonstrate­ how­ the­ newly­ urbanized­ middle-­class­ Bengali­ Muslims­ of­ East­ Pakistan­ imagined­ and­ portrayed­ rural­ East­Bengal­as­a­region­of­idyllic,­pastoral­beauty­in­the­same­way­that­Dipesh­ Chakrabarty­forwarded­“the­secular­idea­of­Beauty”­quoted­above­(see­p.­117).­ When­analyzing­these­films,­I­also­draw­upon­the­ideas­of­Willem­Van­Schendel,­ who­pointed­out­that­for­the­vernacular,­nationalist­middle­class­in­this­period,­ “the­ favourite­ visual­ representation­ of­ the­ nation­ was­ a­ landscape­ of­ bountiful­ green­fields­dotted­with­rustic,­peaceful­riverside­villages.”31

Institutionalization of Bengali cinema in East Pakistan: from The Face and the Mask to the Film Development Corporation (FDC) Historians of Bangladeshi cinema have all narrated­ the­ story­ of­ the­ first­ sound­ feature—The Face and the Mask,­produced­by­Abdul­Jabbar­Khan­in­1956.­They­ highlight­how­Khan­took­up­a­challenge­and­made­the­film­to­prove­that­it­was­ possible­to­make­feature­films­in­East­Bengal­(see­Chapter­3­on­the­making­of­ The Face and the Mask).­All­the­historians­chronicle­the­making­of­the­film­as­ starting­ from­ the­ 1953­ meeting­ convened­ by­ Dr.­ Sadeq­ and­ ending­ with­ the­ release­of­the­film­in­August­1956.­I­would­like­to­turn­my­attention­to­the­socio-­ eoncomic,­ political­ and­ cultural­ background­ of­ the­ making­ of­ this­ film,­ and­ explain­why­and­how­this­film­and­these­contexts­together­served­as a stage in East­ Pakistan­ on­ which­ a­ Bengali­ film-­production­ industry­ could­ be­ set­ up. Though­ Bangladeshi­ film­ historians­ have­ always­ placed­ The Face in a special position­ within­ Bangladesh­ cinema­ history,­ they­ have­ never­ interpreted­ such­ backdrop­and­larger­contexts­of­this­film. Most historians see The Face and the Mask as a one-off incident in the cultural­ history­ of­ Bangladesh.­ Manzare­ Hassin,­ a­ leading­ independent­ film-­ maker­from­Bangladesh,­comments­that,­“though­film­production­in­East­Bengal­ was started in 1956 through The Face and the Mask,­actually­this­was­an­isolated­ event.”32­The­influential­cultural­commentator­Mofidul­Hoque­also­supports­such­ a­ view,­ especially­ because­ this­ film­ did­ not­ initiate­ the­ flow­ of­ feature­ film­ production­ in­ Dhaka­ immediately.33­ I­ contend­ that­ this­ film­ of­ 1956,­ and­ the­ foundation­ of­ the­ Film­ Development­ Corporation­ (FDC)­ studio­ in­ 1957–1958,­ need­ to­ be­ seen­ as­ an­ interwoven­ process.­ These­ are­ also­ integral­ parts­ in­ imagining­ a­ cultural­ modernity­ for­ Bengali­ Muslims­ in­ 1950s­ East­ Pakistan.­ These­ cinematic­ events­ are­ of­ course­ closely­ connected­ to­ political,­ economic­ and cultural transformations as well as the vernacularization of various art and media­forms­in­post-­1947­East­Pakistan. ­ In­ 1953,­ the­ concept­ of­ using cinema to create a Bengali-Muslim­ public­ sphere­can­be­located­for­the­first­time­in­a­meeting­that­was­held­in­Dhaka­to­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan­ ­ 125 discuss­how­to­begin­feature film­production­in­East­Pakistan.­A­Bengali­Muslim­ bureaucrat,­ Dr.­ Abdus­ Sadeq,­ then­ director­ of­ the­ Statistics­ Department­ of­ the­ East­ Pakistan­ government,­ convened­ this­ meeting.­ This­ was­ the­ meeting­ in­ which­Abdul­Jabbar­Khan,­a­middle-class Bengali Muslim­youth­who­was­active­ in­the­theater­movement­in­Dhaka,­challenged­Fazal­Dossani,­a­non-­Bengali­film­ exhibitor-­distributor.­This­public­debate­over­the­possibility­of­shooting­films­in­ East­Bengal­compelled­Khan­to­make­The Face and the Mask in 1956. This was the­first­public­discussion­among­the­representatives­of­the­Muslim­middle­class­ in­ East­ Pakistan­ on­ how­ to­ establish­ a­ film­ industry.­ Such­ an­ issue­ could­ be­ discussed­ in­ 1953­ since,­ in­ the­ aftermath­ of­ 1947,­ the­ Bengali-­Muslim­ middle­ class­gained­strength­economically­and­socially. ­ On­the­economic­front,­the Muslim middle class gained ground in the 1950s as­ many­ East-­Bengali­ Hindus,­ consisting­ of­ professionals,­ moneylenders­ and­ landlords,­took­refuge­in­West­Bengal­in­India.­Even­though­some­middle-­class­ Hindus and a few non-Bengali Ashraf Muslims remained­ in­ East­ Pakistan,­ society­came­to­be­solely­led­by­the­middle-­class­Bengali­Muslims­for­the­first­ time­ in­ the­ history­ of­ Bengal.34 Ramkrishna­ Mukherjee­ notes­ that­ 3.14­ million­ Bengali­ Hindus­ migrated­ from­ East­ Pakistan­ to­ West­ Bengal­ in­ India­ during­ 1947–1961.­The­first­groups­to­migrate­were­government­officials,­big­businessmen,­ middle-­class­ professionals—such­ as­ teachers,­ lawyers,­ doctors­ and­ clerks—and­ rural­ elites,­ including­ jotedars.35­ Then,­ in­ the­ 1950s,­ the­ Muslim­ middle­classes­in­East­Pakistan­readily­found­a­large­number­of­vacant­positions­ in­the­government,­business,­education­and­other­sectors­waiting­to­be­filled­by­ them.­These­middle­and­lower­positions,­including­the­liberal­professions,­were­ immediately­taken­up­by­Bengali­Muslims,­while­the­top­vacancies­in­the­government­ and­ industrial­ organizations­ were­ filled­ by­ non-­Bengali­ Muslims migrating­from­the­western­part­of­Pakistan­or­India. ­ Historians­also­noted­a­sharp­rise­in­numbers­of­rural-­born­Bengali­Muslims­ accessing­eduction­in­the­1950s.­Mukherjee­notes­that­the­percentage­of­literates­ among­Bengali­Muslims­rose­from­13­percent­to­18­percent­in­this­period.36­A­ 1957­ sample­ survey­ among­ university­ and­ college­ students­ in­ Dhaka­ showed­ that­93­percent­of­them­were­of­Bengali­Muslim­origin;­77­percent­of­them­came­ from­ villages;­ and­ half­ of­ the­ respondents’­ fathers­ were­ semi-­literate­ or­ illiterate.37 ­ Alongside­political,­economic­and­educational­transformations,­the­language­ movement of this­period­strengthened­the­middle­class­and­their­affirmation­to­a­ Bengali-­Muslim­ identity.­ Soon­ after­ the­ establishment­ of­ Pakistan­ in­ 1947,­ a­ strong­linguistic­conflict­surfaced­between­the­Bengali-­Muslim­middle­class­of­ East­Pakistan­and­non-­Bengali­elite­Muslims­based­in­West­Pakistan.­In­1948,­ state­leaders­like­Jinnah­and­Nazimuddin­declared­that­Urdu­should­be­the­state­ language­of­Pakistan.­Through­a­number­of­meetings,­petitions­and­publications,­ Bengali Muslims­claimed­that­Bengali,­not­Urdu,­should­be­the­state­language­of­ Pakistan,­ as­ Bengali­ is­ spoken­ by­ East­ Pakistanis,­ the­ majority­ population­ in Pakistan.­On­February­21, 1952­police­opened­fire­on­a­rally­of­pro-­Bengali­protesters­in­Dhaka­and­killed­a­number­of­people.­This­bloody­conflict­made­the­

126­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan Urdu-­speaking­state­leaders­of­Pakistan­recognize­Bengali­as­the­state­language­ and,­ ever­ since,­ this­ day­ has­ been­ observed­ as­ a­ national­ day­ in­ East­ Pakistan­ and Bangladesh.38 The struggle of the Bengali Muslim middle classes to create a distinct cultural identity­ reached­ its­ pinnacle­ through­ the­ language­ movement­ in­ East­ Pakistan­ during­1948–1952.­It­violently­demonstrated­the­ideological­disunity­of the State of­ Pakistan­ that­ was­ created­ on­ a­ makeshift­ basis­ in the name of Muslim brotherhood­ in­ the­ 1940s.­ The­ fragile­ unity­ between­ the­ discourses­ of­ Muslim­ identity­ and­ Bengali­ identity­ were­ divided­ once­ more­ through­ the­ language­ movement. This helped Bengali Muslims to pinpoint the complications and ambivalences­inherent­in­their­cultural­identity­and­to­look­at­their­language­and­ homeland­with­pride­and­confirmation.­In­the­words­of­Badruddin­Umar: The­ struggle­ of­ language­ and­ culture­ since­ 1947­ actually­ is­ their­ [Bengali­ Muslims’]­struggle­to­return­to­their homeland.­Rising­from­a­lower­status,­ the­middle-­class­Muslim­used­to­hasten­to­cut­off­his­link­with­homeland.­ Since­then­[1952­Language­Movement]­his­worries­started­to­be­diluted.­He­ felt­ no­ more­ ashamed­ of­ his­ Bengali­ identity.­ The­ mind­ that­ was­ always­ looking­to­a­foreign­land­attempted­to­return­to­its­homeland.39 With­ this­ new-­found­ cultural­ confidence,­ the­ Bengali­ Muslim­ middle­ class­ in­ 1950s­East­Pakistan­concentrated­on­indigenizing­cultural­forms­such­as­the­fine­ arts­and­drama­in­order­to­express­their­cultural­identity­and­to­define­a­cultural-­ national­ modernity.­ In­ the­ same­ vein,­ theater­ performances­ and­ art­ exhibitions­ started­ in­ Dhaka­ in­ the­ 1950s­ and­ the­ possibility­ of­ feature­ film­ production­ became­an­issue­among­Bengali­Muslim­cultural­activists. ­ Even­ before­ fine­ arts­ and­ drama,­ in­ post-­1947­ East­ Pakistan,­ middle-class Bengali-­Muslims­ quickly­ indegenized­ print­ and­ radio,­ two­ of­ the­ supposedly­ Western­ and­ technology-­driven­ mass­ media­ forms.­ Shamsul­ Huq­ listed­ 41­ publishing­houses­that­were­active­in­East­Pakistan­between­1948­and­1957.­He­ notes­ that­ a­ number­ of­ new­ publishing­ houses­ were­ established­ in­ this­ period,­ mainly­ to­ publish­ the­ writings­ of­ Bengali­ Muslim­ authors.­ He­ lists­ 34­ new­ printing­presses­in­Dhaka­in­the­same­period­that­served­the­same­purpose.40 ­ Alongside­ print,­ Bengali­ Muslims­ started­ using­ radio­ in­ post-­1947­ East­ Pakistan.­ In­ 1947,­ “All­ India­ Radio­ Dhaka”­ was­ renamed­ “Radio­ Pakistan­ Dhaka.”­ As­ many­ Bengali-­Hindu­ radio­ artists,­ administrators­ and­ technicians­ left,­ a­ host­ of­ Bengali­ Muslim­ intellectuals—such­ as­ G.­ K.­ Farid,­ Sadequr­ Rahman,­Syed­Ali­Ahsan,­Amiruzzaman­Khan,­Nazir­Ahmed,­Shamsur­Rahman,­ Ashrafuzzaman­ Khan,­ Abul­ Kalam­ Shamsuddin,­ Syed­ Zillur­ Rahman­ and­ Nazmul­Alam—joined­this­radio­center­immediately.­Some­of­them­had­gained­ some­experience­in­the­Calcutta­center­of­All­India­Radio,­while­most­of­them­ were­young­poets,­novelists­and­journalists­with­no­experience­in­this­medium. ­ In­the­1950s,­Dhaka­radio­musical­programs­mainly­used­lyrics­from­Bengali­ Muslim­ poets­ and­ lyricists­ such­ as­ Nazrul,­ Jashimuddin,­ Shahadat­ Hossain,­ Golam­Mostofa,­Farrukh­Ahmed,­Sikandar­Abu­Jafar,­Talim­Hossain­and­Abu­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan­ ­ 127 Hena­ Mostofa­ Kamal.­ They­ also­ made­ use­ of­ the­ poems­ and­ songs­ of­ Rabindranath­Tagore,­the­great­(Bengali-Hindu)­poet­whose­liberal­and­secular­ outlook­ made­ him­ quite­ accessible­ and­ respectable­ to­ Bengali­ Muslims­ throughout­ the­ twentieth­ century.­ However,­ all­ these­ Tagore­ songs­ were­ performed­and­delivered­on­radio­mostly­by­Bengali­Muslim­singers­and­music­ directors.­The­Bengali­musical­programs­of­Dhaka­radio­thus­served­as­vehicles­ for­imaging­a­cultural­modernity­of­Bengali­Muslims. ­ Similarly,­ a­ new­ group­ of­ playwrights,­ such­ as­ Nurul­ Momen,­ Mohammad­ Kashem,­ Sikandar­ Abu­ Jafar,­ Munir­ Chowdhury­ and­ Nazir­ Ahmed,­ started­ writing­ plays­ that­ were­ produced­ and­ broadcast­ by­ the­ Dhaka­ radio­ center.­ Ashrafuzzaman,­ a­ program­ producer­ in­ Dhaka­ Radio­ in­ the­ 1950s,­ recalls­ that­ “nationalism”­was­a­recurrent­theme­in­radio­plays­at­that­time.­For­example,­he­ mentions­two­radio­plays:­Taimur Long,­by­Nazir­Ahmed­and­Shirajuddoulah,­ by­Sikandar­Abu­Jafar.­Like­Abdul­Jabbar­Khan’s­Isha Kha,­which­he­wrote­for­ the­ stage­ in­ the­ same­ period,­ both­ these­ plays­ can­ be­ seen­ as­ a­ Bengali­ re-­ working­ of­ anti-­colonial­ protests­ by­ Muslim­ heroes­ of­ non-­Bengali­ origin.­ Ashrafuzzaman­ also­ mentions­ Jashimuddin’s­ Beder Meye and Shojon Badiar Ghat—romantic­ ballads­ portraying­ Bengali-­Muslim­ characters­ based­ in­ the­ riverine­ setting­ of­ rural­ East­ Bengal—alongside­ Munir­ Chowdhury’s­ Kabar,­ which was­based­on­the­martyrs­of­the­language­movement­of­1948–1952.41­In­ this­ way,­ the­ “nationalism”­ contained­ in­ radio-­plays,­ as­ mentioned­ by­ Ashrafuzzaman,­ may­ be­ seen­ as­ a­ pro-­Bengali­ cultural­ expression­ of­ middle-­ class­ Bengali­ Muslims­ contributing­ to­ the­ notion­ of­ Bengali-­Muslim­ cultural­ modernity. ­ The­ Dhaka­ Art­ College,­ the­ first­ institution­ to­ teach­ fine­ arts­ like­ painting­ and­ sculpture,­ was­ established­ in­ 1948­ by­ veteran­ painters,­ including­ Jainul Abedin,­ Qamrul­ Hasan,­ Shafiuddin­ Ahmed­ and­ Anwarul­ Huq,­ all­ of­ whom­ were­ trained­ in­ the­ Calcutta­ Art­ College­ in­ the­ 1940s.­ The­ students­ of­ this­ college­came­from­rural-­and­town-­based­Bengali-­Muslim­middle­class­families.­ Some­ of­ them,­ namely,­ Aminul­ Islam,­ Hamidur­ Rahman,­ Syed­ Shafiqul­ Hossain,­ Kaiyum­ Chowdhury,­ Murtaza­ Bashir,­ Rashid­ Chowdhury,­ Ali­ Humayun­ and­ Abdur­ Razzaqe,­ played­ leading­ roles­ in­ establishing­ and­ promoting­a­vibrant­fine­arts­scene­in­East­Pakistan­and­Bangladesh­during­the­ last six decades. Mofidul­ Hoque­ notes­ that­ in­ the­ 1950s,­ the­ teachers­ and­ students­of­the­Dhaka­Art­College­made­conscious­efforts­to­create­a­distinct­art­ tradition.­ They­ wanted­ this­ tradition­ to­ be­ different­ from­ not­ only­ other­ art­ movements­of­the­subcontinent,­but­also­from­the­art­movement­of­Calcutta—a movement­that­some­of­these­artists­had­observed­first-­hand­in­the­1940s.­They­ formed­the­Dhaka­Art­Group­in­1949­and­organized­the­first­fine­arts­exhibition­ of­East­Bengal­at­Lytton­Hall­in­Dhaka­in­1950.42 ­ Like­fine­arts,­drama­was­a­medium­that­was­explored­by­Bengali­Muslims­in­ propagating­ their­ identity­ only­ in­ post-­1947­ East­ Pakistan.­ A­ number­ of­ playwrights­ appeared­ in­ these­ years,­ who­ published­ plays­ depicting­ the­ contemporary­ Bengali-­Muslim­ society­ of­ East­ Pakistan.­ These­ include:­ Abul­ Fazal’s­ Aloklata­ (1948),­ Shawkat­ Osman’s­ Amlar mamla­ (1949),­ Askar­ Ibne­

128­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan Shaikh’s­ Padakkhep­ (1951),­ Vidrohi Padma­ (1952)­ and­ Duranta dheu­ (1953),­ Kazi­ Mohammad­ Iliyas’­ Smuggler­ (1954)­ and­ Ali­ Mansur’s­ Boba manush (1956).43 ­ Alamgir­ Kabir­ notes­ that­ though­ there­ was­ no­ proper­ theater­ hall,­ between­ 1949­ and­ 1954,­ commercial­ and­ independent­ theatrical­ performances­ were­ introduced­ in­ Dhaka;­ mainly­ by­ middle-­class­ Bengali­ Muslim­ men.­ The­ first­ Bengali­ Muslim­ woman­ to­ take­ part­ in­ acting­ on­ the­ stage­ alongside­ male­ counterparts­ was­ Shirin­ Chowdhury,­ in­ 1950.­ Two­ student­ groups,­ Shilpi Sangha, based­at­the­Dhaka­Medical­College­and­Sanskriti Samsad,­based­at­the­ University­ of­ Dhaka,­ led­ the­ movement­ for­ independent,­ non-­commercial­ theatrical­ performances­ in­ Dhaka.­ In­ the­ same­ period,­ commercial­ theatrical­ performances­were­regularly­staged­in­a­number­of­places­in­Dhaka,­including­ the­ Mahbub­ Ali­ Railway­ Institute,­ the­ Brittania­ Cinema,­ the­ Curzon­ Hall­ auditorium­ (later­ part­ of­ the­ University­ of­ Dhaka)­ and­ the­ compound­ of­ the­ National­Medical­School.­Abdul­Jabbar­Khan,­Inam­Ahmed­and­Abdool­Gafur­ Sarathi­ were­ among­ the­ leaders­ of­ commercial­ theater­ in­ Dhaka­ at­ this­ time.44 These­three­people,­who­were­expressing­themselves­in­theatrical­plays,­also­had­ important roles in producing The Face and the Mask.­ Khan­ directed­ and­ produced­the­film,­wrote­the­story­and­the­script,­and­played­the­role­of­one­of­ the­ protagonists.­ Ahmed­ played­ the­ role­ of­ the­ main­ protagonist­ and­ Sarathi­ wrote the songs. ­ Sharaful­ Islam,­ author­ of­ the­ only­ book-­length­ history­ of­ The Face and the Mask,­ outlined­ Abdul­ Jabbar­ Khan’s­ theatrical­ career­ and­ preparation­ for­ The Face.­ Khan­ directed­ Tipu Sultan­ for­ the­ Kamalapur­ Dramatic­ Association­ in­ a­ Dhaka­suburb­called­Thakurpara­in­1949.­He­directed­Udayanala in 1950 at the compound­ of­ the­ National­ Medical­ Institute,­ in­ which­ Shirin­ Chowdhury—the first­ Bengali-­Muslim­ actress—acted.­ Khan­ also­ penned­ Isha Kha,­ which­ was­ staged­ in­ the­ Mahbub­ Ali­ Institute­ at­ the­ same­ period­ and­ was­ broadcast­ from­ Dhaka­ Radio­ on­ November­ 1,­ 1951.­ The­ production­ company­ for­ The Face,­ Iqbal­ Films,­ was­ organized­ in­ August­ 1953­ by­ some­ leading­ men­ among­ the­ Muslim­ middle-­class,­ including­ writer-­journalist­ Mohammad­ Modabber,­ Director­of­the­State­Bank­of­Pakistan­Mahiuddin;­owner­of­the­Balaka­Cinema­ M.­ A.­ Hasan­ and,­ of­ course,­ Abdul­ Jabbar­ Khan.­ Modabber­ also­ took­ part­ in­ organizing­another­Muslim­film­production­company,­Bengal­Tiger­Pictures,­in­ Calcutta­ in­ 1941.­ Like­ Obaidul­ Huq,­ who­ directed­ Dukkhey Jader Jibon Gora (Misery is Their Lot,­ 1946),­ the­ first­ feature­ by­ a­ Bengali-­Muslim­ in­ Calcutta,­ Khan’s­ affiliation­ with­ the­ middle­ classes­ helped­ him­ mobilize­ the­ finance­ for­ The Face and the Mask.­ Sharaful­ Islam­ notes­ that­ in­ order­ to­ make­ the­ film,­ Khan­wished­to­“take­a­risk­of­Taka­2­lacs­(approximately­US­$40,000).”­Islam­ also­notes­that­he­carried­books­by­Nazrul­and­Jasimuddin­with­him­along­with­ Dakat,­one­of­the­plays­he­wrote,­when­he­made­his­trip­to­Calcutta­to­plan­the­ plot­of­the­film­in­the­early­1950s.45 ­ Nazrul­and­Jasimuddin­were­two­of­the­most­important­literary­figures­among­ Bengali­ Muslims­ in­ the­ early-­to-mid­ twentieth­ century­ whose­ poems,­ songs,­ ballads­ and­ novels­ were­ integrated­ into­ a­ general­ Bengali­ literary­ pantheon.­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan­ ­ 129 However,­ most­ of­ their­ literary­ output­ (dealing­ with­ the­ lives­ of­ rural­ Bengali­ Muslims)­ was­ perceived­ by­ middle-­class­ Bengali­ Muslims­ as­ signifying­ the­ Bengali-­Muslim­ identity.­ Similarly,­ the­ play­ authored­ by­ Jabbar­ Khan­ on­ Isha­ Kha,­ a­ nationalist­ hero­ from­ the­ pre-­colonial­ past­ of­ East­ Bengal,­ signals­ his­ concern­ for­ constructing­ such­ an­ identity­ that­ can­ also­ be­ noticed­ in­ the­ production efforts of The Face and the Mask.­Khan,­a­member­of­the­emerging­ vernacular­middle­class­in­East­Pakistan,­was­determined­to­make­a­feature­film­ signifying­Bengali-­Muslim­identity. ­ Khan’s­ mission­ becomes­ clearer­ if­ we­ assess­ how­ he­ wished­ to­ stay­ away­ from­the­Bengali­Hindu­film­circle­in­West­Bengal.­So,­for­the­post-­production­ of The Face,­he­flew­to­the­Shahnoor­Studio­in­Lahore,­nearly­2,000­kilometers­ from­East­Bengal­(Calcutta­was­less­than­300­kilometers­from­Dhaka).­An­anecn anecdote­provided­in­his­memoirs­can­be­cited­here.­This­relates­to­Q.­M.­Zaman,­the­ cinematographer of The Face. As­the­story­goes,­Q.­M.­Zaman,­under­the­Hindu­ pseudonym­ of­ Kiron­ De,­ used­ to­ work­ as­ an assistant­ to­ Murari­ Mohon,­ a­ Bengali-­Hindu­ cinematographer­ at­ New­ Theaters­ in­ the­ early­ 1940s.­ On­ one­ occasion,­ he­ touched­ the­ movie­ camera­ for­ some­ reason.­ All­ the­ others­ in­ the­ studio­began­scolding­him­(“how­come­a­Muslim’s­son­has­the­courage­to­touch­ the­ camera,­ who­ brought­ him­ here?”)­ and­ he­ was­ instantly­ kicked­ out­ of­ the­ studio.46­Sharaful­Islam­also­narrated­this­anecdote­in­his­book­on­The Face and the Mask.47­I­did­not­find­Murari­Mohon,­let­alone­Kiron­De­(Zaman)­among­the­ major­crew­at­New­Theaters­during­the­1930s­to­1950s­listed­in­the­monograph­ on­B.­N.­Sircar,­the­founder­of­New­Theaters,­authored­by­Indian­film­historian­ B.­Jha.­Most­probably­the­anecdote­was­passed­by­Zaman­himself­to­Khan­and­ neither­of­them­are­alive­today. ­ Though­its­validity­remains­questionable,­the­anecdote­signifies­Khan’s­view­ about­Hindu­hegemony­in­the­Calcutta­film­industry.­Going­beyond­the­issue­of­ validity­ of­ such­ an­ anecdote,­ I­ understand­ that­ at­ a­ broader­ level,­ such­ perceptions­ on­ the­ part­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims­ about­ the­ hegemony­ of­ Hindu­ bhadraloks were omnipresent. These perceptions that Hindu bhadraloks were against­Muslims­in­every­sphere­of­life­(either­these­are­fully­or­partially­valid­or­ not­at­all)­played­an­important­part­in­creating­a­Hindu–Muslim­divide­as­well­as­ separate­ identity­ frameworks­ and­ public­ spheres­ for­ both­ groups­ of­ Bengalis­ during­the­twentieth­century. ­ Accepting­these­different­identity­frameworks­for­different­groups­of­Bengalis­ and­Muslims,­and­following­up­on­the­successful­indigenization­of­mass­media­ formats­like­newspapers­and­radio­and­cultural­forms­like­novels,­fine­arts­and­ theater,­ Bengali­ Muslims­ came­ forward­ and­ appropriated­ cinema­ in­ the­ formation­ of­ a­ cultural­ modernity­ that­ is­ “Bengali­ Muslim”­ by­ character.­ The Face and the Mask­became­their­first­venture­in­this­regard.­But­the­larger­and­ more­important­step­they­took­was­to­establish­the­fi establish­the­first­full-­ ­rst­full-­service­fi ervice­film­produc­lm­production­ studio,­ the­ East­ Pakistan­ Film­ Development­ Corporation­ (EPFDC,­ now­ called­BFDC­or­FDC)­in­Dhaka,­the­provincial­capital,­in­1957. ­ How­ the­ FDC­ studio­ came­ into­ being­ is­ considered­ in­ detail­ by­ Hayat­ and­ Quader,­two­major­historians of Bangladesh cinema.48­Alongside­the­state,­some­

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members­of­the­Bengali­middle­class,­especially­those­who­held­some­political­ and­ bureaucratic­ power­ in­ 1950s­ East­ Pakistan,­ took­ initiatives­ to­ found­ the­ studio.­ The­ historians­ note­ that­ Industries­ Minister­ of­ East­ Pakistan,­ Sheikh­ Mujibur­Rahman­(called­“Father­of­the­Nation,”­who­led­the­Bengali-nationalist movement­and­liberation­war­during­1965–1971­and­became­Prime­Minister­of­ Bangladesh­in­1972),­introduced­the­necessary­bill­in­the­provincial­legislative­ assembly­ on­ April­ 3,­ 1957.49 Sheikh­ Mujib­ is­ a­ prototypical­ representative­ of­ middle-­class­ Bengali­ Muslims,­ who­ rose­ to­ prominence­ from­ a­ humble­ background.­ Born­ in­ a­ peasant­ family­ in­ the­ rural­ district­ of­ Faridpur,­ he­ was­ educated­ in­ Calcutta­ where­ he­ served­ as­ a­ close­ associate­ to­ Suhrahwardy,­ the­ legendary­leader­of­the­Bengal­Muslim­League. ­ Kabir­and­Mutsuddi­mention­a­few­others­who­played­important­roles­in­preparing­ and­ forwarding­ the­ bill­ for­ establishing­ the­ FDC.­ They­ noted­ that­ Dr.­ Abdus­ Sadeq,­ in­ cooperation­ with­ Abul­ Kalam­ Shamsuddin­ and­ Abdul­ Jabbar­ Khan,­ drafted­ the­ proposal­ and­ lobbied­ with­ Bengali­ Muslim­ political­ leaders.­ Dr.­ Abdus­ Sadeq,­ Director­ of­ the­ State­ Department­ of­ Statistics,­ convened­ the­ oft-cited meeting in 1953 where the case for The Face and the Mask was made through­the­debate­between­Khan­and­Dossani.­Another­Bengali­Muslim­intellectual,­Abul­Kalam­Shamsuddin,­a­renowned­writer and­(at­that­time)­Assistant­ Secretary­of­the­Information­Ministry­of­East­Pakistan,­took­care­of most of the bureaucratic­ communications­ among­ government­ departments,­ which­ were­ needed­to­introduce­the­FDC­bill­in­the­legislative­assembly.50 ­ In­the­mid­1950s,­the­Provincial­Legislative­Assembly­of­East­Pakistan­was­ well­ represented­ by­ emergent­ middle-­class­ Bengali-­Muslims.­ Through­ the­ first­ general­election­in­Pakistan­in­1954,­the­conflict­between­non-­Bengali­Muslim­ aristocrats­and­the­Bengali-­Muslim­middle­class­intensified­and­the­latter­group­ won.­ The­ contest­ was­ between­ the­ Muslim­ League,­ led­ by­ aristocrats­ who­ claimed­that­they­had­“achieved”­the­Pakistan­nation­and­the­United­Front­(UF­),­ a­newly­formed­alliance­in­East­Pakistan.­The­UF,­a­coalition­of­smaller­parties­ and­ groups,­ also­ included­ representatives­ from­ rural­ jotedars­ and­ peasants.­ In­ defeating­the­Muslim­League­in­this­election,­it­earned­an­absolute­majority­in­ the­Provincial­Legislative­Assembly­of­East­Pakistan.­This­change­signaled­the­ empowerment­ of­ the­ Bengali-­Muslim­ middle­ class­ and­ an­ affirmation­ of­ their­ identity­in­1950s­East­Pakistan.­In­1957,­Bengali­Muslim­professionals­utilized­ this­ favorable­ political­ environment­ in­ order­ to­ establish­ the­ FDC­ in­ Dhaka­ as­ the­ hub­ of­ the­ second­ Bengali-­language­ film-­production­ industry­ of­ the­ world.­ Their­ efforts­ were­ fruitful,­ as­ professionals­ like­ Sadeq­ and­ Shamsuddin­ and­ leaders­like­Sheikh­Mujib­were­representing­what­American­sociologist­Nancy­ Fraser­ calls­ “strong­ publics.”­ They­ were­ the­ people­ “whose­ discourse­ encompasses­both­opinion­formation­and­decision­making.”51 ­ While­ industrial­ entrepreneurs­ established­ film-­production­ studios­ in­ other­ major­ film­ centers­ in­ South­ Asia—such­ as­ Bombay,­ Calcutta,­ Madras­ and­ Lahore—during­the­1910s­to­1940s,­the­establishment­of­the­Dhaka­film­industry­ was patronized­ by­ the­ state,­ and­ especially­ influenced­ by­ the­ Bengali­ Muslim­ professional-­classes.­ Why­ did­ the­ “strong­ publics”­ (borrowing­ Fraser’s­ term)­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan 131 among­emergent­middle-­class­Bengali­Muslims­so­desperately­want­to­set­up­a­ film-­production­industry­of­their­own?­No­Bangladeshi­film­historian­points­out­ that­the­answer­to­this­question­lies­in­the­conflict­between­the­identity­formation­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims­ and­ the­ film-­exhibition­ scenario­ in­ early­ to­ mid-twentieth­ century­ East­ Bengal/Pakistan.­ In­ that­ period,­ a­ good­ number­ of­ feature­ films­ were­being­imported,­mostly­from­the­studios­of­Calcutta,­Bombay,­Lahore­and­ Hollywood.­Transnational economic forces controlled the circulation of foreignlanguage­ films­ here.­ .­ Non-­Bengali­ (West­ Pakistani/North­ Indian)­ Muslim­ businessmen­ and­ Indian­ film­ distribution­ companies­ based­ in­ Calcutta­ or­ Bombay­ led­the­distribution­of­Hindi,­Urdu­and­Bengali­features­of­Bombay,­Lahore­and­ Calcutta­respectively. ­ Mofidul­Hoque­notes­that­the­most­popular­films­in­East­Pakistan­were­Indian­ feature­ films.­ He­ also­ notes­ that­ American­ and­ British­ film­ distribution­ companies­such­as­MGM,­Twentieth­Century­Fox,­Paramount­and­Rank­Organization­had­their­offices­in­Dhaka­in­the­1950s.­Because­of­the­cheaper­rent,­local­ cinemas­based­in­the­cities­and­small­towns­collected­English-­language­films­to­ screen­during­the­morning­and­midday­shows.52­As­Indian­film­historian­M.­B.­ Billimoria­noted,­the­mass­exhibition­and­consumption­of­popular­Hindi­films­of­ Bombay,­ and­ Bengali­ films­ of­ Calcutta­ in­ East­ Pakistan,­ was­ so­ natural­ and­ spontaneous­in­this­period,­that­the­whole­of­Pakistan­was­considered­as­part­of­ the­ “home­ market”­ for­ Indian­ popular­ cinemas.53­ Only­ in­ the­ 1950s­ did­ Bombay’s­Hindi­cinema­became­the­main­focus­of­Indian­film­production;­till­then­ Pune and­Calcutta­were­the­two­major­“regional”­popular­film­industry­locations,­ producing­ films­ in­ Marathi­ and­ Bengali­ (respectively)­ to­ serve­ the­ all-­Indian­ audiences.54­Bengali­Muslims­of­East­Bengal/Pakistan­were­a­vitally­important­ audience­ for­ the­ Bengali­ film­ industry­ of­ Calcutta during the “golden age” of this­ industry­ (that­ is,­ from­ the­ 1930s­ to­ the­ 1950s).­ The­ Indian­ film­ scholar­ Someswar­Bhowmik­identifies­the­rise­of­the second Bengali cinema­industry­in Dhaka­as­a­major­cause­for­the­subsequent­decline­of­the­Calcutta­film­industry­ in the 1960s.55 ­ The­Bengali­Muslim­middle­class­considered­the­foreign­films­to­be­a­threat­ to­ Bengali­ Muslim­ cultural­ modernity.­ Arguing­ for­ a­ distinct­ identity,­ they­ judged­the­distribution­and­exhibition­of­foreign­films­in­East­Bengal/Pakistan­in­ the 1950s as a cultural intrusion.­ In­ the­ circumstances,­ middle-­class­ Bengali­ Muslims­worked­for­the­establishment­of­a­film-­production­studio­in­Dhaka­in­ the­late­1950s­with­the­hope­that­the­studio­would­produce­feature­fi late­1950s­with­the­hope­that­the­studio­would­produce­feature­fi 1950s­with­the­hope­that­the­studio­would­produce­feature­fi feature­fi films­symbol­lms­symbolizing­their­version­of­identity. ­ Abdul­Jabbar­Khan­recalls­how­he,­with­Dr.­Sadeq­and­Shamsuddin,­prepared­ the­bill­for­the­East­Pakistan­Film­Development­Corporation­(EPFDC)­Act­1957.­ Khan­ and­ others­ went­ to­ urge­ Mahmudunnabi,­ a­ minister­ in­ the­ East­ Pakistan­ provincial­cabinet­in­1957,­to­take­steps­to­establish­a­film­studio­in­East­Pakistan.­ The­ minister­ asked­ him­ to­ explain­ why­ one­ should­ think­ about­ making­ films­in­such­a­poor­country.­Khan­replied,­“Do­you­want­that­our­countrymen,­ sitting­in­our­theatres,­always­only­watch­Indian­films­and­learn­Indian­culture,­ politics,­ lifestyle­ and­ ideology?”­ The­ minister,­ agreeing­ with­ Khan­ on­ this­

132­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan nationalist­angle,­asked­him­to­hand­him­a­proposal.­With­that,­he­then­requested­ Sheikh­Mujibur­Rahman­to­table­the­bill­in­the­Legislative­Council.56 ­ Opposing­the­circulation­of­such­“Indian­culture”­among­Bengali­Muslims­by­ the­ medium­ of­ film,­ members­ of­ the­ Bengali Muslim middle class initiated a local­ film-­production­ industry­ in­ East­ Pakistan­ in­ 1957.­ As­ foreign-language films­were produced outside the cultural arena of Bengali Muslims and had no direct­cultural­relevance­to­the­Bengal­delta­and­its­populations,­they­wished­to­ establish­ a­ film­ industry­ that­ would­ produce­ films­ reflecting­ a­ cultural-­national­ modernity­ as­ well­ as­ defining­ the­ Bengali-­Muslim­ cultural­ identity. Thus the official­ website­ of­ the­ FDC­ announces­ its­ nationalist­ mission­ against­ foreign­ culture­very­clearly,­even­as­late­as­2002: FDC­provided­a­film­base­to­launch­counter­offensive­actions­to­block­the­ infiltration­ of­ foreign­ culture.­ Bangladesh­ was­ a­ virgin­ land­ with­ huge­ captive­audience­for­the­studios­of­Lahore,­Karachi,­Bombay­and­Calcutta.­ The­ major­ film­ distributing­ concerns­ were­ owned­ by­ non-­Bangalees­ who­ used­ to­ make­ windfall­ profits­ through­ commercial­ exhibition­ of­ imported­ films.57

The textual world of early Dhaka cinema: the construction of a vernacular middle class and the pastoral beauty of East Bengal on screen The­films­that­were­produced­during­the­early­years­of­the­Dhaka­film­industry­ can­be­read­as­symptoms­of­a­certain­version­of­Bengali-­Muslim­modernity,­an­ area­that­has­not­been­tackled­by­Bangladeshi­or­other­film­historians­to­date.­As­ a­way­to­begin­this­task,­I­produce­here­readings­of­two­of­the­“first”­films­of­this­ industry—The Face and the Mask­(1956)—the­first­sound­feature­by­a­Bengali­ Muslim­produced­in­East­Pakistan­before­the­FDC­was­established;­and,­Asiya (Asiya,­1960)—the­first­film­project­produced­under­the­direct­sponsorship­of­the­ FDC.­While­I­discuss­the­narratives­and­extra-­diegetic­elements­of­these­films,­I­ emphasize­ how­ they­ portrayed­ an­ idyllic­ Bengal­ delta­ and­ its­ rural­ beauty­ in­ order­ to­ point­ out­ their­ version­ of­ Bengali­ Muslim­ identity,­ which­ is­ based­ on­ their­affinity­to­this­very­region.­I­follow­Dipesh­Chakrabarty­here,­who­emphasized­ that­ both­ the­ “riverine­ landscape­ of­ East­ Bengal”­ and­ “the­ new­ ways­ of­ seeing­ that­ landscape”­ played­ important­ part­ in­ the­ imagining­ of­ the­ “native­ village”­as­“home”­for­East-­Bengali­refugees­in­Calcutta.58­I­find­that­the­rural-­ born,­newly­migrated­urban­middle­class­in­1950s­and­1960s­East­Pakistan­was­ renewing­the­portrayal­of­the­riverine­landscape­of­the­Bengal­delta­in­the­early­ films­of­Dhaka­cinema­in­the­same­way.­Their­search­for­a­distinct­identity­and­ their­ mission­ of­ developing­ cultural­ modernity­ of­ a­ vernacular­ kind­ prompted­ them­to­look­at­this­landscape­in­new­ways. ­ I­start­the­analysis­of­these­films­by­peeking­at­their­textual­worlds.­The Face and the Mask­ presents­ the­ story­ of­ Shamsher,­ a­ robber­ who­ kills­ people­ and­ kidnaps­ young­ women­ in­ rural­ East­ Bengal;­ it­ is­ apparently­ set­ in­ the­ early­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan 133 twentieth­ century.­ Shamsher­ finds­ Afzal,­ elder­ son­ of­ the­ jotedar­ (landowning­ cultivator)­Rahman­Mridha,­in­a­jungle.­Afzal,­a­pre-­teen­boy,­has­been­beaten­ and­left­for­dead­by­his­stepmother.­As­Mridha’s­servant­goes­to­bury­Afzal­in­ the­jungle,­Shamsher­takes­him­away­and­cures­him.­After­20­years,­Afzal­comes­ of­age­and­becomes­“chhoto­sardar”­(younger­leader)­of­the­gang.­However,­he­ does­ not­ like­ robbing,­ killing­ and­ raping.­ So­ when­ he­ finds­ that­ Shamsher­ and­ others­ have­ kidnapped­ Kulsum,­ a­ young­ woman,­ he­ sympathizes­ with­ her­ and­ they­fall­in­love. ­ Mridha’s­younger­son,­Jalal,­becomes­a­police­officer­in­charge­of­the­local­ police­station.­Jalal,­his­wife­Hamida­and­sister­Rashida­live­in­a­rented­house­in­ the­ town.­ Mridha­ sends­ Rashida­ to­ Jalal’s­ place­ to­ study;­ however,­ Hamida­ keeps­ her­ busy­ with­ household­ chores.­ Shamsher­ regularly­ bribes­ Jalal.­ Once,­ after­ such­ a­ meeting­ with­ Jalal,­ Shamsher­ sees­ Rashida­ bathing­ in­ a­ pond­ and­ starts­ planning­ a­ kidnap.­ In­ the­ meantime,­ when­ Mridha­ and­ his­ wife­ come­ to­ visit­Jalal,­Hamida­insults­them.­They­leave­Jalal’s­place­and­take­Rashida­with­ them.­Shamsher­attacks­Mridha’s­boat­and­kidnaps­Rashida. ­ Mridha­finds­Shahid­and­his­friends­on­the­riverside,­and­they­take­him­to­ the­nearest­police­station.­The­senior­police­officer­hears­Mridha’s­complaints­ and­ leads­ a­ police­ attack­ on­ Shamsher’s­ gang.­ Afzal­ and­ Kulsum­ are­ also­ planning­ to­ rescue­ Rashida­ from­ the­ gang.­ During­ the­ fight,­ Afzal­ shoots­ Shamsher.­ Most­ members­ of­ the­ gang­ are­ either­ killed­ or­ arrested­ by­ the­ police.­Jalal­is­also­arrested­for­aiding­the­robbers.­Mridha­meets­Afzal­in­the­ police­station­and­recognizes­him­as­his­elder­son­who­was­“buried”­20­years­ back.­Two­brothers,­Afzal­and­Jalal­also­meet­there.­Jalal­gets­a­jail­term­and­ Mridha­arranges­marriages­between­Afzal­and­Kulsum,­as­well­as­Rashida­and­ Shahid. ­ This­ simple­ “lost-­and-found”­ story,­ told­ in­ a­ theatrical­ manner,­ does­ not­ satisfy­the­historians­and­critics­of­Bangladesh­cinema.­So­they­are­in­consensus­ that The Face and the Mask­bears­no­importance­for­its­content­or­artistic­merit,­ despite­its­importance­as­the­first­feature­film­in­East­Bengal.59­I­disagree.­The­ text of The Face and the Mask­gives­expression­to­a­version­of­cultural­identity­ that­the­Bengali­Muslims­wished­to­define­through­various­cultural­forms­in­the­ 1950s. ­ When­The Face and the Mask was­published­as­a­novel­after­the­release­of­ the­film­in­1956,­Abdul­Jabbar­Khan­emphasized­the­portrayal­of­“social­life”­in­ the­Preface.­He­wrote­that,­“social­life­means­our­own­life.­So­we­need­novels­ and­ plays­ depicting­ social­ problems­ and­ their­ solutions.”60­ During­ the­ early­ decades­ of­ the­ twentieth­ century,­ the­ Bengali­ Muslim­ jotedars started to send their­ sons­ to­ towns­ to­ study­ and­ become­ middle-­class­ professionals.­ Historian­ Sirajul­ Islam­ found­ that­ the­ 1950s­ proved­ to­ be­ a­ moment­ when­ the­ city-ward migration­ of­ middle-­class­ young­ men­ and­ their­ spouses­ became­ the accepted norm.­In­the­early­twentieth­century­such­migration­was­seen­as­undesirable­and­ created­ tension­ in­ the­ extended­ family­ tradition­ of­ rural­ East­ Bengal.­ Only­ lawyers­and­other­professionals­used­to­use­towns­as­their­temporary­residence.­ In­ the­ 1950s,­ living­ in­ the­ cities­ became­ more­ fashionable.­ Sirajul­ Islam­ notes­

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that,­in­the­1950s,­jotedars­and­grain­and­jute­traders­lived­in­villages,­while­they­ sent­their­sons­to­the­towns.­They­remitted­resources­from­village­to­city­so­that­ their­ successors­ could­ afford­ a­ decent,­ middle-­class­ lifestyle.61­ However,­ once their­ sons­ became­ members­ of­ the­ respectable­ professional­ middle­ class,­ they­ and their parents were divided into two different worlds. ­ In­The Face and the Mask,­through­the­tale­of­the­life­and­death­of­a­robber,­ Khan­portrays­this­formation­process­of­the­Bengali­Muslim­middle­class.­The­ protagonists­of­the­film­represent­the­different­groups­among­Bengali­Muslims­ in­the­early-­to-mid­twentieth­century.­For­example,­Rahman­Mridha­represents­ those jotedars­ in­ rural­ East­ Bengal­ who­ sent­ their­ sons­ to­ towns­ for­ their­ English-­language­ education.­ Jalal­ and­ the­ senior­ police­ officer­ represent­ the­ emergence of the professional middle class among Bengali Muslims. Shahid and other­rural­youths­with­a­reformist­bent­represent­college­students­waiting­to­be­ professionals.­We­find­Jalal,­the­police­officer,­living­in­town­while­his­parents­ live­in­the­village.­They­come­to­visit­and­are­insulted­by­Hamida,­Jalal’s­wife.­ Such­ conflict­ between­ two­ groups­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims­ (new­ urbanites­ and­ old­ village-­bound­ ones)­ signifies­ the­ dilemma­ and­ fissures­ within­ their­ identity­ construction.­Western-­educated­professional­Bengali­Muslims­were­looking­for­ a­modern­life­based­on­urban­comfort­and­Western­democratic­ideals;­their­rustic­ and­ illiterate­ parents­ could­ not­ be­ accommodated­ within­ that­ framework.­ This­ theme­of­conflict­between­rural­jotedars­and­their­sons­who­became­middle-­class­ professionals­ gained­ currency­ in­ the­ 1940s­ and­ 1950s.­ Abdullah­ Al­ Mamun,­ a­ renowned­ Bangladeshi­ playwright­ and­ film-­maker,­ wrote­ his­ first­ play­ on­ this­ theme­when­he­was­studying­in­a­small-­town­high­school­in­the­1950s.­Mamun­ heard­the­story­first­from­his­college­teacher­father­and­then­wrote­the­play­called­ Niyotir parihash­(literally,­the­farce­of­the­destiny).­In­the­climax­of­the­play,­the­ peasant­ father­ comes­ to­ visit­ his­ son,­ who­ has­ become­ a­ bureaucrat.­ The­ son­ introduces his father to his friends as a poor villager who has come for some help.­The­father­cannot­take­this­insult­and­becomes­mentally­ill.62 ­ I­now­move­to­compare­the­narrative­of­The Face and the Mask with that of Asiya­in­terms­of­constructing­a­cultural­modernity­of­Bengali­Muslims­in­1950s­ and­60s­East­Pakistan.­Asiya­can­be­seen­as­the­brainchild­of­Nazir­Ahmed,­the­ first­ Operative­ Director­ of­ the­ FDC­ (then­ EPFDC)­ appointed­ in­ 1957.­ In­ the­ 1940s­ and­ 1950s,­ he­ served­ Radio­ Pakistan­ and­ BBC­ Radio­ in­ Karachi­ and­ London­and­then­at­the­East­Pakistan­State­Department­of­Film­and­Publications­ in­Dhaka.­He­established­himself­as­the­first­Bengali­Muslim­documentary­film-­ maker­by­directing and producing In Our Midst­(1948),­a­propaganda­documen1948),­a­propaganda­documentary­on­Governor-­General­of­Pakistan,­Mohammad­Ali­Jinnah’s­first­visit­to­East Pakistan.­His­more­important­work was Salamat (1954),­a­candid­documentary­ on­the­daily­life­of­a­construction­worker­in­Dhaka.63 ­ The­establishment­of­the­Film­Development­Corporation­(FDC)­studio,­in­the­ words­of­the­official­website­of­BFDC,­“gave­the­local­writers,­artists,­singers,­ technicians,­ musicians­ and­ film­ directors­ a­ powerful­ media­ and­ platform­ to­ reflect­ and­ defend­ the­ cultural­ and­ political­ aspirations­ of­ the­ people.”64 Nazir Ahmed,­ a­ well-­known­ representative­ of­ the­ emergent­ Bengali-­Muslim­

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan 135 professional class in the 1940s and 1950s,­was­therefore­chosen­as­the­first­head­ of­the­newly­established­FDC­studio.­Writing­the­script­of­Asiya and providing it with­ the­ all-­out­ support­ of­ the­ new­ studio,­ he­ attempted­ a­ trend­ of­ producing­ Bengali­art­films­in­Dhaka.­This­film­is­directed­by­Fateh­Lohani,­who­acted­in­a­ few­Bengali­films­in­Calcutta­in­the­1940s­including­Dukkhey Jader Jiban Gora (Misery is their Lot,­ Obaidul­ Huq­ aka­ Himadri­ Chowdhury,­ 1946),­ the­ first­ feature­film­by­a­Bengali­Muslim.65­Lohani­started­the­shooting­of­Asiya­in­1957­ and­thus,­after­The Face and the Mask,­it­is­the­second­feature­shot­by­a­Bengali­ Muslim­in­East­Pakistan.­Drawing­on­the­exposure­of­Lohani­and­Nazir­Ahmed­ towards­ the­ Bengali­ art­ cinema­ of­ 1940s­ and­ 1950s­ Calcutta,­ Ahmed­ said­ that­ through­this­film­they­wished­to­create­a­“text-­and­training-­film.”66­Film­historians­Kabir­and­Hayat­mention­that­Satyajit­Ray’s Pather Panchali­(Song of the Road,­ 1956)­ was­ seen­ as­ the­ model­ for­ the­ making­ of­ Asiya.­ Like­ the­ famous­ scene of Pather Panchali—in­which­the­young­protagonists­watch­a­train­for­the­ first­time­in­their­lives—in­Asiya, also,­two­adolescents­look­at­a­train­passing­by­ their­ village­ and­ play­ on­ the­ railway­ lines.­ This­ scene­ was­ emphasized­ by­ the­ extreme­long­shot­of­the­train­and­the­big­close­up­of­the­feet­of­the­young­children­on­the­railway­lines.­Most­film­critics­in­East­Pakistan­and­Bangladesh­considered Asiya­ to­ be­ highly­ appreciable.­ In­ 1961,­ it­ received­ the­ respectable­ president’s­award­as­the­Best­Bengali­film­of­Pakistan­and­the­producer­of­the­ film­received­the­Nigar­film­award.67 Asiya­is­thus­considered­to­be­the­first­art­film­by­a­Bengali­Muslim­in­Bangladesh­film­histories.­This­attempt­itself,­i.e.­the­creation­of­an­“art”­film­for­the­ first­time­in­East­Bengal,­to­be­devised­only­by­local­Bengali­Muslim­talents,­can­ be­seen­as­a­step­towards­developing­a­cultural­modernity­through­cinema­as­was­ the­case­with­other­media­and­cultural­forms­such­as­fine­arts,­drama­and­novels­ a decade earlier. The plot of Asiya also narrativized the emergence of a vernacular­middle­class­out­of­rural­East­Bengal­during­the­early­twentieth­century.­ It­outlines­the­suffering­of­Asiya,­a­peasant­girl­who­falls­in­love­with­Moshu,­an­ orphan­ boy­ of­ a­ jotedar­ (landowner-­cultivator)­ family,­ who­ later­ decides­ to­ break­ the­ relationship­ because­ of­ socio-­economic­ realities.­ Moshu’s­ uncle,­ the­ middle-­aged­bachelor­Shikder­(who­has­brought­up­Moshu),­happens­to­choose­ Asiya­when­he­finally­decides­to­marry.­Tajuddi,­Shikder’s­land­and­cultivation­ supervisor,­ encourages­ Shikder­ even­ though­ he­ is­ aware­ of­ the­ love­ affair­ between­Asiya­and­Moshu.­This­is­because­he­wants­Moshu­to­marry­his­own­ daughter,­Heeramon.­Asiya’s­peasant­father­Moniruddi­happily­consents­to­the­ proposal­of­the­rich­landowner-­farmer­Shikder.­Asiya­arrives­at­Shikder’s­huge­ house­and­starts­taking­care­of­the­household.­Shikder,­unaware­of­the­relationship­ between­ the­ two,­ advises­ Moshu­ to­ treat­ Asiya­ as­ a­ “mother.”­ Within­ a­ short­while,­sharing­a­house­and­acting­like­mother­and­son­becomes­difficult­for­ them.­Moshu­asks­Asiya­to­escape­and­go­to­a­new­place.­Shikder­suspects­an­ illicit­affair,­but­then­comes­to­know­the­background.­Being­sorry,­he­asks­Asiya­ to­do­whatever­she­wishes.­However,­Asiya­decides­to­stay­on­as­the­care-­giver­ for­Shikder­and­his­household.­She­makes­Moshu­to­agree­to­marry­another­girl.­ On­the­night­of­the­wedding,­Moshu­kills­himself­by­setting­fire­to­his­bedroom­

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while­Asiya­runs­towards­the­railway­line­where­they­used­to­play­in­their­childhood­days. ­ Through­Asiya’s­decision­to­stay­with­Shikder,­Asiya depicts the consolidation of the social power of male jotedars­ like­ Shikder­ within­ the­ conservative,­ pro-­Islam­ social­ structure­ of­ the­ rural­ communities­ of­ East­ Bengal. Asiya also records­the­economic­empowerment­of­such­landowning­Bengali­Muslims,­particularly­ because­ of­ their­ control­ over­ the­ large­ mass­ of­ rural­ peasants.­ For­ example,­when­approached­by­Shikder,­Asiya’s­peasant­father­Moniruddi­immediately­ agrees­ to­ the­ marriage­ proposal­ between­ the­ aged­ landowner­ and­ his­ young­daughter.­Moreover­he­comments,­“can­I­repay­my­debts­to­Mr­Shikder­ only­ by­ (sending)­ a­ daughter?”­ Because­ of­ this­ portrayal­ of­ the­ hegemony­ of­ rural-­based­jotedars,­who­were­instrumental­in­the­formation­of­a­middle­class­ among­ Bengali­ Muslims,­ I­ argue­ that­ Asiya presents a parallel episode of Bengali-­Muslim­ social­ history­ alongside­ The Face and the Mask,­ in­ which­ we­ saw­the­emergence­of­Bengali­Muslim­urban­professional­sons­with­the­support­ of their jotedar fathers. ­ In­ this­ concluding­ part­ of­ the­ chapter,­ I­ look­ at­ inter-­ and­ extratextual­ connections­ between­ The Face and the Mask and Asiya. I­ note­ various extradiegetic­components­in­both­films,­which,­going­beyond­or­against­the­narrative­ clarity­ of­ the­ films,­ contribute­ to­ the­ imagination­ of­ cultural­ modernity­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims.­ Dance­ and­ song,­ as­ well­ as­ the­ elaborate­ depiction­ of­ the­ natural­ beauty­ of­ rural­ East­ Bengal­ in­ both­ films,­ may­ be­ considered­ in­ this­ regard. ­ In­The Face and the Mask,­in­the­dance­number­used­early­in­the­film­to­show­ the­ gang’s­ revelry,­ Khan­ did­ not­ use­ a­ group­ of­ female­ dancers,­ which­ would­ probably­ be­ more­ appropriate­ for­ the­ gang’s­ character;­ scenes­ of­ scantily-­clad­ young­ women­ dancing­ to­ entertain­ villains­ have­ been­ commonplace­ in­ the­ popular­films­of­South­Asia.­Instead,­Khan­uses­a­half-­clad­male­dancer,­along­ with a female wearing a sari, to­present­an­Indian­classical­dance­number­to­the­ robbers.­ Of­ the­ two,­ the­ male­ dancer­ is­ always­ kept­ at­ the­ center.­ For­ the­ diegesis,­this­is­awkward.­The­dance­number­was­actually­used­to­demonstrate­ contemporary­Indian­classical­dance­from­East­Pakistan. ­ Gowhar­ Jamil,­ the­ foremost­ promoter­ and­ teacher­ of­ Indian­ classical­ dance­ among­Bengali­Muslims­in­the­1950s­and­1960s,­performed­the­dance­in­the­film.­ Jamil­was­a­leading­cultural-­modernist­who­promoted­dance­as­a­cultural­form­in­ East­Pakistan.­He­led­the­staging­of­dance-­drama­in­Dhaka­in­the­early­1950s­and­ was­ also­ picked­ to­ travel­ to­ London­ as­ a­ member­ of­ an­ East­ Pakistan­ cultural­ troupe­ in­ the­ mid­ 1950s.­ In­ 1958,­ he­ established­ the­ Jago­ Art­ Center,­ a­ leading­ dance­ training­ institute­ in­ East­ Pakistan.68­ I­ would­ like­ to­ argue­ that­ Khan­ deliberately­incorporated­Jamil’s­dance­into­The Face and the Mask,­even­though­ it­went­against­the­narrative­logic­of­the­film.­This­was­done­in­order­to­highlight­ the­ modernist­ practice­ of­ Indian­ classical­ dance­ as­ presented­ by­ Jamil­ to­ fellow­ middle-­class­Bengali­Muslims.­As­no­film­in­Calcutta,­Bombay­or­Lahore­would­ include­a­Bengali­Muslim­presenting­an­Indian­classical­dance,­The Face and the Mask proved­to­be­an­opportune­vehicle­for­such­a­presentation.

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan­ ­ 137 ­ The­ film­ also­ served­ as­ a­ site­ where­ Bengali-­Muslim­ middle­ classes­ could­ attempt­ to­ develop­ a­ new­ way­ of­ looking­ at­ their­ own­ land—as­ I­ pointed­ out­ earlier,­drawing­upon­Dipesh­Chakrabarty.­This­seems­more­palpable­when­we­ look­at­the­songs­and­accompanied­visuals­in­this­film.­Of­the­two­songs­used,­ one­can­be­seen­as­connected­(albeit­loosely)­to­the­narrative.­Rashida­sings­the­ song­as­she­bathes­in­a­pond,­without­being­aware­that­Shamsher­is­eyeing­her.­ The­ other­ song­ we­ hear­ as­ an­ interlude­ between­ narrative­ segments;­ in­ the­ publicity­booklet­of­the­film,­it­is­called­“the­song­by­the­boatman.”69­However,­ the­narrative­function­of­this­boatman’s­song­is­ambiguous;­it­can­be­compared­ to­ the­ classical­ dance­ number­ presented­ by­ Gowhar­ Jamil.­ The­ song­ was­ originally­performed­by­Abdul­Alim,­a­popular­folk­singer­who­promoted­rural-­ based­ folk­ songs­ in­ East­ Bengal/Bangladesh­ in­ the­ 1950s­ and­ 1970s;­ a­ role­ similar­to­that­accomplished­by­Jamil­in­promoting­the­cultural­form­of­dance.­ The­song­represents­the­current­of­folk­music­among­emergent­Muslim­musical­ practices­ in­ 1950s­ East­ Pakistan.­ The­ lyric­ of­ the­ song­ tells­ of­ the­ plight­ of­ a­ boatman­in­riverine­East­Bengal, I­am­a­boatman­from­a­village­far­away I­roam­around­with­my­golden­boat­for­business. When­the­village­belle,­with­her­unmade­hair,­comes­to­the­riverbank I­look­at­her­and­remember­my­abode. If­I­were­a­bird,­I­would­fly­to­home Where­my­darling­weeps­alone. She­spends­her­days­waiting­on­the­riverbank Only­to­see­me­returning­home­(my­translation). The­lyric­of­the­song­represents­the­riverine­life­of­rural­East­Pakistan­as­well­as­ its­ beauty­ and­ melancholy.­ The­ visuals­ accompanying­ both­ the­ songs­ use­ symbols­of­a­pastoral,­idyllic­rural­East­Bengal.­In­the­case­of­the­first­song,­we­ mostly­ see­ Rashida­ bathing­ in­ the­ pond,­ and­ sometimes­ see­ another­ woman­ accompanying­ her.­ In­ between­ the­ shots­ of­ the­ protagonists,­ we­ see­ close­ ups­ and­medium­shots­of­water­lilies­every­now­and­then.­The­water­lily,­a­common­ element­in­the­river-­based­lives­of­rural­Bengali­Muslims,­symbolizes­the­East-­ Bengali­landscape,­the­abode­of­Bengali­Muslims.70­In­the­song­of­the­boatman,­ images­of­the­beauty­of­East­Bengal­are­more­evident.­We­see­long­and­medium­ shots­of­rivers­full­of­river­boats­and­of­the­sky­full­of­white­clouds.­We­also­see,­ in­ medium­ shots,­ male­ farmers­ cultivating­ the­ land­ with­ cows­ and­ a­ village­ woman­ collecting­ water­ from­ a­ river.­ While­ none­ of­ these­ shots­ foster­ the­ narrative of The Face and the Mask,­ these­ images­ represent­ the­ beauty­ and­ uniqueness­ of­ East­ Bengal.­ It­ can­ be­ recalled­ that­ in­ the­ modern­ painting­ tradition­ of­ East­ Bengal/Bangladesh­ during­ last­ six­ decades,­ images­ of­ rivers,­ boats­and­boatmen­are­recurring­symbols.71­These­symbols­represent­“the­secular­ idea­ of­ beauty”­ as­ proposed­ by­ Dipesh­ Chakrabarty­ (and­ cited­ above).­ These­ images­thus­take­part­in­the­attempt­to­articulate­a­cultural­modernity­by­portraying­East­Bengal’s­riverine­nature­and­life.

138­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan ­ Like­ The Face and the Mask,­ Asiya­ also­ sets­ up­ the­ romance­ between­ two­ young­lovers,­combining­images­and­sounds­that­quite­ably­represent­East­Bengal’s­traditional­lifestyle­and­the­beauty­of­rural­nature.­Lohani­himself­admits­ that­he­was­accused­of­using­long­takes­of­the­natural­scenery­of­rural­East­Pakistan.72­However,­film-­historian­Kabir­holds­such­efforts­of­cinematic­narration­as­ futile­in­terms­of­composing­an­art­film.­He­says­that­the­director­Lohani­had­no clear­idea­about­the­exact­moment­when­one­episode­should­take­over­from­ another,­ making­ each­ either­ too­ long­ or­ too­ short.­.­.­.­ [H]e­ tried­ vainly­ to­ capture­ the­ lyrical­ beauty­ of­ Bengal’s­ countryside­ in­ sequences­ lingering­ unnecessarily.73 I­ argue­ that­ the­ “unnecessarily”­ long­ sequences­ of­ natural­ beauty­ and­ of­ folk­ culture­ in­ rural­ East­ Bengal­ actually­ portrayed­ the­ relationship­ of­ Bengali-­ Muslim­identity­within­its­local­setting,­as­was­done­in­The Face and the Mask. Asiya­ also­ repeatedly­ presents­ long­ shots­ of­ boats,­ rivers­ and­ clouds,­ and­ medium­ shots­ of­ water­ lilies.­ Moreover,­ it­ combines­ various­ scenes­ such­ as­ a­ snake-­play­by­a­snake-­charmer­in­a­rural­market­and­women­singing­folk­songs­ whilst­thrashing­paddy.­These­images­are­only­remotely­connected­with­the­narrative­development­of­the­film,­but­are­significant­constituents­of­the­rural­culture­ of­the­Bengal­delta.­East-­Bengali­folk­literature­also­plays­important­role­in­the­ film.­Not­only­are­there­a­number­of­folk­songs­in­the­film,­but­sometimes­the­ protagonists,­the­two­young­lovers,­converse­using­folk­riddles. ­ The­songs­depicting­the­Bengal­delta­as­a­rural­idyll,­accompanied­by­images­ depicting­ the­ riverine­ landscape­ of­ the­ delta­ and­ its­ beauty—elements­ of­ folk­ culture­in­both­films,­as­discussed­above—together­combine­and­contribute­to­a­ sense­ of­ the­ cultural­ modernity­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims.­ Willem­ Van­ Schendel­ explains­ the­ breadth­ of­ this­ modernity­ and­ how­ Bengali­ Muslims­ viewed­ the­ nation­as­the­landscape: From­ the­ 1950s­ to­ the­ 1970s,­ the­ delta’s­ vernacular­ elite­ had­ imagined­ Bangladesh­as­the­homeland­of­Bengalis­who­had­been­denied­justice­under­ Pakistan.­To­them,­the­Bengali­nation­stood­for­much­more­than­a­linguistic­ community.­The­nation’s­spirit­expressed­itself­in­particular­cultural­sensibilities,­ devotional­ traditions­ and­ humanist­ aspirations­ that­ suffused­ the­ delta’s­ folksongs­ and­ Baul­ mysticism­ as­ deeply­ as­ the­ poetry­ of­ Rabindranath­Tagore­and­Kazi­Nazrul­Islam.­.­.­.­[They­held]­the­vision­of­the­nation­ as­a­rural­idyll—an­“embroidered­quilt.”74 Both­ films­ thus­ invoke­ an­ idyllic­ Bengal­ delta­ as­ pictured­ by­ such­ rural-­born,­ newly­migrated­urban­Bengali­Muslims.­Re-­examining­this­landscape,­the­film-­ makers,­ representing­ this­ middle­ class,­ re-­imagined­ what­ Dipesh­ Chakrabarty­ termed the “native village” as their “home”—a concept he furthers in order to connote­ the­ coping­ process­ of­ loss­ and­ grief­ for­ East-­Bengali­ refugees­ in­ Calcutta.­He­argues­that:

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan 139 The­“native­village”­is­pictured­as­both­sacred­and­beautiful,­and­it­is­this­ that­makes­communal­violence­an­act­of­both­violation­and­defilement,­an­ act­ of­ sacrilege­ against­ everything­ that­ stood­ for­ sacredness­ and­ beauty­ in­ Hindu-Bengali understanding of what home was.75 When­outlining­the­narrative­elements­at­work­in­imagining­the­“native­village”­ of­East-­Bengali­refugees­in­Calcutta,­he­located­how­the­Bengali­literary­tradition­ from­ late­ nineteenth­ century­ onwards­ conjured­ up­ a­ “powerfully­ nostalgic­ and­pastoral­.­.­.­image­of­the­generic­Bengali­village­.­.­.­for­and­on­behalf­of­the­ urban­middle­classes.”76­We­see­this­pastoral­image­of­East­Bengal­in­The Face and the Mask and in Asiya,­and,­through­these,­the­two­films­represent­the­vision­ of­modernist­Bengali­Muslims­in­defining­a­certain­cultural­modernity.

Conclusion In­this­chapter,­journeying­through­the­early­institutions­and­texts­of­the­Dhaka­ film­industry,­I­identify­how­the­middle­class­used­these­as­tools­to­construct­a­ Bengali-­Muslim­ cultural­ identity.­ I­ argue­ that­ Bengali­ films­ produced­ by­ this­ industry­ need­ to­ be­ seen­ as­ a­ vehicle­ of­ the­ cultural-­national­ modernity­ of­ Bengali Muslims. This chapter thus showcased two attempts to develop a cultural-­national­modernity­of­and­for­Bengali­Muslims­through­Bengali­cinema­ during the 1950s and 1960s. These attempts represented the wishes of the Bengali Muslim middle classes to develop this cinema as a “Bengali-Muslim cinema”­in­East­Pakistan.­They,­as­a­rural-­born­middle­class,­wanted­to­establish­ a­ vernacular,­ Bengali-­Muslim­ modernity­ as­ a­ counter-­discourse­ to­ two­ other­ major­modernist­discourses—Bengali-­Hindu­modernity,­propagated­by­Calcutta­produced­Bengali­literature­and­cinema—and­pan-­Islamic­modernity. ­ Muslim­modernism­was­advocated­by­the­Pakistan­state­and­the­non-­Bengali­ elite­of­West­Pakistan.­Therefore­Bengali-­Muslim­identity­served­as­the­driving­ force­for­the­establishment­of­cinema­institutions­and­texts­in­1950s­and­1960s­ East­Pakistan.­However,­within­a­decade­or­less,­by­the­late­1970s,­the­identity­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims­ took­ a­ new­ turn­ in­ an­ independent­ Bangladesh,­ where­ the­ Bengali­cinema­of­the­Dhaka­film­industry­also­took­new­forms­in­relation­to­a­ national­modernity­as­envisaged­by­the­Bangladesh­state.­Chapter­6­will­present­ and­probe­these­new­twists­and­turns­of­Bangladeshi­cinema.

Notes ­ 1­ Willem­Van­Schendel,­A History of Bangladesh­(Cambridge:­Cambridge­University­ Press,­2009),­p.­152. ­ 2­ Dipesh­ Chakrabarty,­ “Remembered­ Villages:­ Representations­ of­ Hindu-­Bengali­ Memories­ in­ the­ Aftermath­ of­ the­ Partition,”­ South Asia­ 18­ (1995):­ 115,­ cited­ in­ Bhaskar­ Sarkar,­ Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Durham:­Duke­University­Press,­2009),­p.­131. ­ 3­ Cited­ in,­ Peter­ Brooker,­ A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory­ (London:­ Arnold,­ 1999),­p.­51.

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­ 4­ Mohammad­Shah,­In Search of an Identity:­Bengali Muslims 1880–1940­(Calcutta:­K.­ P.­Bagchi,­1996),­p.­19. ­ 5­ Ahmad­ Rafique,­ Bangladesh: Problem of Nationalism and Nation-state,­ (Dhaka:­ Ananya,­2000),­p.­76. ­ 6­ Rafiuddin­ Ahmed,­ The Bengal Muslims 1871–1906: A Quest for Identity­ (Delhi,­ Oxford­University­Press,­1998)­pp.­8,­13,­15­and­192. ­ 7­ David­ Kopf,­ “Pakistani­ Identity­ and­ the­ Historiography­ of­ Muslim­ Bengal,”­ in­ Richard­ L.­ Park­ (ed.)­ Patterns of Change in Modern Bengal­ (Michigan,­ Michigan­ State­University,­1979),­p.­119. ­ 8­ Muin-­Ud-Din­ Ahmad­ Khan,­ Muslim Struggle for Freedom of Bengal 1757–1947 (Dhaka:­Book­Syndicate,­1960),­p.­31. ­ 9­ Kopf­(1979)­p.­118. 10­ Salahuddin­ Ahmed,­ Bangladesh: Nationalism, Independence, Democracy­ (Dhaka:­ Agami­Publishers,­1993),­pp.­50–1. 11­ Ahmed­(1998)­p.­22. 12­ Nancy­ Fraser,­ Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (London:­Routledge,­1997),­p.­90. 13­ Ahmed­(1998)­p.­164. 14­ M.­ Anisuzzaman,­ “A­ Sociological­ Imagination­ for­ Bangladesh,”­ in­ Muhammad­ Afsaruddin­ (ed.)­ A. K. Nazmul Karim Commemorative Volume­ Afsaruddin­ (Dhaka,­ University­of­Dhaka,­2000),­p.­249. 15­ Kopf­(1979)­p.­120. 16­ Kirsten­Westergaard,­State and Rural Society in Bangladesh: A Study in Relationship,­ (London,­Curzon­Press,­1985),­p.­24. 17­ Ahmed­(1998)­p.­xix. 18­ Premen­Addy­and­Ibne­Azad,­“Politics­and­Society­in­Bengal,”­in­Robin­Blackburn­ (ed.)­ Explosion in a Subcontinent: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Ceylon­ (Harmondsworth,­UK:­Penguin­Books,­1975),­pp.­112­and­116. 19­ Shah­(1996)­pp.10–11;­Rafique­(2000)­p.­127;­Westergaard­(1985)­p.­24;­Ramkrishna­ Mukherjee,­“Nationbuilding­in­Bangladesh,”­in­Rajni­Kothari­(ed.)­State and Nation Building­(Bombay,­Allied­Publishers,­1976),­p.­293. 20­ Dhrujati­ Prasad­ De,­ Bengal Muslims in Search of Social Identity 1905–47­ (Dhaka:­ University­Press­Limited,­1998),­p.­6. 21­ Rangalal­Sen,­Political Elites in Bangladesh­(Calcutta:­K.­P.­Bagchi,­1987),­p.­29. 22­ Mustafa­Nurul­Islam,­“Bangladesh:­The­Issue­of­Succession,”­in­Mustafa­Nurul­Islam­ (ed.)­The Identity of Bengalis­(Dhaka:­Bornayon,­second­edition­2001),­p.­42. 23­ Ahmed­(1998)­p.­120. 24­ Cited­ in,­ Sanjida­ Khatoon,­ Ups and Downs of the Culture of Bangladesh­ (Dhaka:­ University­of­Dhaka,­2000),­p.­5. 25­ Wakil­ Ahmed,­ “The­ Identity­ of­ Bengali­ Muslims­ in­ the­ Middle­ Ages,”­ in­ Mustafa­ Nurul­Islam­(ed.)­The Identity of Bengalis­(Dhaka:­Bornayon,­second­edition­2001),­ p.­102. 26­ Rana­Razzaque­Ahsan,­“An­Introduction­to­the­Trends­of­Bengali­Muslim­Thought,­ 1905–1947,”­Journal of Asiatic Society of Bangaldesh 43­(1998):­53–4. 27­ Shah­(1996)­pp.­9­and­24. 28­ Westergaard­(1985)­pp.­27­and­29;­Mukherjee­(1976)­pp.­296–7. 29­ Stuart­ Hall,­ “Cultural­ Identity­ and­ Cinematic­ Representation,”­ in­ Robert­ Stam­ and­ Toby­ Miller­ (eds.)­ Film and Theory: An Anthology­ (Oxford:­ Blackwell­ Publishers,­ 2000),­p.­706. 30­ Abul­Mansur­Ahmed,­“General­President’s­Address,”­Proceedings of the East Pakistan Renaissance Society Conference­17:­11­(1944):­439. 31­ Willem­Van­Schendel­(2009)­p.­202. 32­ Manzare­ Hassin,­ “Film­ Business­ in­ East­ Bengal­ in­ the­ 1960s­ and­ Filmmaking­ of­ Zahir­Raihan,”­Montage­4­(February­1992):­110.

The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan 141 33­ Mofidul­ Hoque,­ “The­ 21st­ February­ (The­ Language­ Martyrs’­ Day)­ and­ Bangladesh­ Cinema,”­Intercut­4­(October­1989):­96. 34­ Nazmul­ Karim,­ Changing Society in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh,­ (Dhaka:­ Nawrose­Kitabistan,­1976),­pp.­237­and­242. 35­ Mukherjee­(1976)­p.­298. 36­ Ibid.­p.­299. 37­ A.­N.­M.­Muniruzzaman,­The Living and Working Conditions of Students of the University and Colleges of Dacca 1957­(Dhaka:­Univesity­of­Dhaka,­1961),­Tables­II-­2,­II-­6,­II-­14. 38­ As­ an­ acknowledgment­ of­ this­ fight­ of­ Bengali-­Muslims­ for­ the­ dignity­ of­ their­ mother­ tongue,­ UNESCO­ recognized­ February­ 21­ as­ the­ International­ Mother­ Language­Day­in­1999. 39­ Badruddin­Umar,­“Bengali­Muslims’­Return­to­Homeland,”­in­Mustafa­Nurul­Islam­ (ed.)­The Identity of Bengalis­(Dhaka:­Bornayon,­second­edition­2001),­p.­204. 40­ Shamsul­Huq,­“Hundred­Years­of­Bengali­Publishing,”­in­Karunamoy­Goswami­(ed.)­ Hundred Years of Bengali Culture (Narayanganj:­Sudhijon­Pathagar,­1994),­pp.­385–6­ and­392–3. 41­ Kazi­Mahmudur­Rahman,­“25­Years­of­Bangladesh­Radio,”­Niriksha­78­(November­ 1996-Februray­1997):­17. 42­ Mofidul­ Hoque,­ “River,­ Boat­ and­ Artistic­ Investigation­ of­ Kaiyum­ Chowdhury,”­ Anyadin­(Special­Eid­Festival­Issue,­2001):­516–19. 43­ Shamsul­Huq­(1994)­pp.­388­and­395–6. 44 Alamgir­Kabir,­Film in Bangladesh (Dhaka:­Bangla­Academy,­1979),­pp. 19–21. 45 Sharaful­ Islam,­ The Torn Pages of the Face and the Mask­ (Dhaka:­ Bangladesh­ Academy­of­Fine­and­Performing­Arts,­1995),­pp.­17­and­23. 46­ Abdul­Jabbar­Khan,­“My­Story­(Amar­Kotha),”­Tarkalok­(January­1–14,­1987):­13. 47­ Sharaful­Islam­(1995)­p.­23. 48­ Anupam­ Hayat,­ History of Bangladesh Cinema (Dhaka:­ Bangladesh­ Film­ Development­ Corporation,­ 1987),­ pp.­ 58–76­ and­ Mirja­ Tarequl­ Quader,­ Bangladesh Film Industry (Dhaka:­Bangla­Academy,­1993),­pp.­120–35. 49­ Kabir­(1979)­p.­25;­Huq­(1994)­p.­96. 50­ Kabir­(1979)­ p.­ 25;­ Chinmoy­ Mutsuddi,­ Social Commitment in Bangladesh Cinema (Dhaka:­Bangladesh­Arts­Academy,­1987),­p.­23. 51­ Nancy­ Fraser,­ Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (London:­Routledge,­1997),­p.­90. 52­ Mofidul­Hoque­(1989)­pp.­98–9. 53­ M.­ B.­ Billimoria,­ “Foreign­ Markets­ for­ Indian­ Films,”­ Indian Talkie 1931–56,­ (Bombay:­Film­Federation­of­India,­1956),­pp.­54–5. 54­ Ravi­S.­Vasudevan­“Addressing­the­Spectator­of­a­‘Third­World’­National­Cinema:­ the­Bombay­‘Social’­Film­of­the­1940s­and­1950s,”­Screen­36.4­(1995):­306. 55­ Someswar­Bhowmik,­Indian Cinema: An Economic Report­(Calcutta:­Papyrus,­1996),­ p.­118. 56­ “Abdul­Jabbar­Khan­(1917–1993),”­Tarokalok (January­1994):­45. 57­ www.fdcbd.com,­viewed­on­27­February­2002. 58­ Dipesh­Chakrabarty­(1995)­p.­121,­cited­in­Bhaskar­Sarkar­(2009)­p.­132. 59­ Mofidul­ Hoque­ (1989)­ 97.­ Shaymol­ Dutt,­ “The Face and the Mask­ and­ Our­ Film­ History,”­ Look Through­ 2­ (1985):­ 28;­ Anupam­ Hayat,­ “Film­ Pioneer­ Khan­ Should­ Receive­State­Honour,”­Daily Muktakantha­(January­24,­1998):­15. 60 Sharaful­Islam­(1995)­p.­95. 61­ Sirajul­ Islam,­ “Introduction,”­ in­ Sirajul­ Islam­ (ed.)­ The History of Bangladesh 1704–1971,­Vol.­3­(Social­and­Cultural­History)­(Dhaka:­Asiatic­Society­of­Bangladesh,­1993),­pp.­32–4. 62­ Abdullah­Al­Mamun,­Me as Mine­(in­Bengali),­(Dhaka:­Ananya,­1996),­p.­11. 63­ Kabir­(1979)­ p.­ 25;­ Chinmoy­ Mutsuddi,­ Social Commitment in Bangladesh Cinema (Dhaka:­Bangladesh­Arts­Academy,­1987),­p.­23.

142­ ­ The Dhaka film industry in East Pakistan 64­ See­www.fdcbd.com,­accessed­February­27,­2002. 65­ In­Chapter­4,­I­demonstrated­that­Misery­was­a­rare­but­somewhat­failed­effort­to­construct­a­Bengali-­Muslim­identity­through­the­medium­of­the­Bengali­cinema­of­Calcutta in the 1940s. 66­ Anupam­Hayat,­Fateh Lohani­(Dhaka:­Bangla­Academy,­1994),­p.­56. 67­ Kabir­(1979)­p.­39;­Hayat­(1994)­pp.­56­and­66. 68­ Rowshan­ Jamil,­ “Gowhar­ and­ Me:­ Our­ Life­ and­ Dreams,”­ Bichitra­ 25.37­ (January­ 1997):­291–4. 69 Sharaful­Islam­(1993)­p.­52. 70­ Therefore,­later­it­was­chosen­as­the­“national­flower”­of­Bangladesh. 71­ Between­the­1940s­and­1980s,­Bengali-­Muslim­modernist­painters,­especially­veterans­ like­ Jainul­ Abedin,­ Kamrul­ Hasan,­ S.­ M.­ Sultan­ and­ Kaiyum­ Chowdhury­ also­ used­ rivers­ and­ boats­ as­ recurring­ themes­ in­ their­ works.­ For­ a­ broader­ view­ of­ Kaiyum­Chowdhury’s­work,­see­Mofidul­Hoque,­“River,­Boat­and­Artistic­Investigation­of­Kaiyum­Chowdhury,”­Anyadin­(Special­Eid­Festival­Issue,­2001):­516–19. 72­ Hayat­(1994)­p.­63. 73­ Kabir­(1979)­p.­39. 74­ Willem­Van­Schendel­(2000)­p.­202. 75­ Dipesh­Chakrabarty­(1995)­p.­115,­cited­in­Bhaskar­Sarkar­(2009)­p.­131. 76­ Ibid.­p.­118,­cited­in­Bhaskar­Sarkar­(2009)­p.­132.

6

Popular cinema Between nation-state and market forces in contemporary Bangladesh

The Dhaka film industry, which had a timid start in late 1950s East Pakistan— through the making of The Face and the Mask and the establishment of the Film Development Corporation (FDC) Studio—has traveled a long way. During the next two decades, by the 1980s, it became firmly established as a film industry with sizable audience and a huge corpus of films in the independent nation-space called Bangladesh. It has thus turned out to be a “Bangladeshi” popular cinema, though the local population simply calls it Bangla cinema (meaning “Bengali cinema”). In the current chapter, therefore, I shift my attention to the popular film industry in the contemporary period, and investigate why and how this cinema became a “national” popular cinema while participating in a dialog with the national-modernist agenda of the postcolonial state as well as the market forces in globalizing Bangladesh. I chart here its developmental flow since the 1970s in relation to larger frameworks such as nation, state and modernity. During this period of four decades of independent Bangladesh, the idea of nation has been in negotiation with three identities—Bengali, Bengali-Muslim and Muslim—a process that began in early twentieth-century East Bengal, as I outlined in earlier chapters. I contended that the idea of “Bengaliness” was strongly incorporated into a rural-linked, delta-focused version of BengaliMuslim identity during the early to mid twentieth century. Chapter 4 revealed how this identity struggled and vied for some visibility in the bhadralok-led Bengali cinema of Calcutta in the 1930s and 1940s. Chapter 5 went further, and illustrated how the same identity of Bengali Muslims that is connected to the ethos of the Bengal delta drove the creation of the second Bengali cinema in post-1947 East Pakistan. The creation of Bangladesh as a new nation brought in a new identity—Bangladeshiness—in the block of the three usual suspects I mentioned above. In post1971 Bangladesh, the nonstop conflict and merger of these three and more identities in different ways and doses led the formation of national modernity towards a contested domain in which the Bangladesh nation-state played a principal part. In the case of popular cinema, the role of the nation-state was more palpable. The state imperatives were so central in shaping up a Bangladeshi film industry that this chapter positions the Bangla cinema as part of state-national modernity during the late 1970s to early 2010s.

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Let us first take a look at the breadth of Bangla cinema in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Bangladesh, which will help us to examine its relationship with the nation-state and market further. A quick view in this globalizing mediascape easily proves the omnipresence of this cinema. Here, the presence of this cinema as a popular cultural mode is very much visibly seen and audibly heard. In the cities and towns, huge, glittering billboards advertising the latest films can be seen in front of the major cinemas. The stars of popular cinema are the most frequently drawn subjects of the illustrations done at the back and sidebars of rickshaws and auto rickshaws in the cities and small towns.1 Bangla film songs blare from horn speakers, radio sets and audio players at family gatherings such as weddings and puberty rites as well as religious and social festivals, particularly in the towns and villages. All the radio stations in Bangladesh play songs from the popular films round the clock. Since the 1980s, there have been daily “sponsored” radio programs featuring soon-to-be-released films. Songs from the latest films of Bangla cinema were first made available on audio tape in the 1980s, and then moved to CDs; now they can be downloaded onto mobile phones from corner shops on any urban street. Wherever one moves within Bangladesh, most of the time he has to listen to film songs or film-related programs on radios or CD-players. Roadside tea stalls, restaurants, barber shops, grocery stores in the urban and semi-urban areas, as well transport vehicles, are all equipped with these radio-cum-CD-players. Television also regularly enhances the presence of Bangla cinema within the everyday lives of ordinary people. Satellite television channels have become accessible to urbanites since the mid 1990s. However, most people in rural Bangladesh still watch Bangladesh Television (BTV), the state-run public television. The broadcast of a popular Bangladeshi feature film on BTV at any time of the week was and is the most-loved television program for ordinary Bangladeshis. In mid 1997, it was noted that the presence of school and college students decreased on Saturdays because of midday film broadcasts on BTV.2 During late 2014, alongside BTV, more than 25 private satellite television channels broadcast Bangla popular films every day. On a given day, one can watch a dozen or more feature films of Bangladeshi origin on television. The weekly film programs are also broadcast through every television channel. The most popular is a program that presents song-and-dance sequences from the latest films and is anchored by a film star. Dependent upon the mass popularity of Bangla cinema, a print industry has also flourished. Numerous Bengali film magazines are published and circulated in and around the cities and small towns. All the serious dailies and weeklies also devote one or more sections to gossip and news of the film industry, a trend that started in Dhaka in the early 1950s. Alongside the newspapers and magazines, stationery such as postcards, notebooks, writing pads (to be used by high school students), calendars, albums—all bearing the pictures of the film stars, are also available on street corners. There can be no doubt that Bangla cinema, as produced by the Dhaka film industry, has emerged as one of the most popular modes of entertainment for the

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 145 newly urbanized population in a globalizing Bangladesh. Film scholar Alamgir Kabir predicted more than three decades ago that “Bangladesh will certainly be among those few countries where the cinema will probably continue to survive even when it will have moved into the museums of other countries.”3 As popular Bangla cinema is the cinema for the majority population, many describe it as the “mainstream” cinema. In this way, it is the Bangladesh cinema that developed in a nation-space called “Bangladesh” during the last four decades. This popular cinema is sometimes short-handed as the Dhakai cinema (as because the film production industry is centered in Dhaka)—a notion popularized by middle class film critics that attaches a bit of negative connotation to its populist character. Whatever we call it, this popular cinema targets a very distinct market sector, a “Bangladeshi” audience. This audience comprises mostly Bengali Muslims in the postcolonial nation-space called Bangladesh as well as, to a lesser extent, Bangladeshis scattered in many major cities around the world. Such a national market for local Bengali-language cinema alongside the state-level efforts of constructing a “Bangladeshi” identity amid the globalizing forces of the era, drove the Dhaka film industry to sustain a popular cinema from the 1970s onwards. During the later decades of the twentieth century, the Bangla cinema of Dhaka had become the larger and stronger of the two Bengali cinemas, bypassing the other Bengali film industry located in Calcutta in India. Despite being much older than the Dhaka film industry and the base for some renowned Indian art cinema film-makers like Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, the “first” Bengali cinema industry of the world, based in Calcutta, adopted a smaller, regional role, serving only the Bengali-speaking audiences of West Bengal in India. Indian-Bengali film historian Shomeswar Bhowmik pointed out that during late-1960s the annual average production of the Calcutta film industry declined from 28 to 52 films per year in the mid 1950s.4 On the other hand, the Dhaka film industry came into being as a full-fledged production industry only in the mid 1960s. In its first decade—that is, between 1966 and 1975, it produced on average 28 films each year, the same number of films produced by Calcutta in the late 1960s. However, since 1976, the Dhaka industry has seen a dramatic increase in the number of films produced annually. During 1976–1983, it produced an average of 42 films each year, with including 50 films being made in 1979. This number has gone up to an average of 67 films each year during 1984–1992, including 78 films in 1989.5 This upward tendency of film production continued in the late 1990s and beyond. The Dhaka film industry produced a total of 645 feature films during 1996–2003. This means that during these eight years, it produced an average of 80 feature films per year.6 The highest number of feature films (92) was released in 1997 and again in 2000.7 In other words, since the mid 1970s, the annual film production industry in Dhaka has increased at a rate of 25–30 percent every five years or so, while the Calcutta industry has seen a sharp decline in the number of productions since the 1960s. While the Calcutta film industry produced 46 films per year in the 1950s, this number decreased by 35 percent during the 1960s to

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1980s (that is 30 films per year).8 It seems clear that out of the two Bengalilanguage film production industries in the world, the Bangladesh film industry became stronger than its Indian counterpart during the 1970s and 1980s. From a film industry that produced fewer than 30 films a year in the early 1970s, this industry produced 80–90 feature films a year during the 1990s and 2000s. The level of growth was not restricted to films; cinema theaters also increased dramatically in this period. Bangladesh saw an astounding 400 percent increase in the number of cinema theaters between 1971 and 1984. There was an unprecedented rush to build new cinema theaters in Bangladesh from the early 1970s. According to Alamgir Kabir, there were only 110–122 cinemas in operation in East Pakistan in the 1960s. During 1972–1975, within the first three-year period of independent Bangladesh, the number of theaters almost doubled (from 120 to 220),9 and doubled again in the next eight years. As quoted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), from 220 theaters in 1975 the number of theaters jumped to 444 in 1984. Over the next decade, this number tripled, and film historian Anupam Hayat notes 1,400 cinemas in 1994.10 However, BBS noted the existence of only 767 cinemas in 1990.11 On the other hand, the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC) claimed that there were nearly 1,800 cinemas in Bangladesh in 2001.12 At around the same time, the influential daily Ittefaq noted that there were 1,175 cinemas in Bangladesh.13 Despite the discrepancies among these sources, and though some cinemas in the major cities were closed down in last few years,14 one can still argue that in the 2000s there were around 1,000 cinemas in Bangladesh. Alongside the increase in film production and exhibition venues during the late 1990s, cinema attendance also rose in Bangladesh—especially in rural areas. The National Media Survey of 1998 notes that 16 percent of rural people visited cinemas regularly compared to 11 percent in 1995. The survey also records a 2 percent rise (from 20 percent in 1995 to 22 percent in 1998) in the number of urban and rural viewers who went to the cinema at least once in three months.15 In other words, though there is only a 10 percent rise in the total national film viewership during 1995–1998, an almost 50 percent rise in viewership in rural Bangladesh is seen in this period. This data substantiates the way Bangladesh cinema transformed itself in the 1980s and 1990s to become an entertainment medium for the poorer and less-educated populations living in semi-urban areas—a transformation that began in the early 1980s. Four senior economists based at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies summarize the transformation of its popular cinema in this period: With much higher capital requirements, it became critical to reach a mass audience. The result has been the transformation of the cinema into a vehicle of mass culture which is tawdry, cheap and vulgar. More sophisticated audiences now depend on the VCR for their visual entertainment.16 Amid such aesthetic judgments of middle-class intellectuals that negate popular cinema, its overwhelming presence and the geometric expansion of film production,

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 147 exhibition and reception in a rapidly globalizing Bangladesh has largely been been overlooked by local and international scholars. Despite the fact that Bangladesh developed and sustained such a vibrant popular cinema industry alongside some major Indian popular cinemas during the last few decades, this industry is not wellresearched. By focusing on popular cinema here, I am examining the lesser-studied discourse of Bangladeshi cinema. By contrast, most commentators at home and abroad have been more enthusiastic about analyzing the discourse of art cinema (which I explore in Chapter 7). To date, none of the critics have asked the important questions, such as: How did the Dhaka film industry manage to survive and expand into such a large, vibrant, vernacular popular cinema in the last four decades? What role did the Bangladesh nation and its population did play in this process? How is this cinema related to the construction of identities and the national modernity of the majority population (that is, Bengali Muslims) in Bangladesh? Asking, and answering, these questions, this chapter locates the characteristics and changes of the discourse of Bangla cinema of Dhaka over last four decades. I aim to point out here that through some direct nationalizing drives of the nation-state in the exhibition and production sector and because of the expansion and diversification of the genres and audiences of Bangladesh popular cinema in recent decades, this cinema expanded into one of those rare species of mediumsized, vernacular-language national film industries. It manages to survive, almost ignoring the Hollywood film industry, which is considered to be a major threat to many film industries in the world. This success lies in the fact that as a “national” popular cinema, Bangladeshi cinema addresses a vernacular and wellguarded audience; that is, Bengali Muslims and some non-Muslims and nonBengalis living within the postcolonial state of Bangladesh. I find that the nation-state not only nationalized this cinema, it also took measures towards vernacularizing this film industry as well as its capital. In this way, the Bangla cinema of Dhaka is one of the few non-Western entertainment cinemas that, in Paul Willemen’s words: “have managed to prevent Hollywood from destroying their local film industry.”17 This chapter is going to take a comprehensive look at the genealogy of “Bangladeshi” popular cinema. Here, my objective is to delineate how the creation and sustenance of this cinema—as a national-popular cinema—is linked to the nation-state and the national market. I investigate how this cinema has been patronized by the nationalist state and the middle class, eventually nationalizing and vernacularizing it during 1970s onwards. As a response, this cinema, whilst addressing a vernacular “Bangladeshi” audience, constructs a particular kind of nationalist discourse that contributes to the formation of nation-state modernity in a globalizing Bangladesh. I find the words of Partha Chatterjee appropriate in this context, “the cultural identity of a nation is neither immemorial nor naturally given. It has to be fabricated, most deliberately so under the auspices of the nation-state.”18 When a film starts in Bangladeshi cinemas, a hoisted national flag is shown on screen, and a soundtrack of the national anthem is played. The members of the audience stand up to show respect to the Bangladesh nationstate, which is symbolized through the flag and the anthem. This is a clear

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example of how the nation-state and political-nationalist Bengali Muslims want popular cinema to be a part of what I call nation-state modernity. This chapter therefore investigates why and how the Bangladesh nation-state and the state-nurtured film-capitalists designated the contemporary, popular filmindustry certain roles in the establishment and maintenance of a dominant public sphere. This is the “national” public sphere that is engaged in guarding the interests of the middle-class Bengali Muslims leading the nation-state through hegemonic rule. Bangladesh popular cinema, through its institutions and texts, serves this national public sphere, “the subject of evening news, the ‘nation’.”19

The Nation-state and national imagination in post-1971 Bangladesh The idea of the nation and role of the nation-state went through violent twists and turns in independent Bangladesh. In the 1970s, the way that cultural-nationalist leaders of Bangladesh imagined a national modernity for the new nation—following on from the ideals of middle-class cultural modernity as envisaged in the 1950s and 1960s—was based on “cultural autonomy to the delta. . .a new national culture . . . [based on] language, a regional style and a search for modernity.”20 In August 1975, some lower-ranking military officers organized a coup and killed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh and the key leader of the 1960s cultural-nationalist struggle. This political change towards military rule meant a shift of focus for the Bangladesh state and its driving force: from culturalnational modernity to nation-state modernity. Such a radical transformation towards a “Bangladeshi” modernity was quickened through the political-economic mechanisms of military governments led by General Zia and General Ershad during 1976–1990. The 1975 political shift gave more power and freedom to transnational capital, enabling it to enter and move within Bangladesh and further expand the industrial public sphere. Politically, as Hamza Alavi noted, this change let “a new bureaucratic-military oligarchy with outside aid . . . consolidate its position and power.”21 The successive military regimes led by General Zia during 1976–1981 and by General Ershad during 1982–1990 used transnational capital for capitalist development and strengthened the formation of a certain kind of nation-state modernity, undermining the discourse of cultural-national modernity that was the ideal of the Bengali-nationalist Awami League during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The motto of the Zia regime was similar to that of the Ayub regime in the 1960s. Willem Van Schendel found that Zia’s takeover “echoed that of General Ayub Khan in 1958, almost down to the script of his address to the nation.”22 In the words of another Dutch sociologist, Westergaard: The regime which came to power after the downfall of Sheikh Mujib had many of the characteristics of the Pakistan regime, which was governed by a bureaucratic-military oligarchy. [. . .] The policies pursued by the new regime were also reminiscent of that period.23

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 149 For example, the Zia regime dropped the nationalization scheme of the Mujib government and emphasized the role of private entrepreneurs in working towards rapid industrialization in the late 1970s. Instead, it handed back a good number of the nationalized industrial and economic units to their owners, which eventually fattened the emerging group of local capitalists.24 The state-sponsored thrust for capitalist development, as well as the construction of a Bangladeshi modernity, continued in the 1980s and 1990s. This thrust was effectively driven forward by a small group of Bengali-Muslim capitalists close to the state. Rangalal Sen, in 1985, defined the power elite who were at the top of Bangladeshi society and who constituted less than 5 percent of the population. They were large property-owners in the cities and villages, traders and industrialists connected with multinational companies and government bureaucrats and military leaders. Sen refers to a study that highlighted a group of 5,000 families who have friends and relations sitting in upper positions in all state departments and who thus control the politics and economy of Bangladesh society.25 There is no doubt that such a handful of Bengali-Muslim capitalists made use of their influence in order to gain massive wealth during the military regimes of 1975–1990—a process that started back in the Ayub Khan era of the 1960s. From the late 1970s onwards, the emerging capitalists attached to the state, as well as the state itself, imagined Bangladesh society as a coherently united and idealized community. The national elite engaged in imagining Bangladeshi nationhood and nation-state modernity from the 1970s onwards seemed to create a monolithic picture of Bangladesh that tended to make the nation look like a largely undifferentiated and more-or-less stagnant entity. They wanted to see that the nation “that emerged from the 1971 war was overwhelmingly and essentially Muslim. . . .Bangladeshi nation was the ultimate manifestation of the delta’s Muslim-Bengali identity.”26 However, one can locate numerous fissures in contemporary Bangladesh society. One can easily identify it as a “stratified society,” drawing upon the taxonomy of societies proposed by American feminist sociologist Nancy Fraser. The above examination of the political and economic leadership of 1980s and 1990s Bangladesh confirms this society, in the words of Fraser, as one “whose basic institutional framework generates unequal social groups in structural relations of dominance and subordination.”27 Bangladesh society, at the micro level, is fragmented into numerous communities and groups, and this eventually leads us to take a different view to that proposed by both capitalists and the state. Social fragmentation is not only based on larger questions of nationality or cultural identity, as is often argued by official institutions. British anthropologist, David Abecassis, pointed out that: In Bangladesh, the world-views and beliefs of a rural landless woman who calls herself a Muslim could be in many respects similar to that of a rural landless woman who calls herself a Hindu, and what marks them out from each other is not so much what they actually believe but the cultural practices of the community they belong to. . . . Kinship, language, patron-client

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Popular cinema, nation-state and market relationships and other elements of inter-relationship are more important delineators of community in a society where survival is the issue each day than are matters of creed.28

In this way, the key criteria of social division are related to the shared interests and cultural practices of a smaller community. In particular the wealth, occupation, education and location of a person work together and in a complex way to determine one’s social standing. Generally, when most of these grass-roots markers work similarly for a group of people in a similar fashion, they call themselves a community or “jati.” While, “jati” literally means “nation,” it is used in Bangladesh to mean communities of all kinds and sizes. Dutch anthropologist Willem Van Schendel demonstrated in the early 1980s that it could be applied to ethnic groups (Bengali jati vs. others), religious groups (Muslim jati vs. Hindus), occupational groups (peasant jati vs. others), the nation-state (Bangladesh vs. India) and so on. But in daily life, jati is used to mean a small or not-so-large group of people; for example, a community of fishermen or a sub-caste among the Hindus or Muslims living slightly outside a main village could call themselves a jati. In this way, in the eyes of the ordinary people in Bangladesh, the whole society, in the words of Willem Van Schendel, “is made up of a number of mutually exclusive social groups.”29 Such fragmentation is continuously strengthened by a sense of regionalism and kinship prevalent among people, mostly in the villages, but also in the towns and cities. Therefore, who comes from which district or sub-district and village, and who is related to whom in a kinship bond, could determine one’s fate with regard to employment, education, marriage and so on. Because of such “staggering differences of culture, race, religion, wealth, language and literacy”30 among people in contemporary Bangladesh, the construction of a standard national identity towards Bangladeshi modernity becomes extremely important. Along with various social and cultural institutions, popular cinema serves to construct a fictive notion of nation-state modernity in 1970s to 2010s Bangladesh. Throughout this period, popular film industry structures and texts have had to maintain an alliance between the mercantile capital of the emerging film capitalists and their main sponsor, the Bangladesh nation-state, whilst contributing to the sense of a Bangladeshi nation-state modernity. This is a modernity that works “to reproduce dominant ideology and, above all, to simulate the fictive coherence and transparency of a public sphere that is not one.”31 In the rest of this chapter, examining the institutional and textual modes of Bangla cinema in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, I focus on the relationship of popular cinema to both the Bangladesh nation-state and market forces. I identify, amid rapid urbanization, globalization and commercialization, how Bangla cinema proved itself to be a vernacular, but profit-making popularculture industry. In order to demonstrate the relationship between this industry and nation-state modernity, I take a strategy of moving from the institutional context to the textual mechanisms of the Bangladesh film industry. I begin with an analysis of the political and economic context in and through which this

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 151 industry functioned and expanded in recent decades. Here I assess the nationalizing efforts of the state, together with newly developed local capitalists, to devise a national popular cinema in 1970s–2010s Bangladesh. I identify three different initiatives on the part of the nation-state that helped to shape this cinema as a “Bangladeshi” popular cinema. These are: a ban on the screening of South Asian films in local cinemas; imposing a taxation system that helped profiteering by film exhibitors; and the partial financing of popular films through the state-run Film Development Corporation (FDC) studio. I analyze how these three state-national initiatives shaped and maintained the institutional environment of Bangla cinema and enabled it to serve as a “Bangladeshi” cinema over the last four decades. After narrating the nationalization and vernacularization of the exhibition and production institutions of this cinema in the final part of this chapter, I enter the textual world of Bangla cinema to assess how its texts responded to the state’s nationalizing efforts. I analyze two representative texts from the two major genres of this cinema to show how they not only normalized but also contested the notion of Bangladeshi nationhood on screen.

Bangla cinema as a national popular cinema in Bangladesh: the homogenizing initiatives of the nation-state This section highlights how the Bangladesh nation-state employed the Bangla cinema of Dhaka to help create a standard national identity and to protect local film capitalists and maximize their profit-making. Through various “national” incentives and constraints, they made sure that Bangla cinema would provide the maximum financial gain for the state, keeping a large share for the major capitalists—that, is the film exhibitors—and leaving a small share for the smaller stakeholders—the film producers. I contend that this popular cinema was nurtured in a state-nationalist environment—within a chaotic capitalist setting because of the interests of the state and the state-linked “Bangladeshi” capitalists. They wanted to churn out as much as possible from this “golden goose,” and to survive within a vulnerable industrializing environment, whilst promoting a standardized “Bangladeshi” national identity. This ambiguous attitude of the nation-state towards popular cinema has resulted in the strong and conservative control of this institution by the state. It can be said that the Bangladeshi power elite’s ambivalent concept of the role of cinema culminated in attempts to assert and maintain, in the words of Annette Hamilton, “a curious repressive-modernist control over the political/social consciousness of a society plunged headlong into a postmodernist global economy.”32 Below, I analyze three major state-national efforts towards industrializing Bangla cinema during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These exemplify mechanisms of the nation-state and its elite in managing popular cinema in a repressive modernist manner in contemporary Bangladesh. The first initiative—the complete ban of the theatrical exhibition of Indian and Pakistani popular films—provided local film capitalists with a readily available national

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audience. Two other important institutional frameworks of Bangladesh popular cinema that were brought forward by the nation-state were changes in filmexhibition taxation and the production and financing of popular films through the state-funded FDC studio. These “rules of the game”—the institutional parameters of Bangladesh popular cinema as constructed and revised by the nationstate—ensured that popular cinema retained its Bangladeshi characteristics, served only Bangladeshi audiences and thus upheld Bangladeshi modernity. No to the neighbours: the ban on South Asian films in theaters The first and foremost drive to homogenize the Bangladesh film industry on the state’s part, was to ban the screening of Indian and Pakistani popular films in Bangladeshi theaters. As the films of these South Asian nations had been screened in local theaters since the 1910s, they were considered to be a major threat to local films. This nationalist intention to keep the whole domestic market for Bengali-language, local popular films only clarifies the state’s attitude: the film industry’s essential role was to produce a “Bangladeshi” cinema for a “Bangladeshi” audience. Starting in the 1960s, the ban was in force for around five decades—it is still on, even in the globalizing mediascape of twenty-firstcentury Bangladesh, though Indian popular films in DVD or VCD format are available at every street corner in the cities. The order banning Indian films was first issued by the Ayub government of Pakistan during the 1965 India-Pakistan War. This timing clarifies the fact that the Pakistan state utilized a peak moment of pan-Pakistani nationalism to issue the historic ban, a step that ensured that only “Pakistani” films could be screened in both parts of the country. The film capitalists of Lahore, Karachi and Dhaka demanded this ban, as Indian Hindi and Bengali films had always been considered as the main rivals to Urdu and Bengali popular films produced in 1950s and 1960s Pakistan. The war that broke between Pakistan and India in September 1965 gave the state a suitable window of time to issue the ban. The Pakistani leaders took the decision on the ban on September 10, 1965, just four days after the war started.33 The Pakistan state and the local film producers used the discourse of pro-Islam (and anti-Hindu, anti-Indian) Pakistani identity successfully to make the ban work. No film historian in Bangladesh has interpreted the ban and its background with due emphasis. In addition, they normally overlook the fact that in the early 1960s, the two groups of Pakistani film capitalists—producers and exhibitors— fought with each other over the banning of Indian film releases in Pakistan theaters. In 1962, for the first time, the Pakistan government banned the showing of Indian films for five years, following the suggestion of the Film Investigation Committee. The exhibitors started a legal battle against the decision. Then, in 1963, the High Court of Pakistan declared this ban to be illegal upon considering a petition lodged by the film exhibitors.34 I suggest that this legal battle between the Pakistani state—being ready to ban Indian films—and local film exhibitors and distributors—wanting to screen them—in early 1960s Pakistan is an

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 153 important instance of negotiation between the nation-state and the cinema industry in a post-colonial nation-space. After the state lost the legal battle, it waited for an opportune moment in which to implement the ban against Indian films. The war that broke out between Pakistan and India in September 1965 seemed a suitable nationalist moment for the state to order the ban, which was effected through a notification made with the powers conferred by an act passed two years previously—the 1963 Censorship of Films Act.35 The relevant section of the act gave the government the power to decertify “a . . . class of certified films. . . in the interest of the local film industry, or in any other national interest.”36 I argue that the ban against Indian films imposed during the 1965 war between India and Pakistan signifies the state’s intention of homogenizing Pakistani cinema solely to forward a state-sponsored national identity. However, I emphasize the 1965 ban because of its relevance to Bangladesh cinema between 1970s and 2010s. After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the Pakistani ban against Indian films was kept in action, using similar nationalist rhetoric, by the Bengali-nationalist government led by Sheikh Mujib. In 1972, just after the liberation war, leading distributors and exhibitors of Bangladesh cinema expected that the newly-established, pro-Indian government of Mujib would again approve the exhibition of Indian popular films in Bangladesh, as was happening in pre-1965 East Pakistan. In the words of Alamgir Kabir: Veteran producers were reluctant to launch new films as they were not quite sure . . . about how much concession in the film sector would be made for the benefit of the film industry of India as a gesture of goodwill by the new Bangladesh Government to a country that, admittedly, played a vital role in the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistani yoke. . . . However, with active encouragement from higher level . . . the fear subsided quickly enough.37 Khan Ataur Rahman, a veteran film director-producer between during the 1960s to 1980s, recalled that when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was approached about the exhibition of Indian films in 1972, he declined such a proposition, saying: “tell them, those films will not be shown in Bangladesh.”38 Sheikh Mujib and other Bengalinationalist leaders of the new state not only kept the ban on the theatrical exhibition of Indian (Hindi and Bengali) films, but also quickly issued a complete ban on the screening of Pakistani (Urdu) popular films.39 In 1972, in a similar manner to the Ayub regime of 1965, they also made a notification making use of the same section of the Censorship of Films Act of 1963 as a legal instrument to order the ban against the showing of Urdu films in Bangladesh.40 Thus the culturalnationalist leaders of the early 1970s made sure that local popular cinema films did not need to compete with their major competitors—films made in other major film centers within the Indian subcontinent. The state-level commitment of keeping a well-protected domestic market only for Bengali-language, local popular films made the Dhaka film industry thrive after 1972. These two bans, which are still in force in Bangladesh, exemplify how the nation-state and cinema in Bangladesh made use of the nationalist discourse of

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the time. Like the timing of the 1965 war, Mujib and others used a peak moment of Bengali nationalism, that is 1972 when Bangladesh was liberated, to order this ban against Urdu films produced in Lahore and Karachi. The idea of a pure Bangladeshi identity that could be jeopardized through Indian (-Hindi and -Bengali) and Pakistani (-Urdu) films has ensured that, since 1972, no Indian or Pakistani film can be shown in theaters in Bangladesh. There is no doubt that such state-national protection for a national audience that can, or will, watch only Bangla films produced in Dhaka and that should have no access to popular transnational films, has determined the character of local popular cinema as a “national” cinema.

Taxation and profit-sharing in film exhibition: nationalist protection against subcontinental popular cinemas Alongside protecting a “national” exhibition environment for popular cinema, the state enabled flexibility in the system of taxation on film exhibition in the early 1980s, which can be seen as another major effort to expand as well as homogenize the Dhaka cinema as a national popular cinema. I previously described this cinema as a “golden goose” for the state, as it has always earned large sums of tax money from the film-exhibition sector. The Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC) claimed in the early 2000s that, in previous years, film exhibition in Bangladesh brought in around 300 million Taka (five million US dollars) in taxes for the State Exchequer.41 The state earns such high amounts from popular cinema in contemporary Bangladesh due to the high rate of “amusement tax” it charges on film exhibition there. The postcolonial state of Bangladesh inherited the method of taxation of the film-exhibition sector directly from the colonial period. The colonial state started the taxation on film exhibition with the Bengal Amusement Tax Act of 1922. The Pakistan government modified this, created the Bengal Amusement Tax Ordinance of 1957 and imposed an amusement tax of 70 percent on the ticket price of a film. In the 1960s, the tax was between 70 percent and 110 percent, depending on the class of the ticket issued. In the early 1970s it rose to between 75 percent and 125 percent, while in 1974–1975, the tax increased to 100–150 percent of the entry price.42 Kabir claimed that in 1974–1975, the rate of film viewing tax in Bangladesh reached a level of 162 percent of the entry fee, “an unbeatable world record.”43 The rate of amusement tax continued to increase in the late 1970s. As Quader calculates, during 1973–1979, the increase in this tax was 189–313 percent. In 1982, film audiences in Bangladesh paid a tax of 165–213 percent (depending on in which “class” the viewer sat) of the basic entry fee charged for a ticket.44 The taxation on film exhibition in Bangladesh took a new turn as the government started a new taxation mechanism in cinemas from October 1983. The capacity-based tax, as it was called, transformed Bangladesh cinema into a larger, popular-culture industry and encouraged it to serve the “national” public sphere at a time when Indian and Pakistani films started to penetrate the Bangladesh market

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 155 in the form of video. This new method of collecting tax from the theaters, based on capacity, seemed quite profitable to the exhibitors and theater owners and also to the film producers and distributors. Under the capacity-based tax system, the entry fee to a cinema is calculated as the summation of the basic entry fee, the air conditioning charge and the amusement tax that is equal to (or 100 percent of ) the entry fee. The cinemas pay the tax in advance weekly installments, as the amount to be paid is determined by the Revenue Department, based on an assessment of the capacity of a particular cinema. Each theater has to declare their number of seats and screenings per week to the Revenue Department. By assessing the location of a theater, the Revenue Department asks it to pay between 5 percent (for a rural theater) and 50 percent (for a theater in major cities) of the amount it would earn if the theater was full in all the screenings taking place during the week.45 As the new tax (100 percent of the entry fee multiplied by 5–50 percent of the capacity) is much lower and easier to manipulate than the previous “pay-perviewer” taxation system, cinemas in contemporary Bangladesh have witnessed large profit-making overnight. The pay-per-viewer taxation system was based on the actual viewers buying tickets for a particular show. Viewers had to buy a set of revenue stamps along with their cinema tickets. As this system used a form of advance tax, the cinemas had to buy these stamps beforehand from the Revenue Department, which they would then attach to the tickets. Cinema tickets could not be sold without these revenue stamps, which provided concrete evidence that the viewer had paid the exhibition tax. This tightened taxation system was difficult for cinemas to manipulate. However, under capacity-based taxation, most of the theaters declared their capacity to be much lower in order to lower the weekly tax instalment.46 Second, theaters defered the weekly installments, arguing that certain weeks were very slow, and thus creating bad debts that were never paid. Quader noted that such corruptive measures decreased the revenue income of the government from film exhibition by 25 percent during the mid 1980s. Because of the large amount of unpaid taxes, the government had to lodge certificate cases against some 200 theaters in June 1988, and some theaters had to close down.47 The capacity-based tax system thus proved to be a very profitable system, especially for the film exhibitors and, to a lesser extent, for the producerdistributors of Bangladesh popular cinema. During the years 1983–1989, both the number of cinemas and the annual production of films saw a sharp rise. By 1989, this rise had resulted in around a 90 percent addition to the existing number of cinemas (from 400 to 750) and films produced in 1983 (from 40 to 78).48 The number of newly built cinemas and the increased number of films produced after 1983 signify that the capacity-based tax worked as an invigorating force for Bangladesh popular cinema. It helped the state-national policy of keeping the “national” character of Bangladesh cinema intact amid the increasing availability of banned Indian and Pakistani films on video in the cities and towns of Bangladesh. Like the ban on Indian and Pakistani film screenings in the mid 1960s, this new taxation of the early 1980s can also be seen as an incentive that was offered

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to theaters to keep their doors open so that the state could retain a “national” film-exhibition environment in Bangladesh. It was a handout provided to film producers and exhibitors to fight the antagonistic giant of video through which the Bangladeshi state feared that Indian and Pakistani films would flood Bangladeshis with anti-national entertainment. The Bangladesh government started to allow the import of video-players whilst announcing the budget for the fiscal year 1979–1980. Just after that, the chairperson of the Bangladesh Film Exhibitors’ Association, Iftekharul Alam, and renowned film director Dilip Biswas commented that from now on there would be cinemas in every household and that the audience in theaters would decrease dramatically.49 Film exhibitors in Bangladesh again felt the same fear in the late 1990s, when they had to cope with the invasion of cable television. The president and secretary of the Dhaka Film Exhibitors’ Group complained in October 1997 that the film-exhibition business in Bangladesh was under serious threat from “video channels” (the cable-connected local network put up by suburban satellite television service providers), which were now showing newlyreleased local films. Audiences could watch these films sitting in their homes by paying a small monthly fee, so audience numbers in theaters would decrease. While middle-class audiences had stopped going to cinemas (since the early1980s), as they could watch all the “Indian higher standard films and television programs” on video, lower-income audiences were solely responsible for enabling film theaters to survive. But as these people could also watch the new Bangladeshi films through the “video channels” now, film producers would soon be on the streets and film exhibitors would have to close down theaters because they could not afford further losses.50 The film business did not come to a halt by the end of 1997, as the film exhibitors forecast here. Rather, 1997 turned to be a record year when the Bangladesh film industry produced its highest number of feature films (92). This happened because of the huge profitability of the film-exhibition sector. Within a few years, however, the state renewed its pro-exhibitor role by slashing more highest rate of capacity-based tax by more than half—from the previous rate of 125 percent to 50 percent of the entry price.51 This lowering of the exhibition tax in 2002 was also a new incentive provided to film producers and exhibitors by the state. It was intended to help them in their battle against the new giant of satellite television, which was permeating Bangladeshi households with Indian films too easily. Because of this “nationalized” and profitable state-governed exhibition environment of Bangladesh popular cinema, pro-state film exhibitors, in collaboration with intermediaries engaged in film distribution, not only control the box office but also the film production sector. Renowned Indian art cinema filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, who made his well-known film Titas in Bangladesh in the early1970s, made the following bitter point to illustrate this pro-exhibitor environment of the Bangladesh film industry: In Bangladesh film exhibitors are actual directors of the films. Films are made as per their satisfaction and films might be stopped on their orders.

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 157 They collect the money at first; then they hand money to the distributors when they find it convenient. The distributor whenever feels comfortable pays the producer.52 The crux of the problem lies in the fact that there are many fewer cinemas than are needed in Bangladesh. Quader demonstrated that in 1991 there were 0.34 cinema seats for every 100 people in Bangladesh. This is only one-sixth of the minimum number of cinema seats (two seats for 100 people) proposed by UNESCO.53 Naturally, because the number of cinema screens is low, there is a high demand among film producers for suitable theaters for the release of their films, especially in big cities like Dhaka, Chittagong, Narayanganj, Khulna and Rajshahi. Producers of each new film want to make sure that their film is simultaneously released in most of the theaters in these cities, so that the films can earn a larger share of boxoffice profit. Therefore a well-balanced formula of sharing the box-office profit between the producer and the exhibitor is non-existent. There are a number of methods in practice and most of these are manipulated in favor of the exhibitors; the producer normally gets a thin share of the profit. Kabir gives an account of the system of sharing box-office profits in the mid 1970s. He refers to a Sequence magazine survey, that revealed that the state received 62 percent of box-office earnings as tax. Then the exhibitor received 19 percent, while the distributor and producer gained 17 percent and 2 percent respectively.54 What is notable is that the producer received only 2 percent, while the distributor, who brokered the film, grabbed eight times more profit than the producer. There are two declared methods in use for profit-sharing in the exhibition sector of Bangladesh cinema. The first one, the method used for releasing a new film in cinemas in the big cities can be called the “percentage method.” It means that the producer-distributor and the exhibitor will receive certain percentage of the box-office profit. For each of the parties, this could be in between 40 to 60 percent. However, it should normally be 50 percent for each. This “fifty–fifty” rule of profit-sharing for new films continued to be the norm in the 1980s and 1990s, except for a few years in the mid 1980s, which witnessed the period of capacity-based taxation. During these early years of capacity-based taxation, when both new films and outlets for film exhibition in Bangladesh dramatically increased, the film producers and distributors (most of whom were producerdistributors) fought for a larger share of the profit. By establishing the Film Release Committee, comprising the representatives of film exhibitors, distributors, producers and directors, they ensured a 55–60 percent share of the earnings of a newly released film in this period.55 The 50–50 method has been in practice since the early 1990s. However, the share of the exhibitor increases and the producer-distributors’ share decreases in the second- or third-week run of the film.56 Cinemas in smaller towns rent the films for second- or third-release using a fixed-rental method. These small theaters rent the film, paying a small fee for a fixed period of time ranging from two weeks to a month.57 All these unequal (that is pro-exhibitor) methods of profit-sharing have been in place through direct action or non-action, on the state’s part, in the film-exhibition sector.

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The nation-state through pro-exhibitor taxation and profit-sharing methods, made sure that local, pro-state film capitalists, especially those investing in film exhibition, received substantial profits. This process ensured the vernacular and homogenous “Bangladeshi” character of cinema screenings by keeping nonBangladeshi film culture away from these cinemas.

The state of/in production and financing of popular films in contemporary Bangladesh The above analysis of state initiatives to keep audiences in Bangladesh protected from neighboring popular cinemas shows that in contemporary Bangladesh cinema, the exhibition sector plays crucial role in keeping the vernacular character of this cinema. The exhibition environment of Bangladesh cinema also determines the modus operandi for the film-production sector. This situation ensures that the production environment of Bangladesh popular cinema is also aligned to the homogenization efforts of the state and exhibitors towards making it a “Bangladeshi” cinema. Therefore, as with the film-exhibition sector, the filmproduction sector of Bangladesh popular cinema is also under the control of the nation-state and the pro-state film capitalists. The fact that the main studio (FDC) and all other film-production facilities (production houses, labs etc.) and distribution agencies are housed in the town of Dhaka, the national capital of Bangladesh, exemplifies the dependency of this industry on the state and its elite. Within the pro-state and pro-exhibitor production context of popular cinema in contemporary Bangladesh, the financing and production of films also depend on gestures by the state and sponsorship from the film exhibitors. The state literally lends shooting, editing, sound-dubbing, lab and printing facilities to almost all popular feature films at its Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC) studio in Dhaka, the only full-fledged 35 mm film-production studio in Bangladesh. Actually this studio was established (as EPFDC, but popularly called FDC) through the nationalist support of middle-class Bengali Muslims in late 1950s East Pakistan, as I explained in Chapter 5. From the 1970s till the 2000s, the Dhaka-based FDC studio played a central role in producing a definitive film culture expressing a sense of national modernity of the Bangladesh nation-state. This kind of high dependency on a centralized, state-run facility in the production sector of Bangladesh cinema is very different from the industry in neighboring India and Pakistan, two other South Asian nations with large national film industries. In these countries the existence of large, full-service film-production facilities under private ownership is almost commonplace. As FDC provides film producers with necessary technical supports on credit, the state automatically partners the financing and production of almost all popular films and is also the main financier for FDC.58 Though FDC likes to describe itself as a “self-financing, promotional, development-oriented organization,” it has received huge amounts of funding from the state during last few decades. From its inception in 1957 and up to 2000, it received 445.98 million Taka (US$7.5 million) as a “development Loan” and 82.00 million Taka

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 159 (US$1.4 million) as “share capital.” Until 2002, it also had outstanding loans from the film producers amounting to 35 million Taka (US$0.6 million).59 Film historian Quader claimed that in June 1992, outstanding loans held by the FDC amounted to more than this (41 million Taka, or US$0.7 million),60 which is visible evidence of the influence of film capitalists over the mechanisms of the nation-state, or at least the bilateral relationship between these two. Not only the state, within the informal and half-baked capitalist structure of the Dhaka film industry, but also the pro-state film exhibitors partner in the financing of popular film production, in most cases investing their “black money”—undeclared and untaxed capital earned—dubiously. Renowned Bangladeshi political commentator Badruddin Umar points out that after the liberation war of 1971, a group of indigenous capitalists in Bangladesh started to invest in various highyielding sectors. These included “black” sectors, such as smuggling and black marketeering, as well as “white” sectors like transport and popular cinema. Umar complained that this local-born capitalist class in early-1970s Bangladesh came to invest in film production and distribution only to “whiten” their money. At the same time, they made quick and substantial profits from popular cinema by employing methods like the non-payment of income tax (as most transactions in the film industry are kept undocumented and undeclared).61 For these investors, film production was a less risky, but high-profit, business that could be compared to serving as a commission agent for the distribution of imported consumer goods or to acting as a state-enlisted construction contractor—roles which were also linked with protective gestures from the state. Being allied with the state in this way, they intended to multiply their dubiously earned wealth in the shattered economy of war-devastated Bangladesh in the 1970s. Not only in the 1970s, but also during the 1980s to 2000s, the postcolonial state of Bangladesh knowingly permitted the permeation and circulation of “black money” in the film industry. Alongside lending film-production facilities at the FDC studio, another strategy of the state in assisting the emerging film capitalists can be identified. In the words of film-maker and critic Kabir: Unlike his Western counterpart, [film producer] is here a mere financier with or without some say in the selection of stars. Usually successful businessmen . . . venture into film production where “black” transactions are quite prevalent in the hope of earning fat and quick profits and other “fringe benefits.”62 Film historian Mutsuddi finds that most major actors and technicians of Bangladesh cinema receive a substantial portion of their fees as undeclared and thus untaxed money. He locates a cycle of “black” money here: film producers who pay the stars such money also collect similar undeclared money from the exhibitors and the exhibitors then adjust their books to show lower sales at the boxoffice.63 In this cycle of maximizing undeclared and untaxed money in the contemporary scene of Bangladesh popular cinema, the businessman who functions

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as the “film producer,” collects finances for the underproduction of film from various sources, some of whom might like it to be kept clandestine. First, he receives technical services on credit from the FDC studio. After he has done nearly half of the shooting, he pre-sells the film and collects advance payments from a group of distributors and/or exhibitors who control bunches of cinemas in different regions of Bangladesh. When the film is in the post-production stage, the producer collects another advance sum from the exhibitors, especially those owning theaters in big cities. With this money, he pays the FDC studio for the technical facilities. Imrul Shahed and Mahmuda Chowdhury, two well-known film critics of Weekly Bichitra, noted in the 1990s that, using this process, the film exhibitors finance at least 33 percent of the budget of a film.64 Film journalist Anwar Al-Deen records that in 2000, film producers received an advance of 70,000 Taka (approximately US $1200) from each theater in Dhaka at the post-production stage.65 There are around 100 cinemas in Dhaka, Chittagong and Narayanganj, the three most-populated cities in Bangladesh, where new films normally get their first release.66 If a new film is released in only half of these cinemas, the producer can collect an advance of around 3 million Taka (approx. US$60,000)—nearly half of the total production budget of a film. Film journalists Shahed and Chowdhury, and film director Matin Rahman, point out that because of such exhibitor-based financing of films, if the film producer can somehow put together around 40 percent of the total budget, he proceeds to produce a film.67 Film critic Shahed also notes that this practice of team-financing gave many partner-producers a chance to become full-fledged film producers in the Bangladesh film industry during the 1990s.68 In other words, this pro-state, pro-exhibitor process helped emerging entrepreneurs to establish themselves as film-capitalists within the national, vernacular environment of the Bangla cinema of Dhaka. However, this multi-sourced financing of popular films has created a vulnerable film-production industry in contemporary Bangladesh. In the absence of any formal loan facility offered by banks or other financial institutions, the producer has to organize the finance of a film from FDC first and then from a host of exhibitors. This complex and uncertain process can take much longer than anticipated, and sometimes a film is never completed69.

The Bangladeshi nationhood and the texts of the Bangla cinema What kinds of film texts and genres are being produced and reproduced within the state- and exhibitor-driven institutional environment of Bangladesh popular cinema? I raise and answer this question in the last section of this chapter. In other words, I ask: How “Bangladeshi” are the Bangla cinema films that have been actively domesticated by the nation-state and film exhibitors in last five decades? By dissecting and comparing two representative texts from the two major genres—the social films and the action films—I portray the textual modes of this cinema in fabricating the perception of “Bangladeshi” nationhood in an age of globalization.

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 161 First, let us take brief look at how film texts are created in Bangladesh popular cinema. The norm of multi-source financing of film production here necessitates that the film has to be completed and released very quickly, as the investors want their return at the earliest opportunity. Being enticed by the “film producer,” most financiers come from film-exhibition or multiple (other) business sectors. They are keen to get a return on their investment and realize profits quickly, and they are least concerned with the difficulties, preparation and length of time associated with producing a film that will look credible on screen. The cast and crew, including the director of the film, are thus always under pressure from financiers to complete the film and so they all work in a “stopgap” manner. So, “ad hocism” has become a consensual procedure of producing a film in contemporary Bangladesh. Because of this quick-finish method, film stars in Bangladesh, unlike their Western counterparts, work in a number of films simultaneously—sometimes in five to ten films. More importantly, the whole industry depends on a handful of stars only. The most-loved stars can act in a dozen or more films in a given year. A leading film director in the FDC studio, Matin Rahman, pointed out that there are only four (or fewer) film stars on whose names films could be sold to the public and therefore putting their schedules together is always a fight with the impossible.70 For the whole year, the actors and crew of popular films work in two shifts, starting in the late morning and continuing until midnight (14–15 hours) almost seven days a week. Like the actors, a film director with a “star” image might direct three films at once and may end up directing six or more films in a given year.71 This quick-production film industry in contemporary Bangladesh produces film texts that are not well composed, let alone innovative in design. Therefore, the scriptwriters and directors here depend highly on a well-tested generic formula, sometimes copying whole sections or elements from Indian popular films. Whatever genre they follow, and however quickly they are put together, the film texts mostly commit themselves to explicitly serving the nationalist agenda of both the state and the film-capitalists. As I demonstrate below, both the social and action films, the major genres of popular cinema, attempt to forge a “Bangladeshi” identity on screen that is actually at stake in a globalizing Bangladesh in multiple ways. The “social” films are romantic melodramas that are supposedly addressed to female viewers, especially middle- and working-class women living in or around towns. These films, as sentimental family dramas, began by portraying males and females as simple and unproblematic iconic figures against the semitraditional social backdrop of 1960s East Pakistan. Later, the social films struggled to address and appropriate the complexities of gender and class relationships in a rapidly modernizing “national” society in 1980s–2000s Bangladesh. In these later films, the central characters are no longer idealist, rural-based male figures traumatized by the process of industrialization and coupled with one or two sacrificing and silent female figures prevalent in the popular “social” films of the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, the protagonists are increasingly facing the challenges of urbanization and modernization in a globalizing Bangladesh.

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This transformation of conventional social films was accompanied by the rise of a new genre in Bangladesh popular cinema. Action cinema, as a major genre mainly developed in the 1980s and 1990s, especially to meet the challenges brought about by new viewing options such as video and satellite television. Social films not only transformed the narrative strategy to suit the new media scenario, but also decreased in number, whilst action films became the staple of Bangladesh cinema from the mid 1980s, amid the threat of video. As a way of battling against Indian and other foreign films on video (and later on DVD and cable television), the major survival technique of the Dhaka film industry was to concentrate on producing action films with bodily actions from the mid 1980s. This exhibition of male and female bodies “in action,” although in different ways and of course for different reasons, can be located visibly in the recent action films of Bangladesh popular cinema. Most of these films can be seen as playgrounds for battles of the sexes, in which the male bodies are depicted as strong killer-heroes and the female bodies are supposed to be soft, vulnerable, victimized heroines signifying the well-accepted gender roles of Bangladesh society, as they are understood by the directors and scriptwriters of the film industry. The two films I detail below as illustrative “cases” were both produced in late 1990s Bangladesh. I use these films: Father as Servant (Baba Keno Chakor, 1997) and The Mother (Ammajan, 1999), two of the record money-spinners of the Dhaka film industry, as examples to illuminate the role of popular cinema texts in constructing Bangladeshi national identity. I examine how these texts contribute to the homogenization of Bangladesh popular cinema as “Bangladeshi” cinema and to the efforts of the nation-state and film capitalists in the exhibition and production of this cinema. Social film Baba Keno Chakor (Father as Servant, 1997) Father as Servant (1997) is a film that represents a new breed of social films in a globalizing Bangladesh, though the narrative and presentation of the film resembles the structure of a conventional “social” film of the yesteryears. Razzaque, the most popular hero in the 1970s and 1980s Dhaka industry directed this film. Popularly called “Nayakraj” (lit. The King of Heroes) Razzaque became an icon of such family-drama films of that time. This film is produced by his production-distribution company, Rajlakhshi Productions, which has earned fame for its popular social films. In Father as Servant, following the patterns of the conventional social films of the 1970s, almost all the incidents happen within the four walls of an extended, middle-class household in contemporary Bangladesh. Though there is no direct reference to any specific event of the 1990s, the film is full of clues that make it a story of contemporary Bangladesh. There is a reference to a suburb of Dhaka in the film, and one of the characters is said to be working in Chittagong, the second largest city in Bangladesh. The houses, gardens, cars, shops and streets depicted in the film communicate that this tale is happening in a middleclass household in the city of Dhaka.

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 163 The story (and plot) of the film goes like this: retired accountant Raqibuddin’s happy family starts to face disruption as his elder son Shakeel borrows a huge sum from him to solve problems in his business venture. Raqibuddin received this money as a retirement benefit and has saved it in order to meet the expenses of his daughter Khooshi’s wedding ceremony.72 Soon, Raqib’s friend proposes marriage between his son Asif and Khooshi. Raqib, his wife Shahana and Khooshi herself accept the idea happily. However, Shakeel says that he is unable to refund the money. Shakeel’s wife Julie remarks that everybody in the household is dependent on Shakeel’s income and it is not improper if he uses Khooshi’s wedding fund for developing his business. Raqib and Shahana feel disturbed on hearing Julie’s comment, but, seeing this, Shakeel does not stop Julie from insulting his parents. Khooshi goes to Asif ’s house and says that the wedding has to be stopped. The generosity of Asif and his father enable the marriage to go ahead and Raqibuddin does not need to spend money on the ceremony. However, the quarrel and conflict between Raqib, Shahana and their daughterin-law Julie increases, especially because of Julie’s mother’s ill intentions. Julie becomes the female head of the household, taking the keys from her mother-inlaw Shahana, and sending Raqib to do groceries on the grounds that the servants at the house are prone to stealing money from the grocery bill. She also sends Raqib to take lunch to Shakeel at his office and there Shakeel’s partner considers him to be a “good servant.” Feeling severely insulted, Raqib and Shahana leave the house. Raqib becomes a push-cart laborer and Shahana dies with the family photo in her lap. At the end, all of Julie’s evil plans are revealed by Raqib’s younger son Shameem and they all come to seek forgiveness from Raqib and take him back to the house. The story of Father as Servant is exemplary for Bangladeshi family-drama films. We see the disruption and dismemberment of a large, but tightly-knit, happy family throughout the development phase of the film narrative, while the cohesion of the family household is regained at the end of the film. Interestingly, there is almost no outside enemy or “villain,” who can be cursed for the conflicts developing among the members of the family. Normally, villains are important players in “action” films, the other major genre of contemporary popular cinema in Bangladesh. Actually, there are very few characters outside this central family in the film and only two of them can be blamed as minor criminals for the trauma the family goes through. All the conflicts happen and are also resolved among the members of the family household: the parents, two brothers, one sister and their partners. In this way, the supremacy of traditional family relations within a modernizing, patriarchal and semi-capitalist Bangladesh is the key theme of the film. In the very first scene, we see the members of the family around the dining table. Raqib, the father, receives and delivers comments on the contemporary affairs of his children here. This meeting seems to be a daily ritual and it emphasizes the father as the head of the family, while the mother is his obedient deputy and caretaker of the household. This dining together also communicates the importance of the family to the lives of its individual members (that is, individual is not

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“independent,” a person always needs to consider how he/she can be a better “part” of the family). Because of that, we see the family photograph several times in the course of the narrative until Shahana, the mother, dies with the very same photo in her lap. This theme of the centrality of family is extended in Father as Servant as a collision between traditional and modern forces and identities. For example, the film highlights the fact that traditional family roles (e.g. the parent–child relationship) need to be followed, even if somebody gains wealth and, in turn, achieves a luxurious lifestyle (which happens with Shakeel and Julie in the film). Thus one can feel that there is a palpable fear of modern/Western forces among traditional characters like Raqib and Shahana, who in turn empathize the agonies of the lower strata of the middle class in contemporary Bangladesh. These people see rapid modernization as a threat to their traditional, semi-rural lifestyle. Therefore the transfer of the household keys from Shahana, the mother-inlaw, to Julie, the daughter-in-law, becomes critically important in Father as Servant. Though it repeats a well-known cliché of South Asian family dramas, it also represents the conflict between tradition (extended family) and modernity (nuclear family). Similarly, the later roles of Raqib as a “servant” and a pushcart laborer signify not only the conflict between traditional and modern roles, but also the anxiety of the Bangladeshi lower middle classes of being modernized through the rapid globalization of economy and culture. Action film Ammajan (The Mother, 1999) Ammajan (The Mother), an influential film text of the late 1990s and early 2000s, represents the post-cable, television action genre of Bangladesh popular cinema. Kazi Hayat, a director well known for high-pitch action films in the contemporary film industry of Dhaka, scripted and directed the film, while Manna and Moushumi, two of the leading film stars of this industry, played the role of the male and female protagonists (Badsha and Rina). Manna became the most reliable male star of action cinema by playing action hero characters in numerous films before and after The Mother. Many of these were written and directed by Hayat. These action films by the Hayat–Manna duo turned out to be some of the most popular films in the Dhaka industry; for example, Dhar (Catch, 1999), Koshto (The Pain, 2000) and Minister (The Minister, 2003). In the case of The Mother, which also earned huge success at the box-office, the Hayat–Manna duo turned into a trio, incorporating Dipjol—a new actor-cum-film-producer at that time. Dipjol, who became a very popular actor during the 2000s and who was criticized for bringing extreme violence into Bangladesh popular cinema, played the role of the villain (Kalam) in The Mother. This is one of his early films as an actor-producer that can be said to begin the extremely violent sub-genre of popular action cinema in contemporary Bangladesh. The other notable point about this film is the incorporation of Shabnam—a renowned female actor of social films in the 1960s and 1970s—as Ammajan, “the revered mother.” This character is an exceptional mother—who leads the narrative of the film by

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 165 encouraging her obedient son, Badsha, to fight and kill the rapists—who signals a reworking of the cinematic representation of women in Bangladesh in this age of globalization. The plot of The Mother develops chronologically, following a simple cause– effect chain. In the pre-title, pre-history part of the narrative, young Badsha’s father (Lal Mia), a plumber in a government department, suddenly dies in an electrical accident. While claiming for Lal’s pension, his wife (Badsha’s mother) is raped by Boroshaheb (the head of the department). An adolescent Badsha, while waiting outside the room, understands that something terrible has happened to his mother and he runs, stabs and kills Boroshaheb. The stabbing is shown as “freeze” shot. We see the film titles on the “freeze” shot and learn that Badsha has received a 14-year jail term for his actions. It can be said that Lal Mia and his wife are shown as idealist male and female characters, as they would be shown in a conventional social film. They are portrayed as people from the yesteryears—an imagined non-modern age, when life was easy and people were innocent. However, with the death of Lal Mia and the rape of his wife, the screen presence of such innocent characters is quickly minimized. They are shown only in the “preamble” phase of the narrative and they are not continuously portrayed as glorified icons to be respected and followed. At the end of the preamble, we see young Badsha lose his “innocence” by stabbing and killing boroshaheb. This is a common narrative mechanism seen in action films, and it is used in order to enter the “present” or “modern” phase of the narrative. At such points, one of the main protagonists normally loses his/ her innocence through a conflict or an accident related to modernization and urbanization. After the titles on the “freeze” shot of the killing of boroshaheb, we enter the main narrative world of the film that is contemporary Bangladesh. Here we find that Badsha has become a very prominent gangster (called a mastan in Bangladeshi culture). He now lives in a huge villa with his mother (Ammajan), though since the day of being raped by boroshaheb, she has stopped talking to her son. Badsha sees it as his mission to kill rapists and their collaborators. He continuously does this by stabbing them with a huge knife whenever and wherever he can locate a rape incident. Each time, he informs Ammajan and takes her blessings (touching her feet, that is salam to elders in the Islamic fashion) when he sets out for such a task. He also accompanies his mother to the local Islamic shrine every week, where she prays and hands out money and food to the poor. In the same spirit Ammajan, Badsha and his gang go out to deliver relief among flood victims in rural areas. It should be noted that there was a massive flood in Bangladesh in late 1998, presumably when The Mother was under production. In the course of relief operations, Ammajan locates Rina, a beautiful young woman busy in handing out relief materials with another team. She considers Rina to be a suitable partner for Badsha, and as soon as Badsha understands Ammajan’s wish, he runs to Rina and informs her that she must marry him. Rina happens to be the daughter of a former minister and she is engaged to a fellow university student, Mijan, whose parents live in the US. Mijan’s parents want him to move

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to the US as soon as possible, but he is reluctant to leave because he loves Bangladesh so much. In these circumstances, Badsha starts stalking Rina here and there and repeatedly tells her that she must marry him. In order to get rid of Badsha, Rina’s father, the ex-minister seeks help from Kalam, whom he rescued from the street and groomed to become a well-known gangster. Kalam who is somewhat indebted to Badsha, does not take the task seriously. However, when Badsha kidnaps Rina from the airport at the point where she and Mijan are fleeing to the US, Kalam goes to Badsha’s place, shoots Ammajan and brings Rina back to her father. Badsha, already attired as a groom, takes Ammajan to hospital and then goes to collect Rina so that Ammajan—before dying—can see him married to her. Badsha faces Kalam’s gang in the wedding center where Rina and Mijan are to be married. After Badsha kills most of Kalam’s mates, they have a face-toface gunfight and, eventually, Badsha shoots Kalam. Then he begs Rina to go to the hospital with him so that Ammajan can die happily. When they are leaving for the hospital, Kalam shoots Badsha from behind. Still, Badsha takes Rina to hospital. There Badsha, on Ammajan’s order, hands Rina to Mijan. Then both mother and son die in the same bed. This story of The Mother is presented in such a way that the viewers can experience the violent incidents vividly. As a sample of the extreme-violence sub-genre of Bangladesh action cinema, elements like killing, bleeding, gunfight, rape and chase are shown as essential ingredients (if not attractions) of the film. We see a number of deaths by stabbing, which include a close shot of the blooddrenched knife and the dripping blood. Several gunfights take place, and the last fight between Badsha and Kalam goes for a significantly long time and ultimately ends with the death of both protagonists. While the fights between macho men rule large parts of the diegesis of The Mother, conflicts between men and women are not depicted as vividly. Moreover, though a number of rapes are reported or mentioned in the film, only the rape of Ammajan is visually presented and few other rape victims are shown. Textualizing Bangladesh on Screen: Father as Servant and The Mother as “Bangladeshi” films Contemporary Bangladesh is palpably present both in Father as Servant and The Mother. The two major socio-cultural trends in globalizing Bangladesh, identified by Willem Van Schendel as “mofussilisation” and “mostanocracy,” are clearly present in both films. He noted the presence of a new wave of “mofussilisation” (provincialization) in 1970s and 1980s Bangladesh.73 “Social” films like Father as Servant put together and glorify such semi-rural sensibilities on screen, which are shown to be in conflict with the modern lifestyle of sophisticated urbanites. The bhadralok father could be looked at as belonging to the class of servants, especially because of his worn clothes—representing this conflict between provincial and metropolitan ideals in the heartless city quite clearly. Similarly, the rise of gangster rule or “mostanocracy” in 1970s

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 167 and 1980s Bangladesh society is textually articulated in The Mother. In this film, Badsha represents: the archetypal mostan . . . young, urban, armed and testosterone-charged. He acts officiously as the leader of a locality . . . he rules through fear, sometimes avenging wrongs but more often committing them himself. . . . [He] straddle the worlds of politics, the bureaucracy, the market and crime.74 In this way, The Mother as tale of the rise and fall of Badsha as gangster, is a somewhat realistic portrayal of contemporary Bangladesh. While Bangladesh as a social context is readily available in both Father as Servant and The Mother, thus making both films part of the vernacular popular culture framework of the homogenized “Bangladeshi” popular cinema, I note that there is an apparent absence of the Bangladesh nation-state in the two films. Almost no national institution that can be seen as an identity marker is clearly represented in either of the films. Even state-national organs such as the police and the courts (which are summoned to enhance the role of the nation-state in many of the popular films here) are not present. This tendency of keeping the nation-state absent or invisible on cinema screens suggests two possibilities. First, it posits the fact that, because of globalization, non-Western nation-states like Bangladesh became weaker than before, while other non-state institutions (such as new private companies led by provincial or “mufussil” businessmen in Father as Servant and teams of gangsters or “mostans” in The Mother) became stronger. In The Mother we also see the strong connection of some protagonists with Western modernity (for example, Rina and Mijan try to flee to the US because Mijan’s family live there). These elements indicate that the notion of strong, anti-colonial culturalnationalism, which is used to mobilize people of different identities under one big “national” umbrella against Western colonial nation(s)—what I term culturalnational modernity—is visibly weak and jeopardized in contemporary Bangladesh. The second possibility is probably more important. The apparent invisibility of the nation-state rationalizes the cultural identity of the community or group represented in the two films as the national identity for all Bangladeshis. For example, in both Father as Servant and The Mother we see the disintegration of a Bengali Muslim family in contemporary Bangladesh. The settings, costumes (especially of female actors), dialogs and props used in both the films clearly represent middle-class Bengali Muslims. In both the films, we see a number of traditional Islamic rituals such as burials, weddings, prayers, etc., that strongly communicate the fact that Bangladesh is a land of (and for) Muslims with Bengali ethnicity. This kind of portrayal of Bangladeshi society directly relates to post-1975 attempts by the state and middle-class Bengali Muslims to turn Bangladesh into a nation-state for Bengali Muslims only. This clearly undermines the cultural identity of minority groups such as non-Muslims (e.g. Bengali Hindus, Bengali Christians) and non-Bengalis such as hill-tribes living in Bangladesh. Thus the contemporary texts of Bangladeshi popular cinema not only represent the conflict between the nationalist discourse and global forces, but

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also these films re-organize Bangladeshi nationhood by covering up the conflicts within the nationalist discourse in an age of globalization. This is the role of Bangla cinema as “Bangladeshi” cinema, which has been designated by the Bangladesh state, film capitalists and nationalist middle classes associated with nation-state modernity in contemporary Bangladesh.

Conclusion The institutional and textual aspects of Bangladesh popular cinema that I present above make clear that it is an ambivalent cultural institution in contemporary Bangladesh. The state–cinema relationship, homogenization of exhibition and production environments, and textual characteristics of this cinema illustrate the role of the nation-state and the film capitalists in utilizing it as a profitmaximizing tool, as well as in using it to uphold their nationalist rhetoric, especially the political identity of being a Bangladeshi. I argue that in contemporary Bangladesh, nationalist forces and global modernity are constantly redefining the role of popular cinema, to meet the challenge of constructing a standardized “Bangladeshi” identity in, of and through Bangladeshi popular cinema. This strategy of normalizing a national identity mainly applies to Bengali Muslims of Bangladesh. Both the state and local capitalists use contemporary popular cinema to create this identity and to achieve the formation of nation-state modernity in order to discourage other kinds of cultural or national identity from competing with them. This strategy not only enables the state and local capitalists to suppress non-Bengali and non-Muslim identities lurking beneath the Bangladeshi national identity, but it also allows them to churn out as much as possible from this “golden goose” called popular cinema.

Notes 1 Jinat Zahan, “Star-Faces on Rickshaws,” Anandabhuban 2.17 (January 16, 1998): 15–18. 2 In Bangladesh the weekly holiday in educational institutions and state offices is Friday, the holy day, as per Islamic tradition. See, “Film Broadcast on Saturdays: Attendance decreases in Schools and Colleges,” Daily Janakantha (July 31, 1997): 4 3 Alamgir Kabir, Film in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1979), p. 92. 4 Someswar Bhowmik, Indian Cinema: An Economic Report (Calcutta: Papirus, 1996), pp. 120–1. 5 Calculated from the table in Mirza T. Quader, Bangladesh Film Industry (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993), p. 211. 6 Calculated from the data presented in the annual reviews on the Bangladeshi film industry published in various Bangladeshi magazines and newspapers of this period. See, Jai Jai Din 20.12 (December 30, 2003): 27, 19.12 (December 31, 2002): 35, 14.13 (December 30, 1997): 29 and 13.13 (December 31, 1996): 39, Weekly 2000 4.33 (January 4, 2002): 78, Daily Banglabazar (December 30, 1999): 16 and Anandabhuban 3.16 (January 1, 1999): 17. 7 Manik Zaman, “Now We Are All Waiters in the Film World,” Jai Jai Din 14.13 (December 30, 1997): 29; Juton Chowdhury, “Bengali Cinema: Annual Review 2001,” Weekly 2000 4.33 (January 4, 2002): 78.

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 169 8 Calculated from the table in E. Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 294–5. 9 Alamgir Kabir “The Cinema in Bangladesh,” Sequence 2.2 (Spring 1975): 17. 10 Anupam Hayat, “The History of Bangladesh Cinema: The Trends,” 6th International Dhaka Film Festival Bulletin 1 (January 20, 2000): 4. 11 Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), Statistical Year Book 1984. 12 “Financial Position and Benefits (of FDC),” www.fdcbd.com, viewed on February 27, 2002. 13 See “On the Lame Condition of Bangla Cinema,” editorial, Daily Ittefuq (September 27, 2000): 4. 14 For example, five cinemas in Dhaka were closed or transformed into shopping centers during 1999–2000. See “On the Lame Condition,” 4. 15 Khalid Hasan (ed.) National Media Survey 1998 (OMQ: Dhaka, 1999), p. 51. 16 Abu Abdullah (ed.) (1991) Modernisation at Bay: Structure and Change in Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Limited), p. 136. 17 Paul Willemen “The Third Cinema Question,” Framework 34 (1987): 25. 18 Partha Chatterjee, “Introduction,” in Partha Chatterjee (ed.) Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of Indian Nation-state (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 18. 19 Miriam Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Permutations of the Public Sphere,” Screen 34.3 (1993): 197. 20 Willem Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 185–7. 21 Hamza Alavi, “The State in Post-colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh,” in Harry Goulbourne (ed.) Politics and State in the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 68. 22 Willem Van Schendel (2009) p. 196. 23 Westargaard, State and Rural Society in Bangladesh: A Study in Relationship (London: Curzon Press, 1985), p. 90. 24 Ibid. pp. 92–3. 25 Rangalal Sen, Bangladesh: The Social Structure (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1991), pp. 84, 91–3. 26 Willem Van Schendel (2009) pp. 202–3. 27 Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 80. 28 David Abecassis, Identity, Islam and Human Development in Rural Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Ltd., 1990) pp. 4–5. 29 Willem Van Schendel, Peasant Mobility: The Odds of Life in Rural Bangladesh (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1981), p. 292. 30 David Abecassis (1990) pp. 4–5. 31 Miriam Hansen, “Foreword,” Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Oskar Negt and Alexandar Kluge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. xxix–xxx. 32 Annette Hamilton, “Cinema and Nation: Dilemmas of Representation in Thailand,” in Wimal Dissanayke (ed.) Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 142. 33 “Ban on Indian Films,” Weekly Chitrali (September 10, 1965): 1. 34 Quader (1993), p. 431. 35 Notification no. C-40/65-Film. See, Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Center (AMIC), “Bangladesh: Cinema,” in http://sunsite.nus.edu.sg/amic/ country/banglad/bangcine.html, accessed: August 11, 2002. 36 Abu Nasr Md Gaziul Hoque (ed.) “The Censorship of Films Act, 1963,” Mass Media Laws and Regulations in Bangladesh, (Singapore: AMIC, 1992), p. 115. 37 Kabir (1979) pp. 52–3. 38 Khan Ataur Rahman, “Tell Them . . . in Bangladesh,” Weekly Chitrali (April 13, 1990): 8. 39 Quader (1993) pp. 432 and 441.

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40 Notification no. FS/7F (Gen)-55/72/294(2). See, Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Center (AMIC), “Bangladesh: Cinema,” in http://sunsite. nus.edu.sg/amic/country/banglad/bangcine.html, accessed August 11, 2002. 41 “The Finance of FDC,” www.fdcbd.com, accessed February 27, 2004. The 2004 exchange rate is used here, that is 1 US $= Taka 60.00. 42 Quader (1993) pp. 407–8. 43 Kabir (1979) p. 82. 44 Quader (1993) pp. 410–11. 45 The importance of a theater depends on the level of urbanization and the density of the population of a particular locality. 46 Such falsification happens in collaboration with Revenue Department officials, who are supposedly bribed by the cinemas. During my field visit to some theaters in cities like Dhaka and Faridpur, and country towns like Rajbari, Narayanganj, Madhukhali and Savar during 1998–2000, theater managers were hesitant in quoting their actual capacity. 47 Quader (1993) p. 415. 48 Quader (1993) pp. 211 and 397. 49 “Film-makers Afraid for VCR and TV” Weekly Bichitra 8(7) (June 29, 1979): 74. 50 “Stop Illegal Film Exhibition through Video Channels,” Daily Ittefaq (October 23, 1997): 20. 51 Manik Khondokar, “We need Operation Clean Heart in Film Industry,” Jai Jai Din 19.12 (December 31, 2002): 37. Khondokar complained that no exhibitor lowered the cinema ticket price, despite the tax cut. 52 Cited in Quader (1993) p. 391. 53 Quader (1993) pp. 396 and 401. 54 Kabir (1979) p. 82. 55 Quader (1993) pp. 376–79. 56 Anwar Al-Deen, “The Exhibitors Put 300 Films on Hold,” Daily Ittefaq (September 21, 2000): 14. 57 Matin Rahman, “Film Production and Marketing,” (Dhaka, unpublished manuscript, 1995): 17; Kabir (1979) p. 81; Quader (1993) p. 380. 58 This monopoly role of the state and FDC is in slight decline, as many popular films in the 2010s are produced via digital technology, for which film-makers rely on a few private facilities in Dhaka. However, the FDC studio is also striving to acquire digital equipment soon, which will probably bring back its central role. 59 “Financial Position,” Official website of BFDC, www.fdcbd.com/business_industry. html, accessed February 27, 2002. 60 Quader (1993) pp. 326 and 341. 61 Badruddin Umar, “On Cinema of Bangladesh,” Intercut 4 (1989): 135–6. 62 Alamgir Kabir (1979) p. 78. 63 Chinmoy Mutsuddi, Social Commitment in Bangladesh Cinema (Dhaka: Bangladesh Arts Academy, 1987), p. 126. 64 Imrul Shahed and Mahmuda Chowdhury, “Cinema 1993: The Year of Business Development,” Weekly Bichitra 22.33 (January 7, 1994): 141. 65 Anwar Al-Deen (2000) 14. Al-Deen reveals that because these films flopped and the box-office could not even get the amount paid as advance to the producer, the theaters kept the film print. 66 In late 2000, though five cinemas closed down, there were still 46 cinemas in Dhaka. See “On the Lame Condition,” 4. 67 Imrul Shahed and Mahmuda Chowdhury (1994) 141; Matin Rahman (1993) p. 17. 68 Imrul Shahed, “Cinema: Annual Review 1994,” Weekly Bichitra 23.28 (December 2, 1994): 60. 69 Around 50 incomplete or postponed feature film projects were started between 1973 and 1995 in Bangladesh. See Omar Faruk, “Fifty Films Postponed in FDC,” Daily Manavjamin, p. 12, November 22, 2001.

Popular cinema, nation-state and market 171 70 Interview with the researcher, Dhaka, December 2006. 71 Numerous names of actors and directors can be cited here. However, two examples will suffice. In 2000, Dipjol, an actor renowned for playing villains in action films, acted in 24 films. See Juton Chowdury, “Cinema: Still the Old Stars,” Anandadhara 3.60 (January 2001): 19. Delwar Jahan Jhantu, a well-known film director in Bangladesh, directed 50 films alongside writing 150 film scripts and 700 film songs during his 19-year career. See Ahmed Azad, “One Jhantu: 50 Films in 19 Years,” Fortnightly Tarakalok (November 15, 1998): 14. 72 Wedding ceremonies are seen as major life events in middle class families in Bangladesh and also in the whole of South Asia. Such ceremonies are elaborately depicted in many South Asian (notably Bollywood) films of the last few decades. Among the Bangladeshi middle classes, the ability to offer a huge ceremony on the occasion of a daughter’s wedding is seen as essential on the part of the bride’s father. 73 Willem Van Schendel (2009) p. 251. 74 Ibid. pp. 252–3.

7 Cultural modernity and art film discourses Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema?

The preceding chapter focused on the popular film industry, especially on how the film industry was homogenized for and by the national-modernist agenda of the postcolonial state. The Bangladesh nation-state has given special protection to the popular film-exhibition and film-production sector in the last five decades, because of its mission to construct a “Bangladeshi” cinema as alternative to the major cinemas of the region, such as Bollywood cinema, Indian-Bengali cinema and Pakistani-Urdu cinema. In response, popular cinema constructed a particular nationalist discourse that contributed to the formation of nation-state modernity in a globalizing Bangladesh. In Chapter 6, I argued that the Bangladesh nationstate, together with local capitalists, made sure that popular cinema created a “Bangladeshi” identity that displaced the notion of Bengali-Muslim identity, a preferred identity promoted through Dhaka-produced Bengali cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. The present chapter shifts the focus from the popular film industry to a parallel, competing discourse that has been labeled art cinema. This term is used as a commonplace and self-evident phrase in Bangladesh. However, no commentator systematically specifies what is meant by art cinema in Bangladesh. Generally, a film text that is not part of genre-based popular cinema film production is “art cinema” for Bangladeshi audiences. This has happened beacuse different groups understand art cinema differently here, and there are a variety of art cinemas in and outside of the Bangladesh film industry. Some of these films are quite different to what is normally considered to be art cinema in the West. Here, I aim to outline the genealogy and workings of the notion of art cinema that developed in various forms and shapes in post-1971 Bangladesh over last four decades. I analyze how the cultural-modernist middle classes produced and circulated an independent cinema since the 1980s and presented films under the umbrella of “art cinema” both in Bangladesh and the global arena. In the same period, one can identify the discourse of “middle cinema” (that is, an “art cinema” mode within or on the margin of the popular film industry) that developed as a localized “Bangladeshi” art cinema for local audiences. This cinema was also supported by the nation-state. Opposing the inward-looking trend of this vernacular cinema, the independent cinema discourse represents the globalizing attempt of Bangladeshi art cinema. With no visible support from the

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 173 state, or sometimes opposing the state-national will, this recent discourse took an ambitious turn to reach the audiences of “international” art cinema—the critical audiences based in Western metropolises. The key questions I pose in this chapter are: What is art cinema in the Bangladeshi context? How is this related to the idea of art cinema as developed in the West? How has this Western-modernist notion been borrowed, perceived and recycled by the middle classes here? How did the middle classes become successful in founding and disseminating such a discourse of “Bangladeshi” art cinema at the national and global level from the early 1980s onwards? In order to answer these, and position the cultural-modernists in relation to the notion of art cinema in these recent decades, I start with the backdrop and examine the modernist and aestheticist engagements of middle-class Bengali Muslims with the medium of cinema since the 1960s through what I call a film club discourse. So I delineate Bangladeshi independent cinemas below with two objectives. First, I demonstrate how these cinemas represent different methods used by Western-educated, cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims in creating a discourse of art in the realm of cinema. More importantly, I position the development of such cinemas in contemporary Bangladesh as being in the process of borrowing and indigenizing the understanding and appreciation of art cinema from the West. I trace how these independent cinemas of the last five decades embody the cultural-national aspirations of the national middle class, the cultural-modernists who used the “Western” notion of art cinema as part of their mission of achieving, in the words of Partha Chatterjee, “the cultural project of nationalism: to produce a distinctly national modernity.”1 These cinemas, as pro-West, transnational genres, oppose the monolithic portrayal of the Bangladesh nation and its sense of modernity as nation-state modernity. Using different narrative worlds to locate the nation and its people, the proponents of the independent cinemas put forward these as homegrown but also as part of a globalizing art cinema. Through these films they made self-conscious statements towards the multiplicity of identities of Bangladesh within the framework of a cultural-national modernity—their preferred version of national modernity. The consolidation of this sense of cultural modernity in early-1970s Bangladesh has been articulated by Willem Van Schendel: The Cultural elite of Bangladesh sought to develop a national culture that combined local authenticity with modern appeal. Religious symbols disappeared. Instead, the country’s official national symbols referred to the delta’s natural beauty and abundance.2 The “national culture that combined local authenticity,” as mentioned by Willem Van Schendel here, is constantly narrated and highlighted in the two different, but interconnected (and sometimes, overlapping) trends of independent cinema in Bangladesh that I detail in the course of my analysis below. The first one, which I call artisanal art cinema, developed as and through what has been termed the “Short Film Movement” in 1980s and 1990s Bangladesh. The other trend

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that developed out of this artisanal mode during the 1990s to 2010s, may be called an “international” art cinema. This trend, successfully appropriating the textual and institutional norms of global art cinema, made its presence on the global stage showcasing an authentic “Bangladesh” in various international film festivals. The rest of the chapter progresses in three steps. In the first step, I present the relationship between the Western-developed notion of art cinema the and Bangladeshi middle classes. Here, first situating the middle-class modernists in between Western art cinema and Bangladesh popular cinema, I delve into how film club discourse in this land made possible a strong and ongoing interaction between the modernist middle class and international art cinema over the last five decades. In second part of the chapter, I analyze how this middle class developed a discourse of independent cinema between the 1980s and 2010s—dividing it into artisanal and globalizing art cinema. I outline how and why this cultural-modernist group shaped these art cinema discourses as national-modernist ventures that could also be showcased on the international platforms representing the postcolonial modernity called Bangladesh. In the last section of the chapter, I demonstrate how the recent trend of Bangladeshi independent cinema was successful in playing dual roles. First, it proved to be a part of the national treasury of “high art,” as these films may function as the carriers of cultural modernity for the middle classes in contemporary Bangladesh. On the other hand, these films also became praiseworthy to Western arthouse audiences, though not all films could find the fine balance between being national and global at the same time. This duality ensured that these films— upholding the modernist aspirations of European art cinema—contributed to the sense of cultural-national modernity forwarded by westernized middle classes from Bangladesh. At the same time, they succeeded in being part of an international art cinema addressed towards a global modernity.

Middle-class cultural-modernists between Western art cinema and Bangladesh popular cinema At the outset, I attempt to define and locate the discourse of art cinema in the Western context and to explore how this notion has been absorbed as well as localized in the Bangladeshi context, especially by middle-class culturalmodernists in their attempts to negate the vernacular popular cinema. I will begin by simply asking: How did a mode of art cinema begin in the history of (Western) cinema? What were its institutional and textual parameters? How are these relevant for cultural-modernists in contemporary Bangladesh? Andras Balint Kovacs locates “Western” art cinema as modernist art in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s: The modern art film is cinema’s response to the postwar modernist wave in drama, literature, music, and the arts. Late modern cinema is not a style or practice but a form of modernist art, applying various stylistic solutions to express thoughts and feelings generally accepted in a specific period.3

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 175 In the early 1980s, Steve Neale, when clarifying the institutional parameters of art cinema in the Western context, outlined how art cinemas in Europe were actually developed out of the conflict between the domination of American cinema and emergence of the European national film industries. He also highlighted how European art cinemas created the contrasts “of genre versus personal expression [and] of trash versus taste.” Neale considers these art cinemas as national institutions articulating specific cultural identities. So he argues that: [T]he films produced by a specific national film industry will have in any case to differentiate themselves from those produced by Hollywood. One way of doing so is to turn to high art and to the cultural traditions specific to the country involved. Either way, the films will be shown in different cinemas and be distributed by different distribution networks. And they will be marked by different textual characteristics.4 David Bordwell, also writing in the same period, took efforts to establish the textual characteristics of art cinema in the West. He proposed a textual model of art cinema, referring to the exemplary films of well-known European filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s. Bordwell argues that, using ambiguous narrative, authorial signatures and realist devices such as real locations, real problems and psychologically complex characters, “the art cinema represent[s] the domestication of modernist film-making.”5 Bordwell locates the textuality of art cinema against classical cinema narration as established in the 1930s by the Hollywood studio system, Art-cinema narration has become a coherent mode partly by defining itself as a deviation from classical narrative. . . . [In art-film narration] the suzhet [plot] is not as redundant as in the classical film; . . . exposition is delayed; . . . the narration tends to be less generically motivated.6 What is notable is that, when articulating the institutional and textual patterns of Western art cinema, scholars like Bordwell, Neale and Kovacs are in consensus about the nationalist-modernist and European character of this discourse. Some films they forward as key examples of this discourse are also in common. For example, all of them see La Dolce Vita (1960), 8–1/2 (1963) and Persona (1966) as representative art cinema texts.7 However, the Bangladeshi notion of art cinema differs from the Western (European) notion of art cinema on various counts. The first and foremost is that the discourse of art cinema in Bangladesh is not caught in a conflict like the one between American cinema and European national cinema—a major reason for development of various art cinemas in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. As the threat of Hollywood to Bangladesh cinema is minimal, for the culturalmodernist middle classes, the local popular film industry itself, and the penetration of Bollywood films through non-theatrical distribution channels, represent the utmost threat to entertainment cinema in Bangladesh. This is a threat that can

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be compared to the role of Hollywood in some European nations, as noted by Neale. Thus the idea of art cinema here serves as a broad-based framework that houses an ensemble of marginal and not-so-marginal cinematic practices that in some ways work against the dominant discourse of local and Indian entertainment cinemas. Bangladesh, a postcolonial nation-space in South Asia, also differs from European national contexts. Here art cinema is more than a strategy to fight the domination of a large foreign and popular film industry. Here the anti-colonial, nationalist middle-class, who advocated art cinema over popular film culture, borrowed the concept of modernity and nationalism from the West. They take the role of art or independent cinemas in the 1990s and 2000s in the same vein of constructing a sense of cultural-modernity that is “national” for Bengali Muslims that they attempted through various art and cultural forms during the mid-to-late-twentieth century.8 Such attempts to articulate cinema as a national-modernist public sphere can be located in other South Asian nations too. Lester James Peries, the leading film-maker from Sri Lanka, laments how this process of identity formation by a national art cinema is at stake: I think you would find that [filmmakers] in practically every country struggling to establish an identity through film, the progress of a national industry has been crippled or adversely affected by foreign companies operating in these countries for many years. When a cinema is saddled with the problem of national identity, you will find that the resulting products are unacceptable to the audience for which they were made. The audience has been brainwashed . . . into accepting another form of entertainment.9 Using the same grieving tone as Lester Peries here, modernist Bengali Muslims locate Bangladeshi popular cinema as a non-modern and “foreign” (read antinational) cultural institution that is unable to be a part of their envisaged culturalnational modernity. These middle classes, engaged in building a modern national culture in Bangladesh, feel that popular cinema as a cultural practice pulls them back in their journey towards establishing a modern identity for the Bangladeshi nation. Appreciative of Western modernist art cinemas, they feel frustrated looking at the textual systems and reception modes of Bangladeshi popular cinema that are somewhat related to age-old folk-theatrical traditions of rural Bangladesh—which they consider to be pre-modern (or non-modern) textual and reception modes. Mofazzal Karim, a poet and former Bangladeshi High Commissioner to the UK, who headed the Bangladesh Federation of Film Societies and the Bangladesh International Film Festival committee in the early 2000s, finds that popular films are “nothing but the melee of hundreds of trashes coming out of the studios every year. The opium-fed and doped audiences are like Tennyson’s lotus-eaters. It is a pity. It is a shame.”10 The Director General of Bangla Academy, the state agency for the development of Bengali language and literature, thinks that:

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 177 “there will hardly be found a good film made in the country for a long time (my emphasis). 11 A leading media academic and Vice Chancellor of the University of Dhaka, Professor Arefin Siddique, admits that ‘our progress in the field of feature film [read popular cinema] was not satisfactory (my emphasis).”12 Because of this intellectual acceptance of the inferiority of Bangladesh (popular) cinema, no piece on Bangladesh cinema can be found in the voluminous threevolume History of Bangladesh 1704–1971 published by the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh in the 1990s, both in English and Bengali. However, this “comprehensive” history contributed scholarly pieces on other arts and media such as painting, fine arts, sculpture, folklore, drama and music.13 In this way, the middle-class, cultural-modernist perspective allocates no space for the existing mode of entertainment cinema in a “modern” Bangladesh. They consider popular cinema as unable and unwilling to disseminate the essential Bengaliness within the Bengali-Muslim identity. So, the perceived marginalization and/or absence of cultural identity in Bangladesh popular cinema created a “trash versus taste” (borrowing Neale’s phrase) attitude among the culturalmodernists. This can be taken as symptomatic of how the Western-educated middle class wants cinema to serve as a modernist art practice, not as a popular mode of entertainment. Drawing on certain kinds of national–realist idioms, modernist Bengali-Muslims therefore shaped the institutions and discourses around Bangladeshi art cinemas that I analyze below. These Western-educated, cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Bangladesh attempted to construct an indigenous art cinema that can be seen to be at par with the Hindu bhadraloks of nineteenth-century Bengal.14 They belong to a middle-class strata of Bengali Muslims that received higher education in a Western-style academia; in most cases they are bilingual (proficient in both Bengali and English) and normally they appreciate the mode of realism as practiced in Western literary and cinematic traditions. They serve in mid-to-high-level salaried jobs and in important positions in the social and political institutions that lay emphasis on intellectual efficiencies and an ability to adapt to a Western and modern environment. These cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims, a minority in terms of the whole population, opted to bring in “modernity” in a manner similar to Hindu bhadraloks—a process they initiated in colonial Bengal. They also created and sustained various Western-modern institutions—ranging from novels and fine arts to radio and cinema in 1950s and 1960s East Pakistan.15 As the popular cinema, being aligned with the nation-state, became expanded and industrialized from the late 1970s onwards (as I explained in Chapter 6), this group wanted art cinema to be a part of their envisaged modern national culture. In a bid to infuse the Western concept of modernity and realism into the realm of cinema, these middle-class cultural-modernists, in the words of Indian scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha, used in an Indian context, “invariably erect a mid-20th century European bourgeoisie’s notions of art into a self-evident, universally applicable norm.”16 The discourses of art cinema developed by the Westerneducated, cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims of Bangladesh advocated the

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normalization of such “European notions of art” as a “universally applicable norm” for developing a Bangladeshi art cinema. They then divided the film culture into two compartments: “commercial” cinema and art cinema. Here, I find relevant the view of Indian scholar M. S. S. Pandian, who noted, in the case of 1930s Tamil cinema, that “the elites . . . in retaining their exclusive claim to high culture, had to differentiate their engagement with cinema from that of the subalterns.”17 I find such differentiation among the middle-class Bengali Muslims in their claim to keep cinema within a cultural-modernist public sphere. They frequently refer to a “conflict” between popular/commercial and art cinemas, as they constantly negate popular cinema and glorify art cinema. The cultural-modernists vehemently argue against the fantasy-based textuality of popular films of the Bangladeshi and Indian film industry and describe these films as silly and cheap entertainment. Poet and social activist Farhad Majhar points out that middleclass Bengali Muslims treat popular films as merely “rickshaw-pullers’ films” and when they talk about these films, they do so only to dismiss these films as tasteless and primitive entertainment.18 Such a differentiating view of middle-class Bengali Muslims on cinema may be compared to what was articulated by the critics of Indian popular cinema in the 1950s. These critics concluded, in the words of Indian film scholar Ravi Vasudevan: the rational outlook required for the development of a modern nation state is still lacking, and the popular cinema provides us with an index of the cognitive impairment of the majority. . . .19 Rosie Thomas, in her pioneering article on Indian cinema in Screen in 1985, located such criticisms against Indian popular cinema which, she argued, were based on “unfavourable comparison with the Indian art cinema.” She noted that these commentators insist on evaluating popular cinema “according to the canons of European and Hollywood film-making.”20 This comment works in the Bangladesh context too, as I demonstrated on pp. 176–177 (this will also be relevant for the proponents of film clubs, as I illustrate below). A strong rejection of popular cinema from a cultural-modernist perspective prompted middle-class Bengali Muslims to agitate for a cinema that was modern, nationalist and artistic. They envisaged a Bangladeshi art cinema that fulfilled such a culturalmodernist engagement with cinema. This cinema, then, could be placed in the national-cultural repository alongside other well-respected art media and could also be shown around the world. How and why did the middle class in Bangladesh imagine this probability that a nationalist discourse of art cinema, based on Western-modernist ideals, might also become part of an international art cinema? This happened through a long process of cultural absorption that started in 1960s East Pakistan with the setting up of the first film club. The film clubs, introducing the classics of Western art cinema to the local cinephiles, eventually developed a group of

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 179 cine-literate middle-class individuals who started to show support for an art cinema modeled on European art cinema from the 1970s onwards. The detailed story of these film clubs, and their role in the appropriation of modernist cinema among the middle classes in Bangladesh, is presented in the next section.

Film club discourse, international art cinema and cine-literacy among the middle classes The film club discourse since the 1960s served as a site for the development of a certain kind of cine-literacy among the middle classes as well as the breeding ground for imagining and setting up a Bangladeshi art cinema that could go global. This discourse worked towards developing a discourse of Western-style art cinema as well as normalizing the textual patterns of Euro-American classics as standard film language. Such a Western-modernist approach to cinema began with the establishment of the first full-fledged film club of Pakistan, the Pakistan Film Society (PFS). Muhammad Khasru and others established the PFS in Dhaka in 1963.21 In March 1963, that is few months before the establishment of the PFS, some students at Dhaka University formed the Students’ Film Club, another contender to the title of “first” film club in Pakistan/Bangladesh. However, this club continued for only a year or so.22 The PFS almost singlehandedly initiated the appreciation of Western cinema among the modernist Bengali Muslims of the 1960s. Following in the footsteps of the PFS, the Chittagong Film Society (CFS)—the first film society outside Dhaka—was formed in 1967. In 1969, the Dhaka Cine Club was founded by veteran Alamgir Kabir. A passionate fan of Western art cinema, Kabir studied cinema in the UK in the early 1960s and returned to Dhaka in the late 1960s to participate in the modernist film movement of East Pakistan.23 Two other early developments that fostered a certain kind of cine-literacy as the normalization of Western art cinema practices among modernist Bengali Muslims need a mention here. First, some well-known European and American classics were released in Dhaka cinemas in the 1950s and 1960s. Alamgir Kabir noted that films like Bicycle Thieves, Bitter Rice and A Streetcar named Desire were shown in Dhaka at that time.24 Kaiyum Chowdhury, a renowned Bangladeshi painter, recalled that he watched Bicycle Thieves, Roman Holiday, Guns of Navarone, Spellbound, Moby Dick and Dial M for Murder in Dhaka cinemas. Chowdhury noted that in the late 1960s, this general release of European and American films in East Pakistan was stopped.25 Second, in 1950s and 1960s East Pakistan, modernist Bengali Muslims heavily appropriated Bengali-language realist films of the Calcutta film industry as well as the art films of Satyajit Ray, most of which were based on classic Bengali literature. The majority of these films narrated the modernization and identity formation process of Hindu bhadraloks in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bengal. I demonstrated in Chapter 5 that Asiya (Asiya, 1960), the first “art film” produced in the FDC studio in Dhaka, explicitly followed the footsteps of Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1956). The cultural-modernist Bengali

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Muslims and their film club discourse in 1960s’ East Pakistan were then influenced by what has been called the “Satyajit Ray School” (in the words of Indian scholar Ravi Vasudevan),26 a pro-West approach to perceiving cinema that developed in 1950s’ Calcutta. The Satyajit Ray School was initiated within the setting of the Calcutta Film Society (CFS) established in 1948, a year after India became independent. The CFS, one of the earliest film societies in South Asia, established by Bengali pioneers including Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Chidananda Das Gupta, inspired middle-class culturalists in Dhaka to come forward with this modernist appropriation of cinema.27 Mahbub Alam, a key organizer of the PFS-turned-Bangladesh Film Society (BFS) admitted that his visit to Calcuttabased film clubs influenced him to organize film club programs in Dhaka.28 Alongside Western films in cinemas and the influence of the CFS and Ray, the early film clubs of 1960s East Pakistan became sites where modernist Bengali Muslims could come together to appreciate and discuss highly regarded examples of Western cinema. These are the “best” works of the great authors of European art cinema, the kind of films used as examples of art cinema by Bordwell, Neale, Kovacs and other Western commentators. After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the general release of selected European and American film classics in cinemas was stopped. So film clubs remained the only way of appreciating Western film art for middle classes wishing to construct a cultural modernity in the realm of cinema in 1970s and 1980s Bangladesh. The PFS, changing its name to the Bangladesh Film Society (BFS), continued as the major platform for the promotion of European art cinema and American and Latin American classics in Bangladesh during this period. In 1975, the first direct intervention of cine-literacy occurred in Dhaka. In that year, the Bangladesh Film Society (BFS) arranged the first full-fledged film appreciation course in Bangladesh. Satish Bahadur, a professor at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, conducted the course. Many new film societies were formed in the 1970s and 1980s. The process of educating the middleclass modernists by normalizing Western cinema practices as standard continued through these film club programs. The clubs formed their first federate body in 1974. Alamgir Kabir became the first Secretary General of the Federation of Film Societies of Bangladesh (FSSB). However, in October 1975 another Federation, the Bangladesh Federation of Film Societies (BFFS) was formed with Syed Hasan Imam, a noted film-maker-actor as its president. The BFFS obtained membership of the International Federation of Film Societies in 1976 and the FSSB merged with the BFFS in the early 1980s.29 The film club programs included screenings of European art films and American classic films provided by the foreign embassies at their respective auditoriums, seminars and discussions. They also included occasional publications such as bulletins, magazines and books/anthologies publicizing the aesthetic greatness of these canonized Euro-American films. All these of course established a proWest mode of cine-literacy as the only possible mode in Bangladesh. In the 1970s, the film clubs, alongside the appreciation of Western film classics, imagined the development of a Western-model, Bangladeshi art cinema for the first

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 181 time. Issues, such as grants for art films, the establishment of a film archive and institute, scholarships for pursuing film training abroad, the banning of plagiarized films, etc., were high in the agenda of the film clubs at that time. However, only one of these major demands was fulfilled when the government established the Bangladesh Film Archive (BFA) in 1978. In the early 1980s, under the auspices of the BFA, locally-developed film appreciation courses started. Alamgir Kabir conducted the courses and a group of young, aspirant film-makers came forward to participate in them. Tareque Masud, Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel, three of the most accomplished and renowned art cinema filmmakers in contemporary Bangladesh, took part in these BFA courses at this time. The film club discourse that was bridging the local cultural modernity with a European enlightenment-derived “universal” modernity received antagonism from the state in Bangladesh in the 1980s. The nation-state in this period was propagating a pro-Islam national identity, which would serve as basis for its imagined nation-state modernity. In 1975, the government introduced censorship on film club screenings. In 1980, it introduced an unprecedented law called the Film Society (Registration and Control) Law, which brought the activities of film clubs under the control of the Film Censor Board. Under this law, using the same policies designed to censor commercial screenings of popular films, the Board was empowered to issue a censor certificate for each film to be shown by film clubs. Clubs needed to seek fresh permission for each single screening, even if the film had been previously permitted by the Board. Like a business organization, they also needed to submit an audited income and expenditure report each year to the Censor Board. Any violation was punishable by three months’ imprisonment and/or a fine of 1,000 Taka (equivalent US $60 at that time). Film clubs immediately descibed it as a “black law” and even in the 2000s, they kept demanding that the law was repealed.30 However, this law and overall state control on film clubs became insignificant in Bangladesh from the early 1990s. Like other places in the world, the film viewing options broadened and the inflow of foreign films multiplied. European, American and Asian films, though mostly pirated, became readily available on VCDs and DVDs in the big cities. The foreign cultural centers in Dhaka (e.g. the Goethe Institute/German Cultural Center, the British Council, Alliance Françoise, the Russian Cultural Center) who were partnering with film clubs during the 1970s and 1980s, supplying and showing art films mostly in 16 mm format, now could provide wide-screen video projection facilities. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, digital video technology also helped to spread the study of Western art cinema through film clubs in places outside Dhaka. In this period, out of 28 film societies who were full members of the BFFS, five were from outside Dhaka. Film clubs such as the Zahir Raihan film society, the Rainbow Film Society, the Chalachitram Film Society, the Ritwik Film Society, the Dhaka University Film Society and the Film Circle of the World Literature Center were regularly screening classic and contemporary samples of European and American cinema practices alongside conducting film

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appreciation courses and various kinds of workshops. The Movieyana Film Society and the Dhaka University Film Society joined the rally in the early 2000s and continue their efforts to promote a pro-West film culture today. The film club discourse thus forwarded the textual practices of European art cinema and other pro-Europe art cinema as the modern film language among cultural-modernists. Highlighting the textual characteristics of films by renowned film-makers of Western and non-Western cinema, this discourse constructed a generalized picture, considering all of them to be part of an “international art cinema.” The film clubs never focused on the specific contexts and institutional parameters within which these masterpieces were produced and circulated. This discourse, then, did not clarify the differences inherent in various cinema practices developed in different national and cultural contexts. It never differentiated a European national or art cinema from another; for example, Italian Neorealism from New German Cinema—two art cinema movements that happened in Europe in very different political, economic and cultural contexts. Bordwell noted that in the 1960s, various modernist film practices were institutionalized as an “international art cinema.”31 Following such a notion, Bangladeshi film clubs considered almost all the Western (and even non-Western) art films that differed from the textual patterns of Bangladeshi (and South Asian) popularentertainment cinemas as part of an international art cinema. In other words, just as the cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims involved with film clubs normalized European Enlightenment-derived modernity as the universal conception of modernity, they considered Euro-American cinema and even some Asian and Latin American cinema as modernist art cinema in the same basket. For example, the fifth issue of BFS’s annual anthology Dhrupadi, published in 1985, put together the interviews of Costa-Gavras and Federico Fellini and positioned an article by Antonioni alongside an article on Chaplin and the manifesto of “third cinema” by Solanas and Gettino (all translated into Bengali from English).32 Third cinema is a concept developed in Latin America in the 1960s to define the films other than Hollywood and European art cinema (that is, the first and second cinemas as articulated by Solanas and Gettino). Ironically, the BFS treats the concept of third cinema in the same way that it appreciates European or American film practices, as if there is no conflict among these practices. A similar understanding of “international art cinema” can be pinpointed in other instances too. When the Chalachitram Film Society held a film session entitled “Bondage of Partnership,” celebrating its 20-year relationship with the Goethe Institut (German Cultural Center) in Dhaka in September 2002, they screened Bangladeshi art cinema films such as Good Morning (Suprobhat, 1976) and The Wheel (Chaka, 1993) alongside renowned German films such as Katz and Maus (1966) and Wings of Desire (1987).33 The Zahir Raihan Film Society, a leading Bangladeshi film club, claimed that it hosted 2,200 film screenings in 18 years between 1986 and 2004. Such numbers prove how the film clubs promoted modernist cine-literacy by feeding the cinephilia of the 1980s and 1990s, when foreign or Western art films were

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 183 hard to find in Bangladesh. This film club celebrated its eighteenth anniversary by presenting a Cuban Film Festival in May 2004. The films, made between 1966 and 2003, included 1960s classics like Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) and Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Tomas Alea and Lucia (1968) by Humberto Solas, alongside recent European documentary features such as Cuban Rafters (Bosch and Domenech, Spain, 2002) and Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, Germany, 1999). In a similar vein to other film clubs, the Zahir Raihan Film Society also believed in an “international art cinema” and comfortably brought in the texts of this cinema either from Europe or Latin America. These international art films are the “good films” as they announced: We always believe that making good films is not possible without watching good films. We are striving for developing a film culture. . . . We always try to promote good films against bad and commercial films. That is why we cannot but show good films—films which constitute the history of cinema.34 In other words only “good films,” that is, modernist art films, “constitute the history of cinema” for the Zahir Raihan Film Society and other film clubs. However partial and restrictive a construction of cinema history this may sound, the middle classes holding such an appreciative perspective on international art cinema, coupled with universalizing ideal of European modernity, developed independent cinema practices during the 1980s to 2010s in Bangladesh—I deal with these practices next.

Art cinema discourses in Bangladesh during the 1980s to 2010s: from artisanal to global Bangladeshi cinema The Bangladeshi independent cinema I am referring to is actually an ensemble of two different art cinemas. Neither of these can be considered alongside Bangladesh popular cinema, primarily because of their usage of “westernized” cinematic norms, but also for their different institutional mechanism of production and circulation. These two independent cinemas are produced using different modes, such as the artisanal and transnational modes. In order to appropriate the Western notion of modernity as the basis for local cultural modernity, these Bangladeshi independent films use a Western mode of filmic narration as the cine-literate middle class—educated through the film club discourse—has taken this as the standard way of cinematic representation. Consciously borrowing storytelling and other techniques from the modernist art cinemas of Europe and elsewhere, these non-Western art cinemas also represent mutations and modifications to create a “modern” art cinema of Bangladesh. Andras Balint Kovacs identifies such modernizing influences of Western art cinema on different national cinemas: [W]e must look at the ways these principles [of European art cinema] modernized different national cinemas and created a variety of modern film

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Below, I identify this “multiform modernization trend” in two modes of Bangladeshi art cinema. These I term artisanal and global art cinemas—both of which depict the modernist aspirations of the middle class in contemporary Bangladesh.

The Short Film Movement of the 1980s and 1990s as artisanal-mode art cinema What is “short film” in the Bangladesh context and why is it considered as art cinema here? I explore this question below. The term “short film” earned a localized connotation in 1980s and 1990s’ Bangladesh. This discourse of independent cinema consists of mainly short features and documentaries on 16 mm film (and on video), produced in an artisanal mode—with a low budget—and situated outside the industrial film-production system. These pieces were shown outside cinema theaters: among friends and local groups, and especially among college students and cultural activists. The director of the film, sometimes with the support of friends and family, coordinated the writing, production, distribution and exhibition of these short films. In the early 1990s, when the discourse of short film reshaped into a discourse producing independent feature films (which I analyze in next section), the proponents of this discourse attempted to rename the “short film”, instead calling it “free-length cinema.” However, the audiences, derived from middle-class cultural-modernists, continued to refer to such “freelength” features as “short films.” This artisanal mode of Bangladeshi art cinema started in the early 1980s. Two short features depicting what had happened in Bangladesh before and after the 1971 liberation war: Agami (Towards, 1984), by Morshedul Islam and Hulyia (Wanted, 1984) by Tanvir Mokammel, started what was later called the Short Film Movement in Bangladesh. In 1982, Tareque Masud also started his documentary Adam Surat (Inner Strength) on the rebellious painter S. M. Sultan, who became famous for portraying the strong villagers of the Bengal delta (this film was completed in 1989). A number of short fiction and documentary films of around 30 minutes to one hour in duration and on 16 mm tape (or in some cases, on video), were produced and exhibited in the first decade, a period when the short film genre gained a viable identity as a form of independent cinema in Bangladesh. Tareque Masud’s Chain of Gold (1986) and Adam Surat (1989), Enayet Karim Babul’s Chakki (1986), Morshedul Islam’s Shuchona (1988), Abu Sayeed’s Aborton (1989), Alamgir Kabir’s Monikanchan (1989), Manzare Hassin and others’ One Day in Krishnonogor (1989) and this author’s Michiler Mukh (1990), were made during this period.

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 185 In 1986, Morshedul Islam and Tanvir Mokammel, along with Tareque Masud and Enayet Karim Babul, convened the Bangladesh Short Film Forum (BSFF ), the first and only (to date) association of short film activists of Bangladesh. In 1988 this association hosted the First Dhaka International Short Film Festival, the first of its kind there. This festival, which took place under the leadership of Alamgir Kabir (who died in a road accident a year afterwards), influenced the proponents of the Short Film Movement to internationalize their ventures—a trend that became visible in the 1990s and 2000s. The twelfth edition of this festival was held in Dhaka in 2012, while the thirteenth festival is due to be held in December 2014. Islam, Mokammel, Masud and Babul—the leaders of the Short Film Movement of the 1980s and 1990s—like other cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims— received their education on film appreciation and production through watching European and American film classics. In an informal setting (such as was within the film societies), they watched and discussed Western and non-Western films from Europe, the US, Latin America and India before they embarked on making their own films. The short films of the 1980s and 1990s therefore followed the textual forms of these foreign art cinemas, especially of Indian art cinema and Italian Neorealism. Using these Western or Western-derived textual norms, the short films and videos criticized the pro-Islam move of the Bangladesh state in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore the 1971 liberation war and its culturalnationalist ideals are a recurring theme in these films. The first two short films started this trend of cultural-nationalist cinema. Morshedul Islam, in Towards, narrates the agonies of a disabled freedom fighter in 1980s Bangladesh who fought in the 1971 liberation war. Through flash-back scenes, he juxtaposes how the freedom fighters set free the captive Razakars (local supporters and henchmen of the Pakistani army) during the 1971 war and how the Razakars now punish freedom fighters in the 1980s. In Wanted, Tanvir Mokammel depicts the preamble phase of the liberation war. Using minimal dialog and many long shots, he shows the return of a political prisoner to his village in late-1960s East Pakistan. While re-organizing the underground Leftist groups on the eve of the Bangladesh liberation war, he flees his village again in order to escape from a police raid. Short films like Morshedul Islam’s The Beginning (Suchona, 1988) and The Rain (Bristi, 1999), and Abu Sayeed’s Dhushar Jatra (The Journey, 1992), continued to rewrite the history of the Bangladesh liberation war, while other young film-makers also joined the rally. In an effort to go against the profit-making motives of cinema halls, the short films were and are only shown in “non-commercial” venues, such as the auditoriums of social and educational institutions based in the big cities. The Public library auditorium in Dhaka had become a central location for the screening of short films by the 1980s and 1990s. The basis of this alternative exhibition network is, of course, the film societies and different cultural, student and youth organizations in the cities and district headquarters. Two of the earliest short films, Towards and Wanted were shown in the mid 1980s in almost all the district towns possessing these organizations.

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In the same way, during 2010–2011, Tareque Masud also attempted to reach most districts and smaller towns with his film Runway. Short films became a unique trend in Bangladesh independent cinema as they, for the first time, offered greater independence to film-makers. Since the short films were made on a very low budget, film-makers could become “owners” of their own films. This freedom from the production and distribution cycles led by the film capitalists, gave the independent film-makers more artistic freedom and enabled them to attempt authorial signatures on their films, thus turning them into modernist ventures. Such efforts became visible in the short films of the second decade, which were produced from mid 1990s onwards. While the veterans were telling stories using simpler narrations, the younger film-makers started experimenting with non-linear narratives and exploring personal themes in their short films, as if following the textual patterns of European art cinemas of the 1960s. For example, Sarwar Jahan’s Not Yet Decided (Not Yet Decided, 1996) deals with multiple identities of a young man in a surrealist manner: two different actors represent the multiple “selves” of the same protagonist. Akram Khan’s Adhyai, (The Chapter, 1997) shows, with flash back and flash forward, but no dialog, the last thoughts and moments of a jailed man preparing to be hanged. As his last wish, he bathes in the rain in the meadow in front of the jailhouse. A. K. M. Zakaria’s Ity Salma (Yours, Salma; 2001) does not use any live characters, but only shows a household just deserted by a married couple, where they fought each other probably for the last time. N. Rashed Chowdhury’s Biswaraner Nadi (The River Lethe, 2003) portrays the life and death of a single mother who was left alone by her parents in her childhood and who eventually leaves her daughter alone. The film, with minimum dialog, a number of flash backs, long takes and the ambient sound of a music box thrown away, shows her mental state when preparing for suicide and also depicts how her young daughter discovers her mother dead. What is notable is that all these short films were auteur films, but not only in a textual sense; the institutional aspects ranging from production to circulation of these films are also centered around a single individual, that is, the director of the film. This is how these films were made and disseminated through an artisanal mode. Generally, the director and a small group of friends managed the production, distribution and exhibition of short films. For these reasons, the Masud duo who produced and distributed a number of short films described their work as a “cottage industry.”36 Not only textually, but institutionally as well, the short films of the 1980s and 1990s signified an increasing engagement with global modernist institutions at the production and circulation stage. A few short films were produced with grants from international grant-making agencies or foreign cultural missions based in Dhaka. Two documentaries of this writer, Beyond the Borders (Beyond the Borders, 1995) and Images Under the Shadows (Chayasrito, 1996) received grants from the Japan Foundation and EMW, Germany, respectively. The Goethe Institut in Dhaka also sponsored a number of documentary film projects such as Dhaka Tokai (Dhaka Tokai, 1986), Dhaka Rickshaw (Dhaka Rickshaw,

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 187 1986) and One Day in Krishnanagar (Krishnanagare Ekdin, 1989). More importantly, in a globalizing drive, the films were making an effort to reach international film festivals around the world. The first short film, that is Towards, won an award at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in New Delhi in 1985, which made the trend more praiseworthy to the modernist middle classes. Later, many other short films were shown in festivals around the world—including Hawaii, Singapore, Oberhausen and Yamagata—and even in the Cannes and Berlin film festivals. I argue that the short film discourse in Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s served as a counter public-sphere for the westernized Bengali Muslim middle class. This works as their vehicle, in Habermas’ words, “to generate subcultural counterpublics and counterinstitutions, to consolidate new collective identities.”37 This glimpse at the textual and institutional aspects of short film discourse demonstrates how middle-class Bengali Muslims turned the short film discourse intto an artisanal art cinema—an alternative filmic platform against and beyond the popular film industry. For them, outlining the national and personal experiences of being within a postcolonial modernity, this art cinema participated in shaping a sense of cultural-national modernity in 1980s and 1990s Bangladesh.

Independent cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s: towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? As noted above, in the 1990s the cultural-modernist Bengali Muslims, especially those involved with film club discourse as well as short film discourse, were urging the development of a Bangladeshi art cinema that could present Bangladesh’s national and cultural identity on the global stage. In other words, they envisioned an art cinema that could carry and disseminate the national and cultural identity of Bangladesh internationally, in a way that the European nations articulated their art cinemas as national culture in a transnational platform (see the argument by Steve Neale on p. 175). The discourse of European art cinema has been seen as an international phenomenon from its early days. Andras Ballint Kovacs noted the internationalization of the notion of art cinema in postwar Europe through the development of film festivals. It began with the establishment of the International Film Festival in Venice in 1934. In the late 1940s, this institutionalization of an international art cinema was consolidated through the launch of another half-dozen film festivals, such as Cannes, Locarno and Karlovy Vary (1946), Edinburgh (1947), and Biarritz and Berlin (1950).38 These and later film festivals extensively worked to define and expand the notion of an international art cinema during the mid to late twentieth century, especially to create an artistic counterpart to commercial Hollywood. Kathleen McHugh articulates this scenario as follows: [T]he award structure of these festivals designated prize-winning films, by definition, as exceptional products of their respective nations, produced by

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Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? master auteurs. . . . This structural imbrications of aesthetics and nationalism, while providing very limited international access to a very small number of films from nations other than the United States, nevertheless reified Hollywood’s normative and dominant position, while also insuring that the products of other national cinemas would be selected and would circulate as “art” cinema.39

The international film festivals served as essential sites towards the internationalization of Asian art cinemas too. For Asian art films, such transnationalization through international film festivals began in the 1950s, when Japanese and Indian cinema reached the leading European film festivals through the success of Rashomon and Pather Panchali (Song of the Road). After that, various Asian nations, with or without active encouragement from the state, made efforts to showcase their best examples—that is, art-cinema pieces—on the global stage. The 1980s marked the rise of the Chinese Fifth Generation and Taiwan New Cinema, while the independent cinemas of South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines became visible currents of “world cinema” in the 2000s. Following these examples of Asian national cinemas, with no state incentive (or even sometimes opposing the will of the state), middle class culturalmodernists pushed Bangladesh independent cinema to enter the larger platform of international art cinema from the 1990s onwards. Once aspirations like this are realized, and once a film gains appreciation in the West (through entry to and/or awards from Western film festivals), film critics in Bangladesh immediately canonize the film. The major newspapers, fan magazines, television channels and film society periodicals in Bangladesh take part in the canonization process by disseminating an unquestioning appreciation of these films. I demonstrate below how the discourse of independent cinema, from 1990 to 2010, became an international art cinema for Bangladesh, following the earlier paths taken by art cinema in Europe and parts of Asia. Two opposing currents: the effect of globalization and the strengthening of religious-political-nationalism in Bangladesh in the 1990s, fostered this stream of independent films that I term global Bangladeshi cinema. Below, with a few examples, I analyze the ways and means by which this Bangladeshi art cinema addresses the current disjunctive condition of the global cultural economy. Thus I demonstrate the location and function of Bangladeshi independent cinema as an art cinema in today’s “global village.” Drawing upon the commentaries of scholars of Asian cinema, I examine this “internationalizing” of Bangladeshi art cinema below, together with its strategies for reaching a critical audience in the West. In order to identify the textual pattern of those films trying to be included within the genre of “world cinema,” I borrow the term “global nativism” from Kuan-Hsing Chen; this is a “nativism predicated upon the commodification of the complicit dialectic between nationalism and transnationalim.”40 Like the short films, the production, promotion and circulation of independent films as an expression of Bangladeshi international art cinema denotes something like a counter-public sphere of and for the westernized Bengali Muslim

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 189 middle class. This counter-public sphere, because of its Western-modernist engagement, cannot be expanded to accommodate the majority of the population (that is, the non-middle class, less-educated and less-westernized population) in Bangladesh. Rather, by recording and representing the essence of Bangladeshas-a-nation through Euro-American cinematic narration, the independent cinema discourse forms a Bangladeshi global art cinema that addresses art-house audiences and critics in the West and highly-westernized middle-class Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh. Therefore this art cinema is not (expected to be) appreciated by ordinary, average cinema-goers in Bangladesh. On the other hand, these films never comprise the mainstream fare in major theaters located in prime urban locations. Actually, most of these films enjoy only a “limited release,” while some may never achieve general release and are never shown in ordinary theaters. These films are released in a few theaters (if not only in one or two), sometimes only in a remote town, and then thrown out within a few days of the release.41 For the exhibitors who are vernacular capitalists, these artistic films with “global nativism” (as borrowed from Kuan-Hsin Chen above) have no chance of becoming commercially successful in a local context. Then again, it is possible that this type of independent film may have been shown more widely internationally than inside Bangladesh. This is certainly true for films like The Wheel (1993) and The Clay Bird (2002), which I discuss below. Because of this, while Western-educated, middle-class Bengali Muslims have great admiration for these Bangladeshi global art cinema films, many of them may not have watched them, or may have only watched parts of them on television. The recent upsurge of satellite television channels, and their interest in producing and premiering feature films, has turned the television screen into a potential exhibition site for independent films. This type of Bangladeshi global art cinema started in the late 1970s with an independent feature film, Surya Dighal Bari (The Ominous House, 1979), directed by Mosihuddin Shaker and Sheikh Niamat Ali, two veteran film-club activists of the 1960s and 1970s. As such, this modernist film venture may be seen as the direct outcome of the film club discourse. Based on a renowned novel of same title by Abu Ishaque, a respected Bengali-Muslim novelist, this film was partially funded with a state grant. Alongside the script and direction of the film, the rest of the funds for its production were also provided by Shaker and Ali. Using a Neorealist mode The Ominous House portrayed the sufferings of a poor Bengali-Muslim family in rural East Pakistan in the 1950s under the Muslimnationalist State of Pakistan. The Ominous House received critical admiration from a number of European film festivals. It won an award in Mannheim, and was screened in the London, Berlin and Karlovy Vary film festivals and was also invited to the Locarno film festival.42 However, for next decade or so, no other independent film achieved this level of transnational networking. In this way, the film is an early exemplar for independent films seeking to be a part of international art cinema—a trend that began in the early 1990s with the proponents of the 1980s Short Film Movement. The three figureheads of this movement, Morshedul Islam, Tareque Masud

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and Tanvir Mokammel, initiated this trend in the 1990s, which may be described as an early phase of global Bangladeshi cinema. This phase of globalizing Bangladesh independent cinema started with Morshedul Islam’s Chaka (The Wheel, 1993), a film that received high critical acclaim in Europe, and which can be compared with the fame earned by The Ominous House in the early 1980s. This film narrates the tale of two bullock-cart drivers who have to carry the corpse of an unnamed young man from one village to another in search of the young man’s family so that they can bury the corpse. Finally, being unable to locate the village of the young man, they themselves bury him beside a river. Through numerous lengthy, long shots of the bullockcart going through unpaved roads in rural Bangladesh, The Wheel depicts the rural landscapes and everyday life of ordinary Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh villages. The film won a FIPRESCI and InterFilm Jury award at the 1993 Mannheim film festival in Germany. It won another three awards at the 1994 Dunkirk Film Festival in France, including Best Film, Best Director and FIPRESCI.43 The Wheel also enjoyed theatrical release in metropolitan centers like Paris and Tokyo.44 During the 1990s, and after the success of The Wheel, Morshedul Islam attempted to produce another “international” art film—Dukhai (1997) depicting the struggles of coastal populations in Southern Bangladesh in the face of regular and disastrous cyclones. The film was generously funded by the Digital Media Lab, based in Tokyo, and it was also featured in the Focus on Asia International Film Festival in Fukuoka. Dukhai received nine national awards, including Best Film for 1997.45 In the 1990s, independent cinema also marked the efforts of Tareque Masud and Tanvir Mokammel, two other figureheads in the Short Film Movement of the 1980s who also concentrated on producing films that could be a part of the emerging Bangladeshi “international” art cinema scene. At the production stage, The Clay Bird received a grant from the French government under the South Fund and it also secured a commitment for international distribution from MK2, the renowned French distributor. It was selected as the opening film for the director’s fortnight at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. There it received a FIPRESCI award, along with Palestinian film-maker Elia Sulaiman’s Divine Intervention and Mauritanian film-maker Abdurrahaman Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness. It also won the best screenplay award at the Marrakesh Film Festival in Morocco in September 2002 and the best film award in the Karafest Film Festival in Karachi in 2003. In the same year, The Clay Bird was on release in 35 cinemas in the US. It also had commercial releases in France, the UK, Japan, Italy, Canada and Australia.46 Ironically, the Bangladesh state went against this successful art film that had appeared on the global stage. The Bangladesh Film Censor Board banned the film for being “sensitive” in May 2002. After its success in Cannes, they lifted the ban and asked Masud to make some “corrections” in the film. A glimpse into the plot of the film justifies why the pro-Islam politicalnationalist government in Bangladesh was so sensitive about The Clay Bird. The

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 191 film is set in rural East Pakistan in the late 1960s, as was the case in Mokammel’s In the Bank of Chitra. Like Chitra and other independent features, this film also deals with the collision between Muslim identity and Bengali identity. Kazi, the deeply religious father of young Anu, sends him to madrasa (Islamic boarding school) despite the protest of Ayesha, Anu’s mother. Kazi is afraid that his collegegoing brother, Milon, and Hindu rituals in the village, will “pollute” Anu. In madrasa, Anu finds Rokon—another young outcast who becomes his “special friend”—and Ibrahim, a considerate, sympathetic teacher. At home, Anu’s sister Asma becomes very ill. Kazi does not permit Ayesha to treat her with Western medicine and eventually Asma dies. Rokon gets an ear infection and hears a noise continuously. The madrasa headmaster puts him in the store room. In order to get rid of his “bad spirit,” Rokon is exorcised in the pond in front of all the boys. Anu decides to leave madrasa. This later part of the film is set in the time of the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971. Anu reaches home at a time when the Pakistani army is coming to attack their village. He and Ayesha escape to the nearest jungle with other villagers. Kazi stays at home in the belief that “Muslim brothers from Punjab” will do no harm to Bengali Muslims. Milon joins the guerillas fighting the Pakistani army and dies whilst protecting the bridge on the outskirts of the village. Ayesha and Anu return home and find a disillusioned Kazi sitting in front of the burnt pages of the Holy Quran. They leave home, leaving Kazi behind. This story of The Clay Bird is presented within a structure that is similar to the textual model of art cinema proposed by Bordwell and Steve Neale. Here, we find psychologically complex characters functioning within an ambiguous narrative. The Clay Bird is not committed in following a narrative logic—a linear storytelling based on the cause–effect chain. Rather it leads us to no climax and we do not even see some of the key events of the narrative. For example, we never see how Asma dies. We hear the sound and fury of the Pakistani army and see the villagers fleeing, but we do not see the army itself. We hear that Milon and his accomplices died on the bridge whilst fighting against the army, but we see no bloodshed. Like European art cinema films, there is no highly-motivated, goal-oriented protagonist in The Clay Bird. The protagonists seem to be suffering because they are caught between opposite ideals. From the textual ambiguity and the production and circulation history of The Clay Bird, it can be said that this Bangladeshi independent film confirmed the rise of a global Bangladeshi cinema. The film exemplifies the discourse of a Bangladeshi “international” art cinema in early 2000s Bangladesh. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, most independent films in Bangladesh developed narratives in a manner that is reminiscent of the structure of art cinema as defined by Bordwell and Neale.

New Auteurs and global Bangladeshi cinema in the 2000s and 2010s During the 2000s, a group of new auteur directors joined the independent cinema scene in Bangladesh. Here, I identify three directors who have contributed to the

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internationalization of this cinema as part of the global film culture.They are: Abu Sayeed, Golam Rabbany Biplob and Mostofa Sarwar Farooki. The first two of them received cine-literacy through the film club discourse and Short Film Movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Sayeed was a part of the Short Film Movement, while Biplob led a film club in Dhaka in the 1990s and later served on the executive committee of the International Federation of Film Societies. At the end of this section, I will also focus on a single film by two newcomers which has been seen as a “global native” text around the world. Abu Sayeed’s first independent feature, Kittonkhola (Kittonkhola, 2000), signifies the conflict between folk cultural practice and pro-Islam national identity in rural Bangladesh through altercations between a rural opera (jatra) team and the profit-making businessman who hired the team. Like The Wheel, it was also adapted from a well-known stage drama by Selim Al-deen, one of the most respected dramatists in Bangladesh. Though the film did not bring much international success, it received national awards in several categories including best film, best director, best script, best story and best dialog in 2000.47 Confident after the success of the film during the 2000s, Sayeed produced a number of independent films including Shangkhanad (Wail of the Conch, 2004), Nirontor (Forever Flows, 2006), Banshi (The Flute, 2007), Rupantar (Transformation, 2008) and Opekhkha (Waiting, 2010). In these films, Sayeed, creating different takes on the past and present of ordinary people in Bangladesh, visualizes the complex itineraries of individuals and communities as followed in contemporary Bangladesh. Rural communities and how they face urban modernity have been common themes for Sayeed, who moved from Bogra, a town in northern Bangladesh to Dhaka in the 1980s. Traditional village life and the transformations of rural power structures have been taken up in Wail of the Conch, The Flute and Waiting. In Forever Flows, Sayeed maps the life of Tithi, a girl from the lower middle class who has to become a call girl in order to look after her family. In Rupantar, he attempts to revise an episode from an Indian epic through the santals, a marginal community of northern Bangladesh. Recollection of the protagonist’s childhood and how it can be superimposed on the present, has been an authorial signature in Sayeed’s work—most notably in Wail of the Conch and Waiting. Most of Sayeed’s films in the 2000s were featured at various international film festivals in Europe as well as in India. Wail of the Conch was featured at the Fribourg International Film Festival in 2005 and was nominated for the Grand Prix award.48 In 2006, Forever Flows received a special jury award at the International Film Festival of India as well as both Best Film and the FIPRESCI award at the Kerala International Film Festival.49 It had its European premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2007, where it was described as a “very memorable minimalist movie” and “a real pearl of Abu Sayeed’s work.”50 The Flute was funded by the Vision Sud Est fund and distributed by Trigon Films in Europe, while Rupantar was featured at the Rome Independent Film Festival.51 In the mid 2000s two new auteur directors, Golam Rabbany Biplob and Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, entered the Bangladesh independent cinema scene.

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 193 Biplob made two films by the late 2000s: Swapnadanay (On the Wings of Dreams, 2007) and Britter Baire (Beyond the Circle, 2009). Both films take a Neorealist look at how rural Bangladesh and the traditional life there are at stake because of the globalization of the economy and the market. In On the Wings of Dreams, a poor couple in a Bangladesh village suddenly receive a sum of foreign currency (in the second-hand pants they have bought) that they do not recoginize. They become perplexed about what to do with this sum. While they start to dream of solving many of their problems with it, this fortune also makes the husband greedy and, eventually, the couple become alienated. But in the end, they find that this money has no worth. This tragi-comedy, told in a very simple manner, was shown at around ten international film festivals during 2007–2008, including Toronto, Seattle, Palm Springs, Chicago, Rotterdam, Warsaw and Dubai film festivals.52 In 2007, the film won Biplob Special Jury Award at the International Film Festival of India and also the Best Director Award in the Asian New Talent category at the Shanghai Film Festival.53 Biplob’s other film, Beyond the Circle, which depicts the route by which a village-bound flute-player is lured to the corporatized cultural market of the big city before finally returning to his own “circle,” was also premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2009.54 The last auteur of the 2000s, Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, may be described as most influential in terms of the globalizing of Bangladesh independent cinema. With significant experience in advertising and television production, Farooki ventured into feature film-making in 2003 with Bachelor. This film, an upbeat take on love and deception within romantic relationships among the urban youth in globalized Bangladesh was widely watched by the local middle classes. However, it did not make it much to the wider cinema world except for being shown in two film festivals—the Asiatica Filmmediale Rome and Third Eye festivals in Mumbai.55 However, the three independent films that Farooki made in last five years have taken significant steps towards internationalizing Bangladesh cinema. These have turned him into a new major voice, not only in Bangladesh, but also in the Asian art cinema scene. Among them, Third Person Singular Number (2009) and Television (2012) have been released in Bangladesh and abroad, while his last film, Piprabidya (The Ant Story, 2013), has premiered in Dubai, though it is yet to be released in the home front.56 Third Person is the tale of Ruba, a young woman who attempts to live alone in Dhaka, and who somewhat fails amid the social pressures of a patriarchal society. She is tormented and tied in love for her deserter husband and affection for her “boyfriend,” who shelters her in various ways. The casual approach of Farooki’s storytelling and the contemporariness of the film’s subject matter brought middle-class audiences out to see the film in Bangladesh, and raised heated debate about whether the film advocated polygamy as an acceptable norm, especially for women.57 Third Person was premiered in the Pusan (now, Busan) International Film Festival in 2009, and then had its European premiere at Rotterdam in 2010. At around the same time, it was screened in ten other film festivals in Europe, North America and Asia.58 Because of this film Variety, the international film magazine, called Farooki “a key exemplar of the Bangladeshi new wave cinema.”59

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Farooki’s Television, a modern parable set in today’s rural Bangladesh—populated by mobile phones, motorbikes and Skype calls—highlights how the media have turned the world into a global village. The fight between Islamic traditions and modernizing forces comically transforms a Bangladesh village into a miniature site for the major conflicts the world faces today. By the end of the film, the power of “image,” even for a non-believer (who battles against all kinds of images from an Islamic angle), becomes omnipotent. This comedy drama, in which hilarity and absurdity cleverly coincide, takes a fresh new look at the countryside and the rural population of Bangladesh, who seem to be “rural” no more, but, rather, a part of the global world. Television as an international success has significantly expanded Bangladeshi independent cinema into the world stage of art cinema. Produced with script development and post-production support from the Busan International Film Festival, this film was chosen to close the 2012 edition of that festival. During 2012–2013, Television won six awards in various locations. These include, the Jury Grand Prize in the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Brisbane, the Audience award and City of Rome award in the Asiatica Filmmediale in Rome, the NETPAC award in Calcutta, the Golden Hanuman in Jogja (Indonesia) and a special mention in the Dubai Film Festival.60 Before I move to the concluding part of this chapter, I wish to look at the most recent example of global Bangladeshi cinema. This is Shunte Ki Pao! (Are You Listening!), the first feature-length documentary by the newcomers Kamar Ahmed Simon and Sara Afreen, a couple who trained as architects in a leading university in Bangladesh. This film, produced over three years, closely studies and heartily sketches changes in the life of a family and community in the aftermath of a tidal surge—“Aila”—that hit their coastal village in Southern Bangladesh in May 2009. During 2010–2012, the film was made possible through several workshops hosted by film festivals including Berlin, Amsterdam and Calcutta, as well as by two European grants from the Jan Vrijman Fund and Visions Sud Est. The film was premiered as the opening film of the fifty-fifth Dok Leipzig Film Festival in Germany in October 2012.61 During the next oneand-a-half years it was featured in 19 international film festivals spanning Europe, Asia and Australia. Along the way, it picked up the Grand Prix award in the thirty-fifth Cinema du Reel Film Festival in France and the Jury award in the Film South Asia festival, Nepal, in 2013.62

The narrative worlds of Bangladesh independent cinema: towards a new ethnography of Bangladesh? In conclusion, I ask: How did the independent cinema of Bangladesh since the 1990s become successful in developing an “international” mode of filmic storytelling whilst keeping the duality of being global and national at the same time? The auteurs I mentioned above all have all been well exposed to the contemporary trend of “world cinema,” or, more specifically, to the discourses of art cinema. For example, Variety’s Jay Weissberg praised Third Person Singular Number for Farooki’s initiation to global art cinema:

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 195 Lensing reflects Farooki’s familiarity with global indie fare, judiciously interchanging handheld and fixed camera . . . Combining an indie sensibility with subcontinental elements, Farooki crafts a Bengali film that will hold its own on fest rosters without needing to rely on the usual Third World pigeonholes.63 Utilizing such sensibility to the Western mode of art cinema narration, the auteurs of Bangladesh art cinema in recent decades were successful in representing an accessible but different “Bangladesh” for the benefit of transnational, critical audiences. At the same time, they aimed to create a national culture of Bangladesh through signifying local, authentic cultural images on screen. Attempts at producing the local by representing authentic nations and indigenous cultures have been practiced in various Asian art cinemas since the 1980s. Drawing upon Kuan-Hsing Chen’s articulations, one can argue that the auteur film-makers of Bangladesh constructed “global nativism” on screen for a global audience and westernized Bengali Muslims. Chen defined this trend as follows: A global nativism, though contradictory in terms, dedicated to the circulation of exoticised images of natives and national-local histories or signs, appears to be on the rise as a selling point, a trend sailing under the flag of “world cinema.”64 A similar tendency was marked in Korean cinema in the 1990s and 2000s by Korean Film Scholar Chong-nam So, who felt that a “distinctive uniqueness of cultural tradition is crucial for global audiences to be aware of the notion of Koreanness.”65 However, such “images of natives and national-local histories or signs” or “uniqueness of cultural tradition” are not only important for critical audiences in the West; even the westernized middle class in postcolonial Asia (and Bangladesh) also look for such images and signs. Poet and bureaucrat Mofazzal Karim, the chair of the jury committee that decided the national film award of 1999–2001 (which also handed various awards to independent films such as Kittonkhola and A Tree without Roots) echoed this view. When outlining how they decided which films should win, Karim said, “we only considered which film talks about our life, which film talks about our tradition, culture and civilization” (my emphasis).66 Certainly, independent films like Kittonkhola and A Tree without Roots were successful in meeting the demands of visualizing authentic cultural traditions for middle-class critics, which ensured their success in winning the accolades. In a bid to reproduce local culture for global, as well as national, modern audiences—through the “distinctive uniqueness of cultural tradition”—the globalizing independent films of Bangladesh dealt with some recurring themes and concerns and created certain narrative worlds. I identify three major narrative worlds that these films repeatedly relied upon. The first of these preferred narratives is the libration war. The 1971 war and its identity politics highlighting the conflict between the secular-modern and

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communal-Islamic forces in constructing a modern identity for Bangladesh and its population in pre- and post-1971 Bangladesh, has become a mainstay of both artisanal and “international” art films. Morshedul Islam, Tareque Masud and Tanvir Mokammel, three major auteurs of 1990s–2000s Bangladesh cinema, dealt with this identity politics as well as the liberation war—its preamble and its aftermath—in the majority of their films. Islam’s The Beginning, Autumn ’71 and The Doll’s House; Masud’s Song of Freedom, Words of Freedom and The Clay Bird; and Mokammel’s River Named Modhumoti, On the Bank of Chitra and The Sister, 1971—all focused on various aspects of the liberation war. Their concern is, of course, closely linked with how the middle classes envisaged the shape of cultural-modernity as Bangladesh became independent, A national narrative of delta was constructed to give meaning and legitimacy to the new state. Not surprisingly, its heroes were those who had died for the Bengali language during the Pakistan period and in the Liberation War.67 So independent films have participated in writing this “national narrative of delta” in which the language movement and the liberation war take a central place. The most successful film in this trend—The Clay Bird (2002) is more than the story of a madrasah student, Anu, who sees (and shows us) the world around him. This is the tale of the formation of the cultural identity of Bengali Muslims. One can read this film as a biography of Bangladesh as a nation. Embodying Anu’s subjective angle in this film, Tareque Masud portrays an important piece of Bangladesh’s national history. However, alongside the liberation war, and in a bid to present exoticized images and national–local signs on the stage of world cinema, Bangladesh independent films were successful in highlighting two other interconnected narrative worlds. The first of these was the creation of rural Bangladesh on screen, with its beauty and tribulations. This mode depicts the villages of the Bengal delta and their inhabitants, their struggles against social and natural forces—the troubles and triumphs of their everyday lives. For most Bangladeshi auteurs, constructing the village life on screen has been a repetitive but rewarding exercise. Starting with The Ominous House (1979), and throughout last two decades, most of the independent films represented natural and human conflicts happening in idyllic villages in Bangladesh. In this way, most films of Mokammel and Islam, as well as the majority of the films produced in the last decade by Biplob (On the Wings of Dreams, 2007 and Beyond the Circle, 2009), Farooki (Television, 2012) and Sayeed (Wail of the Conch, 2004, The Flute, 2007, Waiting, 2011) are similar in constructing certain versions of “rural Bangladesh” for Western and local, westernized viewers. The villages, as sites of the rural, are mostly constructed as pristine, sometimes remote, places far away from modern, sprawling cities (as is the case in A Tree without Roots, The Doll’s House, Wail of the Conch, On the Wings of Dreams, Television and Are You Listening!). While this may be seen as a strategic stand on

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 197 the part of the independent film-makers, Western film critics, of course, labeled such global Bangladeshi films as depictions of “rural” Bangladesh, a backward region of the “Third World.” For example, Deborah Young—of Variety magazine—praised Wail of the Conch for its “affectionate depiction of life in the Bangladesh countryside with its village customs and beliefs.”68 Other than the themes of the liberation war and backward village life, the third narrative world constructed in Bangladesh independent cinema represents the relationship between the patriarchy and women—how women have contested the patriarchal society in Bangladesh. While this may also be seen as a globalizing strategy of these films, they mostly portray women in a state of suffering— detailing how they have been subjugated in a pro-Islam society—either in rural or urban Bangladesh. Again, starting with The Ominous House (1979), Mokammel’s A Tree Without Roots (2001), Islam’s The Doll’s House (2006) and Priyotomeshu (My Dearest, 2009), Sayeed’s Forever Flows (2006) and Waiting (2011), Biplob’s On the Wings of Dreams (2007), Farooki’s Third Person Singular Number (2009) and Masud’s Runway (2010)—all these films deal with women who are suppressed by social, religious and global forces in the recent past if not in contemporary time. While My Dearest, Third Person Singular Number and Runway propose rebellious roles for women in different ways, the portrayal of women as battered victims is the norm in most of these films. This representation of women bearing the burden of nation and patriarchy has also been used in other Asian cinemas, especially in Chinese Fifth Generation films of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. films by Zhang Yimou with Gong Li in the major role) as well as in Korean art films in the 1990s and 2000s. Korean scholar Hyangjin Lee discussed this practice as follows: Reversed orientalism or orientalist discourse on the oppressive gender relationship informed by Confucian social norms tends to be referred to as the most familiar marketing strategy of Korean cinema at international film festivals. It is often criticised as an attempt to endorse the identity of a national cinema. The fragmented, heterogenous images of the feminised masses signify the post-colonial status of the divided nation. . . . [T]he figuration of female characters as victims of oppressive Confucian patriarchy and social change envisages the female body as a metaphor for the post-colonial status of the nation.69 Rey Chow, when talking about Chinese Fifth Generation films, also mentioned “the Orient’s orientalism” as a way of self-exoticization. As Chow articulates in the case of Chinese-ness, the Bangladeshi-ness or “ethnicity” in these Bangladeshi global art cinema films is ‘the sign of a cross-cultural commodity fetishism. . . . Precisely because ethnic practices are theatricalized,” the global Bangladeshi cinema is presenting a “Bangladesh,” that is, borrowing the words of Chow, “at once subalternized and exoticized by the West.”70 Then, through the three narrative themes of the liberation war, the Bangladeshi village and suffering women, global art cinema from Bangladesh,

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Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? turns the remnants of orientalism into elements of a new ethnography. . . . In its self-subalternizing visual gestures, the Orient’s orientalism is first and foremost a demonstration.71

The independent films that I discuss above—drawing on Chow’s line of thought—are building a new ethnography for the Bangladesh nation as well as being “Bangladeshi” in a bid to become what I term global Bangladeshi cinema as part of “world cinema.” Let me introduce two examples of this demonstration of a new ethnography in these films. First, in Morshedul Islam’s The Wheel (1993), the bullock-cart itself becomes a shorthand sign for “Bangladesh,” a postcolonial nation-space, quite distant and an unknown entity for the French, but which can easily be imagined as subaltern and exotic. Both the Bangladeshi producer and the French distributor of the film used the image of the bullock-cart in the posters published in Bangladesh and France. This tendency can be seen as a self-subalternized and self-exoticized attempt to address critical audiences in the West. The same tendency can be found in the French daily La Monde’s use of a sketch of a Bangladeshi bullock-cart on its first page to highlight the film’s release in Paris. When Parthaprotim Majumder—a leading mime-performer from Bangladesh who lived in Paris for decades—reviewed The Wheel, he felt prompted to call it “The Bangladeshi Bullock-Cart in France.”72 A second example can be drawn from The Clay Bird (2002). Here Tareque Masud uses Bengali folkloric materials to give its narrative an episodic structure. We see a number of rural festivals and folk concerts in the film, which are loosely related to the narrative. The scenes of the boat race and village fair do not expedite the narrative flow, but rather serve as detours. Similarly the folk concert that Ayesha and Asma watch, the ballad of Qurbani (the annual Muslim sacrifice) recited by the boatman for the villagers and the debate between folk singers on the “true” nature of Islam serve this purpose. Being caught up in meeting the demands of a westernized, national middle class as well as the Western view on a Third World country like Bangladesh, and like The Wheel’s bullock-cart, Masud brings together all these aspects as a new ethnography for Bangladesh and its people.

Notes 1 Partha Chatterjee, “Our Modernity,” The Present History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 207. 2 Willem Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 189. 3 Andras Balint Kovacs, Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950–80 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 47. 4 Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” Screen 22.1 (1981): 14–15. 5 David Bordwell, “Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”, Film Comment 4.1 (1979): 56–64. 6 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 228 and 205. 7 Bordwell (1979) 56–8, Neale (1981) 15; Kovacs (2007) pp. 415–28.

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 199 8 See Chapter 5 for discussion on the modernist use of media and cultural forms by culturalist Bengali Muslims. 9 A. J. Gunawardana, “Third World Filmmaker: An Interview with Lester James Peries,” Sight and Sound 46.3 (1977): 184. 10 A. H. Mofazzal Karim, “The Way I Look at It,” 5th Dhaka International Film Festival Program Book (Dhaka: Rainbow Film Society, 1997) not numbered. 11 “Steps Taken to Establish Film Village at Kabirpur: Sayeed,” The Independent (August 22, 1998), at http://independent-bangladesh.com/news/aug/22/220898mt.htm, accessed October 6, 1998. 12 “Science Fiction Film Fair Opens in City,” The Independent (July 15, 1998), at http:// independent-bangladesh.com/news/jul/15/150798mt.htm, accessed October 6, 1998. 13 Sirajul Islam (ed.) The History of Bangladesh 1704–1971, vol. 1: (Political History), vol. 2: (Economic History) and vol. 3: (Social and Cultural History) (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1993). 14 The Calcutta-based bhadraloks initiated “modern” Bengali literary trends in nineteenth-century Bengal as part of what has been called Bengali renaissance. See Chapter 4 for details. 15 For details on these, see Chapter 5. 16 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Neo-Traditionalism: Film as Popular Art in India,” Framework 32–3 (1987): 21. 17 M. S. S. Pandian, “Tamil Cultural Elites and Cinema: Outline of an Argument,” Economic and Political Weekly 31.15 (1996): 950. 18 Farhad Majhar, “Beder Meye Josna: Why This Film Attract So Many?,” Chinta 2.3 (May 1990): 43. 19 Ravi S. Vasudevan, “Addressing the Spectator of a ‘Third World’ National Cinema: the Bombay ‘Social’ Film of the 1940s and 1950s,” Screen 36.4 (1995): 307. 20 Rosie Thomas “Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity,” Screen 26.3–4 (1985): 118. 21 Shaibal Chowdhury, “Film Society Movement: Bangladesh,” Intercut 4 (October 1989): 118. 22 Mahbub Jamil About Cinema (Dhaka: Shanondo Prokash, 1994), p. 66. 23 Selim Mahmud, “Film Society Movement in Bangladesh,” View From Bangladesh (Dhaka: Bangladesh Federation of Film Societies, 1991) Not numbered. 24 Alamgir Kabir, “Our Cinema,” Sundaram, 2.4 (Summer Issue, May–July 1988): 80. 25 Kaiyum Chowdhury, “Gregory Peck: Our Favourite Hero,” Daily Prothom Alo, 5.234 (July 4, 2003) 16. 26 Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Addressing the Spectator (1995) 308. 27 Shaibal Chowdhury (1989) p.118. 28 “Discussion on Film Society Movement (in Bangladesh),” Driswaroop, Annual Issue 1410 Bengali year (November 2003) 137–8. 29 Selim Mahmud (1991) Not numbered. 30 Ibid. 31 Cited in Andras Kovacs, Screening Modernism:European Art Cinema 1950–80 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 37. 32 See Muhammad Khasru (ed.) Dhrupadi 5 (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Society, 1985). 33 A Bondage of Partnership [booklet] (Dhaka: Chalachitram Film Society, September 2002). 34 Cuban Film Festival Program Book (Dhaka: Zahir Raihan Film Society, 2004), p. 16. 35 Kovacs (2007) pp. 415–28. 36 My interview with Tareq and Catherine Masud in Dhaka in February 1998. 37 Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1996), p. 370. 38 Kovacs (2007) p. 25.

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39 Kathleen McHugh, “South Korean Film Melodrama: State, Nation, Woman and the Transnational Familiar,” in Kathleen McHugh and Nancy Abelmann (eds.) South Korean Golden Age Melodrama: Gender, Genre and National Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), p. 21. 40 Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Taiwan New Cinema, or a Global Nativism,” in Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (eds.) Theorising National Cinema (London: BFI, 2006), p. 138. 41 The Clay Bird (2002) by Tareque Masud, which won a Critics’ award in Cannes in 2002, was released in only two cinemas in Dhaka on two separate occasions. The Ominous House (1979) by Masihuddin Shaker and Sheikh Niamat Ali, which won awards in Mannheim, was first released in Natore, a sub-district town in North-West Bangladesh; later it was shown in few selected theaters in Dhaka and Chittagong. 42 Anupam Hayat (1987) History of Bangaldesh Cinema (Dhaka: Bangladesh Film Development Corporation, 1987), p. 159 and Quader, T. Bangladesh Film Industry (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993), pp. 543–4. 43 Sajedul Awwal, Chalachitrokola (The Nature of Film Form) (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2010), pp. 298, 301. 44 Parthaprotim Majumder, “The Bangladeshi Bullock-cart in France,” Jai Jai Din 12.1 (April 2, 1996): 8. 45 Fahmidul Huq, “Representing Identity in Cinema: The Case of Selected Independent Films of Bangladesh,” unpublished Doctoral thesis (Penang: Universiti Sains Malaysia, 2009), p. 114. 46 Mostofa Sarowar Farooki, “Tareque Masud: From Noorpur to Cannes,” Chutir Dine 285, Weekly Magazine of Daily Prothom Alo (October 16, 2004): 5–6 47 “National Film Award 1999–2001,” Weekly Jai Jai Din 19.48 (September 16, 2003) 9. 48 “Wail of the Conch,” www.imdb.com/title/tt1000155/awards, accessed April 21, 2013. 49 Fahmidul Huq (2009) p. 113. 50 “Forever Flows,” www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/films/nirontor/, accessed March 30, 2013. 51 “The Flute,” https://www.trigon-film.org/en/movies/Flute and ‘Rupantar’, www.riff. it/scheda-film/?id=4228, accessed March 31, 2013. 52 “On the Wings of Dreams: Awards and Nominations,” http://movies.msn.com/movies/ movie-awards-and-nominations/on-the-wings-of-dreams/?ipp=15, accessed May 1, 2013. 53 “On the Wings of Dreams: Awards,” www.imdb.com/title/tt1084045/awards?ref_=tt_ awd, accessed May 20, 2013. 54 “Beyond the Circle: Awards and Nominations,” http://movies.msn.com/movies/ movie-awards-and-nominations/beyond-the-circle/?ipp=15, accessed May 20, 2013. 55 Ant Story, e-flyer (emailed by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki), January 2014. 56 The film has been submitted for censor certificate on March 18, 2014. See, https:// www.facebook.com/Chabial. 57 Farooki made a short film OK, Cut (2010) reflecting on this debate. 58 Ant Story, e-flyer, January 2014. 59 Jay Weissberg, “Review: Third Person Singular Number,” http://variety.com/2009/ scene/reviews/third-person-singular-number-1200477629/, accessed February 9, 2014. 60 Television, e-flyer (emailed by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki), January 2014. 61 www.film-areyoulistening.info/awards.htm, accessed March 31, 2014. 62 www.film-areyoulistening.info/festivals.htm, accessed March 31, 2014. 63 Jay Weissberg, “Review: Third Person Singular Number,” http://variety.com/2009/ scene/reviews/third-person-singular-number-1200477629/, accessed February 9, 2014. 64 Kuan-Hsing Chen (2006) p. 143.

Towards a global Bangladeshi cinema? 201 65 Chong-nam So, “Chihwaseon and Oasis: The Road to the Major Film Festivals,” Korean Film Critiques, 14 (2002): 8–9, cited in Hyangjin Lee, “Chunhyang: Marketing an Old Tradition in New Korean Cinema,” in Chi-Yun Shin and Julian Stringer (eds.) New Korean Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 66. 66 “National Film Award 1999–2001,” 5. 67 Willem Van Schendel (2009) p. 189. 68 Deborah Young, “Review: ‘Wail of the Conch,” Variety, January 3, 2006, http:// variety.com/2006/film/reviews/wail-of-the-conch-1200519477/, accessed January 30, 2014. 69 Hyangjin Lee (2005) pp. 68–9. 70 Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 170. 71 Ibid. p. 171. 72 Parthaprotim Majumder (1996) 8.

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Index

1871 census 95, 105 1940 Pakistan resolution 122 1952 Language Movement 70, 126 1970s film theory 46 1971 (Bangladesh liberation war) 1, 3, 12–13, 22–3, 30, 38n57, 42, 51, 53–4, 60, 68–9, 76–7, 79–80, 86n6, 130, 143, 146, 148–9, 153, 159, 172, 177, 180, 184–5, 191, 195–6; see also liberation war (of Bangladesh) 8–1/2 (1963) 175 50–0 method 157 A Farewell to Arms (1957) 83 A Tree without Roots (2001) 197 Abbasuddin 108 Aborton (1989) 184 action film 160–5 Adam Surat (Inner Strength 1989) 184 Adhyai (The Chapter 1997) 186 Agami (Towards 1984) 184 Ahmed, Abul Mansur 123, 140n30 Ahmed, Nazir 126–7, 134–5 Ahmed, Rafiuddin 95, 112n14, 117–19, 121, 140n6 “Aila” 194 Aina o Oboshishto (1967) 63n48 Ali, Sheikh Niamat 19, 189, 200n41 Alim, Abdul 137 Allen, Robert 31–3, 38n65, n66, n74 American cinema 31, 175, 181 Ammajan (The Mother 1999) 162, 164–6 Anderson, Benedict 41, 49, 61n5 Appadurai, Arjun 50, 62n40 Armes, Roy 5, 23, 55, 63n58, 88n2 art cinema 3, 8, 12–13, 19–22, 24, 43–5, 53–4, 56, 71, 84, 135, 145, 147, 156, 172, 173–4 Ashcroft, Bill 62n31

Ashraf Muslims 118–20, 125 Asia Pacific Screen Awards 194 Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Center (AMIC) 169n35, 170n40 Asian national cinema 5, 7, 16, 27, 28, 53, 188 Asiya (1960) 12, 63n48, 84, 117, 132–6, 138–9, 179 auteur 44–5, 186, 188, 191–6 Awami League 71, 148 Baba Keno Chakor (Father as Servant 1997) 162–4, 166–7 Bahadur, Satish 180 Bangla Academy 22, 24, 176 Bangla cinema 143–5, 147, 150–1, 160, 168 Bangladesh Film Archive 19–20, 27, 36, 181 Bangladesh Film Development Corporation (BFDC) 22, 71, 146, 54, 158 Bangladesh Film Exhibitors’ Association 156 Bangladesh Film Society (BFS) 20, 37n17, 180 Bangladesh liberation war 1, 23, 30, 42, 51, 54, 68, 77, 80, 130, 153, 159, 184–5, 191, 196–7 Bangladesh Press Institute 113n38 Bangladesh Television (BTV) 144 Bangladeshi art cinema 3, 43–4, 172, 177–80, 182, 184, 187–8 “Bangladeshi” audience 145, 147, 152 “Bangladeshi” cinema 151–2, 158, 162, 168, 172 Bangladeshi film-historiography 10, 16, 22 “Bangladeshi” identity 3, 71, 145, 154, 161, 168, 172

220

Index

Bangladeshi independent cinema 173–4, 183, 188, 194 “Bangladeshi” modernity 3, 43, 58, 108 “Bangladeshi” nationhood 77, 160 Bangladeshis 2, 71, 144–5, 156, 167 Bangladeshi-ness 61, 197 “Bangladeshi” national identity 151 banning Indian films 152 Beder Meye Josna (1989) 199n18 Bengal Amusement Tax 154 Bengal delta 1–2, 11–12, 67–8, 77–8, 84–8, 91, 95–6, 106, 111, 115–17, 121, 132, 138, 143, 184, 196 Bengal Tiger Pictures 108, 128 Bengali cinema 2–3, 8, 11, 13n9, 24, 84, 92–3, 75, 84–5, 91–2, 100–10, 111n3, 113n55, 116, 123–4, 131, 139, 142n65, 143, 145, 1168n7, 172 Bengali culture 42, 69, 112n36, n42, 113n42, 141n40 Bengali hindus 2, 68–70, 76, 79, 86, 92–109, 112, 114, 117–18, 120, 122, 125, 150, 167; Bengali identity 1–12, 16, 28, 35, 41–3, 48, 58–61, 64–71, 77, 88, 89n3, n8, 91–5, 99–104, 106–8, 110, 111n5, 112n14, n15, n21, n34, 115–23, 125–7, 129–34, 138–9, 140n4, n6, n7, 20, n22, n25, n29, 141n39, 142n65, 143, 145, 147, 149–54, 161–2, 167–9, 172, 176–7, 179, 181, 184, 187, 191–2, 195–7, 200n45 Bengali muslims 1–3, 10–13, 16, 30, 40–3, 59–61, 66–70, 73, 76, 82–4, 86, 92–7, 100, 102–13, 115–39, 140n4, n6, n20, n25, 141n38, n39, 143, 145, 147–8, 150, 158, 167–8, 172, 176–82, 185, 187, 189–91, 195–6, 199n8 Bengali muslim identity 2–3, 9, 11–12, 60, 65, 68, 91–2, 116–17, 121–3, 125, 129, 132, 139, 142n65, 143, 172, 177 Bengali nationalism 73, 74, 76, 100, 154 Bengali-Muslim middle classes 68, 137 “Bengali-Muslimness” 60 “Bengali-Muslim cinema” 139 Bengali-ness 60, 68, 70, 115 Bengali public sphere 94–5, 106, 111n9 Berlin film festival 52, 63n48, 187, 189, 194 Berry, Chris xiv, 5–6, 49, 62n32 Beyond the Borders (1995) 186 Bhabha, Homi 49, 56, 58, 62n36, 64n69 Bhadralok 4, 69–70, 91–2, 95, 97–111, 112n34, 115, 118–19, 121, 123, 129, 143, 166, 177, 179, 199n14

Bhadralok public sphere 99, 103–4, 107, 110–11 Bicycle Thieves (1948) 179 Biplob, Golam Rabbany 192 Bilet Pherat (England Returned 1921) 100 Bishnumaya (1932) 108 Biswaraner Nadi (The River Lethe 2003) 186 “black” money 159 Bollywood 5–8, 18, 36n4, 45, 54, 171n72, 172, 175; see also Indian cinema Bombay 5, 45, 79, 80, 83–4, 100, 106, 112n17, 130–2, 136, 140n19, 141n53, 199n19 Bordwell, David 6, 26, 31, 65, 100, 102, 113n40, 175, 180, 182, 191, 198n5, n6 Bose, Nitin 83, 108 box-office 53, 157, 159, 164, 170n65 Branigan, Edward 29, 33–4, 38n49, 73, 89n19 Bristi (The Rain 1999) 185 British colonialism 11, 92–3, 95–6, 98 British East India Company 69, 96 British India 1, 10, 17, 66, 79 Britter Baire (Beyond the Circle 2009) 193, 196, 200n54 Calcutta 2, 4, 11, 17, 24, 29, 69, 70, 72, 75–6, 79–80, 89n27, 91–2, 94, 96–100, 101–3, 106–10, 111n2, n3, n9, 112n13, 113n47, n55, 115, 117–18, 120–1, 126–32, 135–6, 138–9, 140n4, n21, 141n55, 142n65, 143, 145, 168n4, 179–80, 194, 199n14 Calcutta Film Society (CFS) 180 Cannes 52, 63n48, 187, 190, 200n41 capacity-based tax 154–7 Carr, E.H. 34–5, 39n78, n82 Censor Board 181, 190 Censorship of Films Act 153, 169n36 Chains of Gold (1986) 184 Chaka (The Wheel 1993) 182, 189–90, 192, 198 Chakki (1986) 184 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 99, 103–5, 112n33, 113n54, n63, n66, 117, 124, 132, 137–8, 139n2, 141n58, 142n75 Chalachitram Film Society 20, 37n29, 181–2, 199n33 Chanda (1962) 84 Chatterji, Joya 91, 107, 111n1 Chatterjee, Partha 41, 59–60, 61n8, n9, 64n77, 99, 113n39, 147, 169n18, 173, 198n1

Index 221 Chitrakala 17 Chitrali 17–18, 23, 36n5, 169n33, n38 Chittagong Film Society (CFS) 179 Chittagong Hill Tracts (1957) 63n48 Chow, Rey 5, 197, 201n70 Chowdhury, Kabir 37n33, 109–10, 114n82, n85 Chowdhury, Kaiyum 83, 90n43, 127, 141n42, 142n71, 179, 199n25 “Cinema Day” 71, 89n11 Cinema du Reel Film Festival 194 cinema theater 81–3, 88, 146, 184 colonialism 5, 11, 13n2, 40–1, 55–6, 58–9, 62n32, 62n39, 92–3, 95–6, 98, 102, 113n47, 169n32 colonialist gaze 51, 53 colonial political-nationalist 53, 57 Crown Theater 80 cultural history 9, 38n57, 124 cultural identity 1–2, 10–11, 16, 28, 35, 41, 42, 60, 61, 64n76, 66–8, 89n3, 91, 95, 99, 103–4, 106–7, 111n5, 112n34, 115–17, 119, 121, 126, 132–3, 139, 140n29, 147, 149, 167, 177, 187, 196 cultural institution 1, 10, 40–1, 150, 168, 176 cultural-modernist middle classes 13, 172, 175 cultural-nationalism 55–6, 71, 80, 92, 167 cultural-nationalist cinema 185 Dancing Scenes from “The Flower of Persia” (1899) 75 Deltaic Bengali-ness 68 Dhaka 3, 17, 19–21, 23–6, 29–31, 52–4, 56, 69, 71–80, 82–7, 126 Dhaka Art College 127 Dhaka Film Exhibitors’ Group 156 Dhaka Prokash 80–1, 88 Dhakai cinema 145 Dhruba (1934) 108 Dhrupadi 20–1, 36n17, 37n24, 89n25, 182, 199n32 Dhukhey Jader Jiban Gora (Misery is Their Lot 1946) 108–10, 128, 135 Dhushar Jatra (The Journey 1992) 185 Digital Film 23, 26–7, 38n45 Dipjol 164, 171n71 Dishanayake,Wimal 5, 13n2, 14n12, 49, 62n39, 93, 111n5, 112n34 Dossani, Fazal Ahmed 29, 72–4, 89n14, 125, 130 Dristidan (1947) 108

East Bengal 1–3, 10, 12, 13n6, 16–17, 21, 24, 26, 29, 35, 40–2, 59–61, 65–6, 68–70, 72, 74–5, 77–88, 91–2, 94, 96, 99, 105, 107–8, 110–11, 115–17, 119–20, 122–5, 127, 129, 131–9, 140n32, 143 East-Bengali refugees 132, 138–9 East Pakistan 1–2, 11–12, 13n6, 17, 20, 23–5, 29–31, 35, 41–2, 54, 66, 70, 72, 74, 83–4, 95, 115–17, 123–6, 129, 131–2, 134, 135–9 East Pakistan Renaissance Society 123, 140n30 Elsaesser, Thomas 14n16, 34, 38, 62n29, 82, 90n40 empirical-historical studies 43, 46–7 empirical-industrial study 65 essentialism 50, 53 Euro-American films 180 Eurocentrism 50, 53, 55 Europe 17, 37, 111, 115, 128, 190–1, 198–9, 201, 203–4, 206, 208–9, 214 European art cinema 19, 22, 44, 174–5, 179–80, 182–3, 186–7, 191, 198n3, 199n31 European national cinema 175 Fanon, Frantz 56 Faridpur 120, 130, 170n40 Farooki, Mostofa Sarwar 53, 192, 193 Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) 180 film club 17, 19–22, 39n17, 37n30, 44, 54, 173–4, 178–83, 187, 189, 192 Film Development Corporation (FDC) 12, 22, 30, 71, 124, 129, 131, 134, 143, 146, 151, 154, 158; see also Bangladesh Film Development Corporation film distribution 32, 66, 80, 109, 131, 156 film exhibition 1, 18, 25, 31–2, 74–5, 80–3, 131, 152, 154–8, 161, 170n50, 172 film history 11, 14n16, 31–4, 37n35, 38n48, n65, n69, n74, n77, 47, 62n35, 65–7, 71, 74, 79, 82–3, 87, 113n40, 141n59 film-historiography 10, 16–17, 22, 24, 27, 31, 43 film industry 1–5, 7–9, 11, 12, 13n8, 18, 20, 22–30, 32, 40, 43–4, 52–3, 62n43, 63n53, 65, 73, 76, 84–5, 87–8, 90n45, 91–2, 100–3, 106, 108–10, 115, 179, 187 Film in Bangladesh (1979) 22, 23, 26, 36n9, 38n45, 45, 193

222

Index

“film producer” 44, 74, 151–2, 155–61, 164 film production 1–2, 4, 8–9, 11, 14n12, 16, 18, 23, 27, 32, 46, 62n43, 66, 71, 73–4, 77, 80, 82–4, 87, 91–2, 100, 104, 106–7, 110–11, 116, 123–6, 128–32, 145–6, 156, 158–61, 170n57, 172, 184 film society 20, 25, 36n17, 179–83, 188, 199n23, n28 France 71, 81, 190, 194, 198, 200n44 Fraser, Nancy 10, 111n8, n10, 118, 130, 140n12, 141n51, 149, 169n27 “free-length cinema” 184 Gabriel, Teshome 5, 56, 63n61, 63n65 General Ayub Khan 148–9, 152–3 General Ershad 148 General Zia 148–9 Gettino, Octavio 56, 63n64 Ghatak, Ritwik 21, 145, 156 Golapi Ekhon Traine (The Endless Trail 1978) 52, 63n47 Gomery, Douglas 31–3, 38n60, 62n23, 65 “great men” (of history) 30, 65, 83 Habermas, Jurgen 10, 94, 99, 111n7, n10, 112n35, 187, 199n37 Hall, Stuart 59, 67, 89n3, 123, 140n29 Hansen, Miriam 10, 13n3, n4, 62n27, n28, 169n19, n31 Harano Din (The Lost Day 1961) 84 Hasin, Manzare 20, 124, 140n32, 184 Hayat, Anupam 22–6, 29, 31, 36n5, n20, 108, 110, 113, 146 Hayat, Kazi 164 Hindu Bhadralok public sphere 11, 92, 98–9, 104, 108, 110, 115, 119 Hindi film 6, 7, 28, 83, 109; see also Bollywood; Indian Cinema Hoek, Lotte 62n43 Hollywood 5, 18, 47, 56, 79, 83, 131, 147, 175–6, 182, 187–8 Hong Kong cinema 6 Hoque, Mofidul 38n54, 76, 89n22, 124, 127, 131, 141n33, n42 Hulyia (Wanted 1984) 184 Huq, Obaidul (aka Himadri Chowdhury) 108–10, 128, 135 independent cinema 3, 13, 172–4, 176, 183–4, 186–94, 197 India 1, 4–8, 11, 13n11, 17, 21, 36n4, 42, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61n19, 66, 68–70, 75, 77–9, 86, 95–7, 100, 102, 105, 107, 110,

111n5, 112n16, n34, 113n47, n58, 114, 117, 120–1, 125–6, 140n18, 141n34, 145, 150, 152–3, 158, 180, 185, 192–3, 199n16 Indian-Bengali cinema 172 Indian cinema 6–8, 14n15, 21, 36n4, 75, 76, 89n25, 100, 111n3, 112n28, 113n44, n54, n55, 139n2, 141n55, 168n4, 178, 188, 199n20 industrialist-formalist works 46 international art cinema 13, 21, 173–4, 178, 182–3, 187–91 International Film Festival of India (IFFI) 187 International Film Guide 30, 37n31, 52–3, 63n50 International Short Film Festival (Dhaka) 56, 185 In Our Midst (1948) 134 Islam, Morshedul 181, 184–5, 189, 190, 196, 198 Islam, Kazi Nazrul 108, 138 Italian Neorealism 182, 185 Ity Salma (Yours, Salma 2001) 186 Jago Hua Savera (Day Shall Dawn 1959) 52, 62n44, 63n48, 84 Jahangir, Borhanuddin Khan 59, 64n75 Jamil, Gowhar 136–7 Jasimuddin 126–7 Jatra 78, 85–7, 185, 192 Jinnah, Mohammad Ali 70, 134 Jotedars (cultivator-landholders) 120, 122, 125, 130, 133–4, 136 Kabir, Alamgir 17, 19–20, 22–4, 36n9, 44–5, 51n12, 90n45, n47, 106–7, 109–10, 114n71, 128, 144–5, 153, 179–81, 184–5, 199n24 Karlovy Vary film festival 52, 187, 189 Khan, Abdul Jabbar 24, 29–30, 37n34, 72, 77, 124–5, 127–31, 133, 141n46, n56 Khasru, Muhammad 37n16, n24, n30, 179, 199n32 Khelaghor (The Doll’s House 2006) 197 Kittonkhola (2000) 192, 195 Kokhono Asheni (Never Came 1961) 84 LaCapra, Dominick 35, 39n83 La Dolce Vita (1960) 175 Lahore 79, 84, 129–32, 136, 152, 154 Last Kiss, The (1929) 78, 79 Latin America 5, 21, 63n64, 88n2, 180, 182–3, 185

Index 223 liberation war (of Bangladesh) 1, 23, 30, 42, 51, 54, 68, 77, 80, 130, 153, 159, 184, 185, 191, 196, 197; see also 1971 (Bangladesh liberation war) Locarno Film Festival 187, 189 Lohani, Fateh 24, 37n34, 109, 135, 138, 142n66 Lumière brothers, the 71 Madan Theaters 100, 102, 108 Mahanisha (1936) 102 Majhar, Farhad 178, 199n18 Majumder, Parthaprotim 198, 200n44 Mamun, Abdullah Al 134, 141n44 Manna 164 Masud, Catherine 24, 37n38, 199n36 Masud, Tareque 21, 24, 37n30, n38, 181, 184–6, 189–90, 196, 198, 200n41, n46 Matir Moina (The Clay Bird 2002) 54, 189–91, 196, 198, 200n41 Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) 183 MGM 131 Michiler Mukh (Face in the Millions 1990) xiv, 184 middle-class 2, 11, 41, 44, 59, 69, 84, 92–4, 101–2, 107, 109–10, 111n9, 112n25, 115, 117, 120, 122–31, 133–4, 136, 146, 148, 156, 158, 162, 167, 173–4, 176–80, 184, 187, 189, 193, 195 modernity 1–4, 8–12, 14n12, 16, 28, 40–60, 61n9, 64n75, 65–9, 72, 73–4, 77, 79, 82, 91–2, 94–5, 99–101, 110–11, 113n47, 115–18, 121–4, 126–7, 129, 131–2, 134–9, 143, 147–52, 158, 164, 167–8, 172–4, 176–7, 180–3, 187–92, 196, 198n1 modernist art films 183 Modern Times (1936) 83 “Mofussilisation” (provincialization) 166 Mohammedan Literary and Scientific Society 118 Mokammel, Tanvir 21, 37n28, 54, 86, 90n49, 181, 184–5, 190, 196 Monikanchan (1989) 184 “Mostans” 167 Mrityukhudha 108 Mukherjee, Kalish 75, 76, 89n27 Mukh o Mukhosh (The Face and the Mask 1956) 15, 17, 27, 29, 33–5, 39, 75–7, 80, 81, 96 Mukul (Cinema hall) 78, 82 Muslim Bengali 42, 67, 77, 93, 103–4, 149 Muslim League 120, 122, 130

“Muslimness” 42, 60 Muslim nationalism 3, 11, 71, 79–80, 94, 116, 118–19 Muslim peasant community 69 Mutsuddi, Chinmoy 22, 45, 89n13, 141n50, 170n63 national cinema 4–11, 14n15, 15–16, 19, 22, 27–8, 35, 36n1, 43, 46, 48–58, 62n41, 65–7, 71, 73–4, 80, 82, 88n2, 141n54, 154, 175, 183–4, 188, 197, 199n19, 200n39 national culture 7, 22, 27, 46, 49, 51, 56, 61n19, n20, 88n2, 148, 173, 176–7, 187, 195 national identity 1–2, 4–9, 28, 42, 48, 58, 61, 64n72, 88, 122, 150–1, 153, 162, 167–8, 176, 181, 192 national modernity 1, 3, 4, 9–12, 16, 40–3, 47, 57, 59, 60, 66, 73 nationalism 3, 5, 8, 11, 13n2, 40–1, 51, 55, 60, 62n39, 71, 73–4, 76–7, 79–80, 92, 94, 99–100, 105, 116, 118–19, 122, 127, 140n5, n10, 152, 154, 167, 169n32, 173, 176, 188 nationalization 9, 149, 151, 188, 192 Nava Nur 121 Navayug, The 122 Nawab family 77–9 Nawab Sirajuddoulah (1967) 69, 87, 96 Neale, Steve 175, 187, 191, 198n4 Negt and Kluge 10, 111n8, 111n10, 118 neocolonial cultural-nationalist 50, 54–7, 140n12, 141n51, 149, 169n27 NETPAC xiv, 194 New German Cinema 182 New Theaters 100, 102–4, 107–8, 129 Nirontor (Forever Flows 2006) 192, 197, 200n50 non-western modernity 41, 58, 59 non-western national cinema 5, 10, 40, 50, 54–5, 57, 88 Not Yet Decided (1996) 186 One Acre of Land (1957) 63n48 One Day in Krishnonogor (1989) 184 Pakistan 1–4, 7–8, 14n12, 16, 19, 21, 23, 42, 51, 53, 54, 59, 66, 68–73, 76, 79–80, 84, 88; see also East Pakistan; West Pakistan Pakistan Film Society (PFS) 19, 179 Pakistani colonialism 58 Pakistani-Urdu Cinema 172

224

Index

pan-Indian Muslim 11, 42, 68, 94, 116, 118–19; pan-Pakistani nationalism 73, 152 Pather Panchali (Song of the Road 1956) 135, 137, 179, 188 “percentage method” 157 Persona (1966) 175 Picture House cinema (later Shabistan) 81–2 Piprabidya (The Ant Story 2013) 193, 200n55 popular cinema 3, 6, 12, 18, 28, 45, 61n6, 131, 143–65, 167–8, 172, 174, 176–8, 183 popular journalism 17–18, 22, 26, 43–4 “postcoloniality” 41, 49 postcolonial approach 41, 49–50 postcolonial modernity 174, 187 Priyotomeshu (My Dearest 2009) 197 Procharak 121 public sphere 10–11, 13, 40, 48, 61n1, 62n27, 71, 76, 84, 88, 91–5, 98–101, 103–4, 106–7, 110, 111n7, n9, n10, 112n34, 115, 117–19, 124, 129, 148, 150, 154, 169n19, n30, n31, 176, 178, 187–8 Purbani 17–18 Quader, Mirja Tarequl 22, 36n6, 62n46, 89n13, 141n48 Quiet Flows the River Chitra (1999) 54 Radio Pakistan Dhaka 126, 134 Rahman, Sheikh Mujibur 30, 70, 77, 130, 132, 148, 153 Raihan, Zahir 84, 87, 140n32, 181–3 Raja Harishchandra (The King Harishchandra 1913) 86 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish 6, 36n4, 41, 58, 61n4, 64n71, 100, 113n44, 177, 199n16 Ray, Satyajit 21, 111n9, 112n34, 135, 145, 179–80 Razakars 185 representation 2, 5, 7, 13n2, 20, 31, 47–8, 51, 58, 89n3, 97, 113n54, 124, 139n2, 140n29, 165, 169n32, 183, 197 revisionist histories 33–4, 88n1 revisionist-industrial historiography 65 revisionist-industrial history 65 “rickshaw-pullers’ films” 178 Roman Holiday (1953) 83, 179 Roopban (1965) 53, 84–8 Rosen, Philip 14n16, 15, 36n1, 38n48, 49–50, 62n29, n35, n41

Royal Bioscope Company 75, 81 Runway (2010) 186, 197 “Rural Bangladesh” 144, 146, 169n28, 176, 190, 192–4, 196–7 Sadeq, Abdus 125, 130 Salamat (1954) 134 Sanskriti Samsad 128 Sat Bhai Champa (Champa, Sister of Seven Brothers) 87 satellite television 144, 156, 162, 189 Sat Rang (1965) 63n48 “Satyajit Ray School” 180 Sayeed, Abu 184–5, 192 Sen, Hiralal 24, 37n34, 74–7, 79, 81, 89n22 “separate Bengali” identity 68 Sequence 20, 157, 169n9 Shabnam 164 Shaker, Masihuddin 189, 200n41 Shangkhanad (Wail of the Conch 2004) 53, 63n52, 192, 193, 196–7, 200n48 Shilpi Sangha 128 “short film movement” 13, 173, 184–5, 189–90, 192 silent film 1, 53, 62n28, 66, 102 Sircar, B.N. 103–4, 113n58, 129 “social” film 11, 101, 103–4, 109–10, 141n54, 160–2, 164–6, 199n19 Solanas, Fernando 56, 63n64 South Asian cinema 4, 8, 14n15 spectators 9, 23, 32, 45–7, 61n16, 62n28, 82, 84, 87 Spellbound (1945) 83, 179 Spivak, Gayatri 41, 55–6, 61n5, 63n60 Stop Genocide (1972) 63n48 “strong publics” 130 Sukumari (The Good Girl) 78 Sun Bath, The (1962) 63n48 Suprobhat (Good Morning 1976) 182 survey historians of Bangladesh cinema 45, 65, 72, 77 Surya Dighal Bari (The Ominous House 1979) 52, 189–90, 196–7, 200n41 Sutarang (1965) 63n48 Swapnadanay (On the Wings of Dreams 2007) 193, 196–7, 200n52, n53 Tagore, Rabindranath 100, 107, 112n34, 127, 138 Tanha (1962) 63n48 teleological histories 58, 65 Television (2012) 53, 63n51, 193–4, 196, 200n60 Telugu cinema 7, 8, 13n11, 14n13

Index 225 Third Cinema 5, 55–7, 63n61, n64–n65, 64n69, 169n17, 182 Third Person Singular Number (2009) 193–4, 197, 200n59 “Third World” 21, 67, 71–2 three conceptions of modernity 59 three worlds theory 41, 50 traditional historiography 28, 30 Twentieth Century Fox 131 Umar, Badruddin 126, 141n39, 159, 170n61 Urdu films 72–4, 84–5, 107, 153–4 Van Schendel, Willem 13n1, 37n18, 42, 61n10, 67–8, 89n4, 93, 111n6, 116, 124, 138, 139n1, 148, 150, 166, 173, 201n67 Variety 52–3, 62n45, 63n47, n51–n52, 193–4, 197, 200n59, 201n68 Vasudevan, Ravi S. 141n54, 178, 180, 199n19 vernacular cinema 4, 11, 116, 172 vernacular middle class 11, 115–16, 129, 132, 135

“video channels” 156, 170n50 Wealth in Pond (1961) 63n48 Weekly Bichitra 20, 160, 170n49 West Bengal 3, 8, 61n9, 68, 76, 96, 111, 120, 125, 129, 145, 198n1 West Pakistan 70, 73, 84, 116, 123, 125, 131, 139; see also Pakistan Western art cinema 174–5, 178–9, 181, 183 Western concept of modernity 177 Western films 180, 188, 197 Western modernity 41, 58–60, 100, 167 Willemen, Paul xv, 5, 49, 63n61 Wings of Desire (1987) 182 “world cinema” 8, 13, 14n12, 53–6, 63n54, 113n44, 188, 194–6, 198 Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro 47, 49, 58–9, 61n7, 62n30, 63n57, n62, 64n73 Zahir Raihan Film Society 181–3, 199n34 Zaki, Syed Salahuddin 38n51, 71, 89n12

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